SOCIAL STORIES
The Good Captain
A sci-fi adaptation of the Herman Melville novella “Benito Cereno” and one of the first Twitter novels
The initial broadcast ran from November 2007 through February 2008 at @goodcaptain
“The Good Captain” was featured at the International Symposium on Electronic Art and the Electronic Literature Organization Conference
A compiled ebook version of the story is available here
The Spoon River Metblog
A modernized adaptation of "Spoon River Anthology," retold as group blog. 244 blog posts tell the stories of people who lived and died in the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois. With a hidden code that led to a secret epilogue
The poems that make up Spoon River Anthology are framed around a master narrative, in which a poet visits the cemetery in his fictional hometown of Spoon River to hear the epitaphs of the dead. Each individual testimony reveals more detail about the larger stories occurring in the town, tales of secret lives, murder, infidelity and atheism, and a culture war that split the town in two.
The Spoon River Metblog updates this complex narrative for a new audience in a contemporary form of distribution. In this modern Spoon River, the story is told in the form of a group blog, as part of the Metroblogging network -- a worldwide collection of city-specific blogs, where groups of authors write stories about life in their city from a personal, hyper-local perspective. A fictional Metblog for Spoon River served as the collection point for these stories, at spoonriver.metblogs.com
The Spoon River Metblog was featured at the International Symposium of Electronic Art
#SXStarWars
At the 2009 SXSW Interactive festival, I organized a cast of twenty performers used their Twitter accounts to re-enact the attack on the Death Star. After the end of the 90-minute experience, the #SXStarWars hashtag trended for two days.
Variety: From SXSW: Death Star Attack Kicked Off on Twitter
Star Wars Blog: Twitter Trench Run
Cthalloween
For Halloween 2009, I organized a mass collaborative social media story in which the monsters from H.P. Lovecraft’s stories arose and stalked the real world. Players were invited to take on one of four Lovecraftian character archetypes and narrate their personal experiences of the terrifying story. Visit the full archive.
Empire Tweets Back
A complete Twitter adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back using 65 different Twitter accounts to represent all the characters, adapted from the movie script with additional material from the radio play.
Undead Pride Day
A massively collaborative social media story event for Halloween 2011. We call it Halloween, but for all the misunderstood monsters, creatures and ghouls, it’s a day to make their voices heard.
The full archive can be found at UndeadPride.com.
#SXStarWars Festival
A fictional SXSW-style conference held in the Star Wars universe. Participants were invited to share their individual experiences and describe the panels, parties, and events they attended.
#SXSWesteros Festival
A Twitter mashup of the 2012 SXSW Interactive conference and world of Game of Thrones. Visit the full archive.