ran across this yesterday in the twitscape, don’t remember where – will try to track back and give credit where it’s due. anyway it’s Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post and Contagious Media, so it’s of course worth a look (she says, winking, because she never heard of him before now).
it’s a choose your adventure twitter game. and as someone who always loved the choose your own adventure series, and bemoaned not having more fingers i could use to bookmark all my choices, i love that someone has bothered to try to make it work in this medium.
twitter’s 140 characters seem to suggest you can’t tell meaningful stories within a tweet. that may be true, though there are people experimenting with the ‘shortest short stories’ form. others have played with sequential tweeting to make larger points, though this is tough logistically when you’re following loads of people. and of course the easiest thing to do is link elsewhere.
the CYOA game works because it is self-referring. one tweet refers not to a blog or tumblr or whatever, but to another tweet. it creates a narrative thread: good. it gives the player choices: also good. it tells you when you’re dead: also good. the basics of any good game, from first person shooter to MMOG.
i also like the weirdly current, terrorism/axis of evil stuff that’s going on here – makes it feel all the more like it’s of this moment, and by going big (assassins! nukes!) it doesn’t stumble into inanity.
but what else can you do with this? i like games – i think a lot about using game-like activities to crowd-source problems, and like games for their own sake, for their ability to make us forget about the chore-like elements of our day and rise above it into a fun headspace that gets us through things faster, more creatively, and with more useful outcomes. stories and games are intertwined – you need to rescue the princess, detonate or defuse the bomb, slay the dragon, discover the treasure, etc. stories propel you forward towards your goal, or derail you, but always add color and texture to the playscape.
alternate reality games are also something that people are playing with more – we’re so multifarious in our networking and linking that we’re pretty good at following threads from one blog to the next video to the twitter feed to the tv spot to the article to the restaurant etc. this feels, like so many things twitter, like it’s the micro version of ARGs.
i hope more is done with it – in fact i might start thinking about how to incorporate this kind of activity as a play-along to a fiction piece i’m working on… maybe the links take you not only to different choices but to different characters presenting you with information and choices. actually that’s kind of cool so i should go now. enjoy!
one other thing, via Flowing Data: CYOA the flowchart!
