Present Imperfect

21 Steps to Digital Fiction Enlightenment | March 20, 2008

Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I may have just discovered the perfect way to read fiction online.

Billed as “digital fiction from Penguin,” We Tell Stories presents interactive stories from six different authors (or, technically, seven, since Nicci French is “the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French”) over the course of six weeks. Since I rambled on about how difficult it was for me to read long-form fiction online in my last post, I thought I’d give We Tell Stories a try.

And I think Penguin has cracked it.

The first installment, The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, is meant as an homage to John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, and it’s a fast-paced little adventure story accompanied by Google map routes (complete with “secret” messages tagged with green arrows) that follow the protagonist through his exploits. You read The 21 Steps in speech bubbles that serve as “pages,” with anywhere from one word to just a few paragraphs per bubble. The experience of reading a story in these small, bite-sized pieces kept me engrossed, online, for a solid hour. That’s right: Despite my earlier protestations about the inherent distractions of the web, I read a short story online, without interruption, and I enjoyed the crap out of it.

The 21 Steps isn’t high literature. It’s completely plot-driven and scores about zero on the emotional inspiration scale, but as a genre piece, it’d be pretty compelling in print. Combine that with even this most rudimentary form of interaction — following someone’s movements across a map — and you get a little taste of what Wilson called “the incredible power of immersion.” And what do you know? The 21 Steps was designed and built by Six to Start: a company that creates “Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) [that]...use multiple media — the web, email, IM, mobile phones, radio, newspapers, TV and live events — to tell a story to hundreds of thousands of people, who can follow and influence the game in real time.”

Six to Start was at SXSW with Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs, but I missed it, and it looks as though a podcast and/or video hasn’t been posted. I’ve yet to play an ARG, and I’m sure it’s exactly the type of thing I could become completely obsessed with for a few months, then burn out and never look back. (Probably exactly why I haven’t played one...). But I could read stories like The 21 Steps all day long. Merely manipulating the presentation of an otherwise fairly straightforward standalone narrative to take advantage of the medium — in this case, the web — may make digital fiction a viable alternative to (though, again, never a substitute for) the book.

I can’t wait for week two.