They Tell Stories

One of the big London games stories of recent weeks is We Tell Stories, a sequence of playful stories with a promised ARG element to follow.

It’s new ARG company Six to Start’s first public project, and it involves Hide and Seek stalwart the partly-fictional Mink Ette, but even apart from that I find it very interesting. However, my reasons for finding it interesting are almost directly opposed to those of many of its other enthusiasts, including to some extent its creators.

See this, from the press release, for example: “These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.” This is not literally true; the first, Google-maps-based, story would have been trickier a couple of years ago, but the second, Toby Litt’s “Slice”, is basically a story told in parallel blogs of the type we’ve seen since 1995, with The Spot (parallel fictional blogs before the word “blog”; a daily audience of 100,000 in 1995, when the online audience was a couple percent of what it is today).

So if statements like this are not literally true, what do they mean? Perhaps that Six to Start or many of the readers of its stories see novelty as one of the important characteristics of the project. See comments like “the sad thing is that there’s generally a real disdain for ‘linear’ storytelling, despite its huge popularity and history, and I think this has caused most people to ignore the possibilities of what could be done with presenting ‘normal’ stories in new ways.” Again this is not literally true (except perhaps in video games, where attitudes to linear storytelling are ambivalent), but it points to the idea that the exploration of new forms undertaken by “We Tell Stories” is something innovative.

This is odd for me because my reaction to the project is predicated not on perceived novelty but rather on how firmly it fits into what seems to me to be a long-running tradition of experimental text-based online fiction that verges on the gimmicky but doesn’t suffer because of it, a tradition that has Geoff Ryman’s 1996 253 as its first prominent “literary fiction” success (or, arguably, Douglas Cooper’s 1994 Delirium—but Cooper hasn’t kept the work online, so only the archaeologists care). By “gimmicky” I mean that the stories feel like they have been constructed medium-first; somebody’s seen a possible technological form for a work of fiction and then consciously created a fiction (or commissioned a writer to create a fiction) that fits that form. Regardless of their success as fiction, these works are most obviously about seeing what can be done; trying to find out what experiments will hold up in a relatively new medium (well, fifteen years old now, or you could start counting from academic darling Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story and make it twenty-one; we’re not as new as we insist on thinking). Not “how best can I tell my story?”, but “what happens if I try to tell it like this?”

Of course most people writing about “We Tell Stories” are aware that there have been many experimental precursors to their work; they just… don’t necessarily like them. I’m quoting Adrian Hon quite a lot, because he’s the one who’s been documenting this most thoroughly: “While a lot of ’stories on the web’ today involve some interesting technology, unfortunately, they’re just not very interesting stories.” Well, no, but that’s because most of everything isn’t very interesting; and even things that do seem to be interesting won’t be interesting to everyone. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by setting “We Tell Stories” apart from its precursors on the grounds that its writing is better than the worst of them. Viewing it within its tradition gives what feels, to me, like a more useful grounding.

The Electronic Literature Directory is full of this sort of stuff. I’m sometimes ambivalent about the ELD, because it explicitly excludes fiction that isn’t directly dependent on its electronic form; I feel that most text-based electronic fiction is entirely reproducible on paper while still being affected in interesting ways by the fact that paper isn’t its intended form. To be fair, however, that doesn’t mean the ELD is obliged to catalogue all online literature ever, and indeed it would be less useful if it did so. In any case, the ELD is a bastion of the sort of thing Penguin and Six to Start are doing here, from Blue Company to “They Come in a Steady Stream Now”.

This sort of writing is playful, interested in form, and usually unrepeatable, or at least unrepeated. It’s not about initiating a new type of storytelling—it’s about using a new form once, and then moving onto the next one, doing fun stuff for the sake of it, where it’s fun partly because it’s a one-off. Analogues in the non-digital world include B.S. Johnson’s shufflable novel The Unfortunates and Queneau’s “Cent Milles Milliard de Poemes”. So in a sense, yes, each new work of this type is novel, but its novelty is itself un-novel, part of its tradition; and most of it fails as fiction, but that’s because most experimental forms do, and that this doesn’t necessarily matter.

Hon says, in a Gamasutra interview, that we “already implicitly know the ‘design’ of books”; other commentators have picked up on his discussion of “designing stories”, with the implication that this is something that’s necessary when we write online fiction. But looking at the vast bulk of online text-based fiction, well: most of the time it looks pretty much like offline fiction, but with lower resolution and more pictures. This doesn’t mean that repeatable new forms are never created; it’s just that they aren’t usually created by people going “hey, you know what would be cool?”, much though people going “hey, you know what would be cool?” is my favourite fictional genre. The dominant forms of text-based online fiction are webcomics and fanfiction, both of them essentially static media that have found a distribution method and audience online, and been affected by this distribution method and audience in both form and content without ever veering far from “stuff that could be printed out and read on paper”. The internet doesn’t need new forms of fiction designed for it; it’s getting on perfectly well on its own. We’re not doing it a favour by making new forms for it, we’re just having fun.

So, okay, I disagree with a lot of people about why “We Tell Stories” is interesting. But it is interesting. Why? Apart from the stories, obviously…

1. The close integration of form and content for the reader, contrasted with the division for the creators. These are works of fiction that are being written by one person in consultation with others, splitting the responsibilities of what the words are and how they’re set out; and this is something that the creators of the work do seem to be interested in (and see also this info-fetishist post). The Gamasutra interview is relevant here, with its discussion of the back-and-forth between the writers and Six to Start. And compare with, eg, Richard Powers’ “They Come In A Steady Stream Now”. Adrian makes the point that none of their stories are being “adapted”, and I wonder whether this is a pointed glance at Powers; “Steady Stream” is after all very similar to We Tell Stories in that an established successful writer’s work is being integrated very thoroughly, by technically-minded people who are not that writer, into an experimental online form. The mere chronology of whether the writing is prior to or concurrent with the technical adaptation seems to me a minor point, though admittedly this is arguable; but the increasingly explicit division between “person who makes the form” and “person who makes the words” is a really significant direction. In printing-press analogy, writers are finding it increasingly unnecessary to actually know how to handle movable type (or indeed Movable Type) themselves, even when writing in experimental forms. Writers within the mainstream of online fiction have been doing this for years—fanfiction lives on livejournals and user-friendly hosting sites, for example—but it’s always interesting to see it in action in the “wouldn’t it be cool if” genre. (Hello fanfiction, I just called you mainstream. Sorry.)

2. Game people doing fiction. The intersection between game design and story creation seems traditionally to be one where the game is the focus, and writers are brought in to do their writing as a relatively minor contribution (exception: interactive fiction, which I’m ignoring because (1) it’s a huge field, standing almost entirely apart from both literary/academic approaches to online fiction and to visual games; and (2) I find most of it kind-of annoying to play). As I say, the area in which We Tell Stories is working is a fundamentally playful one, but it’s not one that’s usually approached by game designers per se. I’m in favour of adding game mechanics and things learnt from the psychology of gameplay to pretty much every area possible—cooking! Furniture arrangement! Footpath design!—so seeing the approach applied to fiction is exciting.

3. That it’s coming from Penguin rather than “someone doing it for fun” or “academia”, the twin wellsprings of most of the other work in this area (with a minor bubble from “literary magazines… er, mostly funded by academia”). Penguin of course seems to throw out some sort of interesting electronic publishing initiative about six times a day (and, er, I’m going to blog my Penguin Classic any day now, I promise, I just wish they hadn’t sent me Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), but previously it’s sometimes felt like “paper publisher approaches internet, pokes it with a stick to see what happens”. With each new project this seems to be less and less the case. Which is nice for them, and nicer still for the rest of us.

4. It looks pretty, and provides (or will provide) multiple works in one location. A lot of works in the experimental-online-fiction tradition no longer exist, and you need to say “um, you’ll have to install this specific plug-in” or “er, yeah, just ignore the comic sans and the purple” about some of the rest. Having a single, attractively-designed, presumably-quite-long-lasting site to point people at that provides a range of different examples of the form is potentially a very useful thing.

It’s also great that we’re promised six stories and then provided with them in a gradual trickle; it makes it fun to speculate about what forms the remaining four stories might take, which—even if everyone who speculates is wrong—is a great way for the world to generate more “wouldn’t it be cool if” ideas.