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What: semi-linear storytelling using Twitter
When: 2010
Who: self initiated/a secret club

This game/story was a small research project on games and storytelling - this project later formed the basis of A New Haunt and was inspired by my disappointment with an issue of WIRED (see artist's impression of what Wired promised me. In the mag, however, they did use the good old Fighting Fantasy system that really, really, REALLY rocked my world when I was a kid, so based on my flat, I wrote a mini story in the sketch book as a test.

There is amazing potential of this way of telling stories and there are some pretty decent things you can do with it, but one that sprung to mind was that this would be an interesting use of Twitter.

We wanted to create the sense leafing through the book so we collaborated with other twitterers. They each hosted a segment of the story, leading them on to the next - From a marketing point of view, this could work as a way to get your target audience to visit certain places - obviously, this system can be linked to facebook pages, blogs, flickr accounts, websites for a more versatile system, We used Twitter because Twitter is flux - the story would be gone within an hour, or at least very difficult to find (We could have used hashtags if I wanted it to linger on.)

At a set time, all storytellers tweeted first message, directing readers to the start, then a segment of the story.

Marketing-wise, this generated very few new followers for the participants - My personal account got a few, but mainly for the hype before the actual event, what it did was to tie the participants closer together, people checked out each others IDs, but non-participants reading the story did not, they focused on the story - probably also because of the Twitter pace - the fear of loosing something.

As for the storytelling in the twitter format, it works with certain kinds of stories, amnesia-stories are good, where you don't need any background, where you figure out snippets along the way. The system is very fragile - you're in trouble if one person forgets to tweet, so in order to make it work, we had created numerous IDs so I could re-route the story if that happened.

I'd like to thank my fellow storytellers: @sewkate, @tikaro, @nick_fu, @equisgarcia, @nerdmeritbadges, @ET_lives, @steveBussDK, @drhypercube, @p8tch, @guerilladrivein and @thisisnevermore