I’ve been following a lot of publishing blogs lately so I’m obliged to post about We Tell Stories, by Penguin Books and alternate reality game company Six to Start.

The project is subtitled “Digital Fiction”, which immediately brings back memories of dreary academic “hypertext fiction”. Those projects often amounted to “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style short stories with multiple endings, where clicking on words to move through a branching plotline was deemed sufficiently interactive to be interesting.

Film critic Roger Ebert famously doesn’t see the appeal of videogames, but he’s astutely observed that a story with multiple endings really has no ending at all: as soon as he (the audience) realizes there are multiple endings, he’ll want to experience them all, and then loses the pleasure of knowing what “really” happened. Interactive fiction has grappled with this too, and as a player I generally side with Ebert. Once I’ve “won” a game by achieving an obviously acceptable ending, I lose interest in finding any other good or bad endings. I’m ready to move on the next story, not traverse the whole plot tree. (Admittedly I’m also the kind of player who wants every modern videogame to be twice as easy and half as long as it is.)

Some blogs are calling the first We Tell Stories episode “interactive fiction”, but The 21 Steps is not really interactive at all. It’s a linear story told through new medium: short text overlaid on the Google Maps interface. It’s an interesting idea that, like many kinds of experiments, could be compelling once the novelty wears off and an author really dives into the medium. Unfortunately the actual “story” behind Steps is pretty thin, with an ending that reads like a clever high school writing project, and the plot didn’t feel like it truly made use of the map paradigm. Conceptually, co-opting a straight information-based API for use in storytelling and gameplay is definitely intriguing — I’d love to see what someone could do with Google Street View. No doubt stories told in short blurb-bursts are here to stay, given all the attention that mobile phone fiction has been receiving.

I imagine the Google Maps component does work well when combined with the story’s alternate reality game, but the ARG requires one to be in the UK. I’ll be interested to read reviews from people who’ve played it through.

The next episode of We Tell Stories comes out tomorrow, March 25th.

I thought I would be nervous about the interactive fiction event but I consoled myself with the thought that everyone would be interested in Dan (who is a legitimate professional game designer) or Andrew (who is a legitimate interactive fiction luminary). When I arrived I was feeling pretty relaxed.

Then I saw my game running on a wall-mounted 40-inch LCD monitor. Two guys were seated in front of it. “Oh you wrote this? We’re stuck on the last waiter.”

The event turned out to be great, actually. It was a nice small roundtable of people genuinely interested in this little niche of game design. I had things to say and only a few of them were carefully rehearsed. The discussion ran overtime and no one minded. I got excited about IF all over again.

One of the topics was the small size of the audience and how it’s diminishing every year. “Three digits, tops, and low three-digits,” Dan said. “Maybe two hundred.”

“But we’re friends with a significant portion of that audience,” I added, “and I think if YouTube and Facebook have taught us anything, it’s that people mostly care about the opinions of their friends.”

(As I was typing this, Dan said, “Hey Emily listed your game under Comedy That Works“, and I thought, “Awesome!”)

After the formal Q&A I wandered into a conversation between a game developer and the sole other woman at the event. The game designer was describing an experiment he was working on involving some computer-generated characters with a certain amount of artificial intelligence.

“But you don’t need special AI,” the woman said. “Look at Liza’s piece — there are all these waiters and they have unique behaviors and responses. If the writing is of high quality, it can completely obscure the fact that the characters are just scripted.”

“Thanks,” I said, embarrassed. When I had hastily replayed my game the night before I had found dozens of obvious typos and bugs.

“Oh yeah,” she added, turning to me. “I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your game.”

So the actual size of the audience: two hundred and one.