Last month, Pepi Ronalds wrote a piece for the Killings blog called “Why we’re still curled up with the book”. In it, she talks about how as readers we have a resistance to interactive ebooks because of our history with the physical book. She begins by identifying a problem with the word “book” and the […]
I’ve recently been reading the work of interactive fiction writer Emily Short and discovered her story Galatea. I was happy to find that the story was powered by a chatbot engine and I wondered if this was a whole genre within interactive fiction. To my initial surprise, I discovered that there seem to be very […]
Gone Home is last on my list of Games That Make You Read. Even though I’m discussing it last, it’s my favourite of all the games I’ve mentioned recently. Fullbright Company, the people who made it, call it a story exploration game. There are other games that are story-driven and also require exploration as part […]
Visual novels fall into my category of Games That Make You Read. They’re interactive stories, originating from Japan. I’ve been introduced to the genre via the work of Christine Love and have read three of her visual novels – Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus. Digital: A Love Story is […]
Games That Make You Read is an inelegant term, but it’s the one I use in my head when I think about the types of games I’ve been playing recently. These games are all quite different from each other and include the story exploration game Gone Home, the visual novels of Christine Love, games made […]
I am discovering just how fertile a period the mid 2000s were for experiments in digital literature. As I said in my previous post, a couple of weeks ago I was at Story+, a digital media writing conference at the Brisbane Writers Festival, and there I discovered Jason Nelson. Nelson is a digital poet, a […]
What sorts of stories are we going to tell in the future? And as the digital world allows storytelling to become more interactive, how will we tell those stories? These are the questions I’ve been thinking and writing about recently, and they were also the topic of last week’s Story+ conference at the Brisbane Writers […]
Three years before We Tell Stories, Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph created the first episode of Inanimate Alice. Designed to be a reading-on-the-screen experience for children, it goes much further than presenting flat text on a screen and is instead an interactive storybook. Alice is eight years old and lives in China with her parents. […]
In 2008, Penguin Books published a digital fiction website called We Tell Stories. At that time I was working for a Penguin subsidiary and had already observed that Penguin was quite concerned with positioning itself at the forefront of the new digital world. The changes that were coming were going to reshape reading and writing […]