Participatory Interactive Storytelling
Participatory Interactive Digital Storytelling
Bamboo Ridge Press had a delightful feature on their website, Renshi, a series of linked poems. One poet after another responded to some element in the preceding poem. I came across an analog that could easily be a model for local Hawai‘i publishers. This one is fueled by contributions from young teenage girls, but there’s no reason why mystery writers, romance writers, ghost story writers, or any other writers couldn’t use the same model.
Marrying traditional book publishing to digital media
Last summer, after leaving her position as Scholastic's president of trade publishing, Lisa Holton launched Fourth Story Media as an incubator for the multi-platform stories she had in mind for young readers.
"I was thinking more and more about how we publish books and how we reach our audiences and about how young people incorporate technology into their lives. How do we develop traditional book publishing but marry it to various online and digital media in a way that makes sense to readers?"
The Amanda Project
The first venture—The Amanda Project—is now in play, as HarperTeen has published the first in a projected eight-volume series. The initial story was developed by Melissa Kantor, whom Holton had first published back at Hyperion, with individual volumes assigned to different authors. At a website (developed in collaboration with Happy Cog Studios), readers who've gotten sucked into the story of three high school classmates, who weren't friends to start with, banding together to figure out what happened to the one girl they had in common, can create online personae for themselves and add new perspectives to the weekly mini-puzzles supplementing the narrative in the print volumes.
Multi-platform Mystery Series
The multi-platform mystery series, co-produced by Fourth Story and HarperCollins, will be written in part by its audience, girls ages 12 to 14. Starting this fall, the story will start as a Web-only production. It will feature a social Web site that will encourage readers to interact with the lead character, Amanda Valentino, and even become new characters in the mystery. The Amanda Project will involve several Web sites and feature a series of blogs that will tell the story as it unfolds.
The best of readers’ submissions will be included in the book series, which HarperCollins has recently started publishing. Fans will also be able to download related music and buy both official and user-generated merchandise. 4th Story Media, which owns The Amanda Project, will produce and own the content. Web design agency Happy Cog, which has offices in New York and Philadelphia, will assist with the Internet production.
The first four books will tell one story arc which, combined with the revelations gradually unfolding online, will set up a second story arc for the back half. "They've immersed themselves way more deeply than we thought they would," [editor] Aberg-Riger confessed; at one point, putting the clues in one puzzle together, the teen players began to organize a trip to Paris—sending the Fourth Story office into a frenzy before they realized the girls were just plotting out their characters' travel plans.
Participatory Soap Opera
The effect is like a participatory soap opera, or a massive Dungeons & Dragons campaign with one dungeonmaster and hundreds of players; or the classic text-based puzzle games Infocom created for home computer owners in the 1980s, which set us both on a nostalgia kick for their adaptation of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, one of the truly great interactive fictions.
"A lot of adults had a really hard time grasping this," Holton says of the way the books and the website link together into one overarching immersive narrative, "but I would explain it to a 13-year-old girl and " (she snaps! her fingers) "she'd get it in 30 seconds. In fact, beta users used to tell us it took them a long time to figure the website out, and it would turn out 'a long time' was five minutes."
More to come
Inspired by the initial success of The Amanda Project, Fourth Story is already preparing another series, a science-fiction-themed narrative aimed at young male readers. "In some ways, this is radically different than what I'd been doing for the last 20 years," Holton reflects, "but the basics are still the same... What's the story? And how do you think readers will be interested by it?"
"It feels like the art and craft of publishing great stories for children is on the brink of revolutionary change," said Lisa Holton, "we are exploring new ways of using the web to tell stories, while also leading kids back to the joys of reading.”
I am indebted to the following sites for this story:
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/
www.theamandaproject.com/
For a sense of the Amanda Project, I clipped the following snippets from the Amanda website. The clips are deliberately not in any logical order, because this more closely represents the very lively associative style of the site itself, and how right-brained people think.
Basically, this site is about a girl named Amanda Valentino. She started at our school, Endeavor High, on Halloween. She vanished in March. Her friends—Hal Bennett, Callie Leary, and Nia Rivera—have set up this website to try to find other people that knew her so they can discover more about who she was and why she disappeared. Since Amanda left, she’s been sending Hal, Callie, and Nia cryptic clues, and they need help to decipher what they mean.
We're getting published!
They’re going to publish Callie’s chronicle of what’s happened so far first—go get your copy now!—she calls it Invisible I. Then Hal will take up where Callie left off—his will come out next spring (2010), and Nia’s after that...there will be eight books before we’re finished!
We’re all working with professional authors (!!!) to tell our stories—Callie worked with the amazing Melissa Kantor to write Invisible I, and we’ll have more to say about that soon.
But that’s not even the most exciting part...
Each of the books will include special writing that we choose from the Amanda Project site. In Invisible I, we’re super-excited to include PhysicsNerd’s beautiful "Who Is This Amanda Truly?"
We need your stories!!! Keep writing and posting, and if something you’ve written helps us tell the story of Amanda, and where she is now, we’ll include your writing in one of our books. (Of course, we’ll obviously get your permission first.)
By signing up and helping us search for Amanda, you'll have a chance to have your own writing featured in one of our books, or in the Zine we're putting together. And even before the book comes out, we have a ton of stories and pictures and other clues for you to help us figure out.
How do I get started?
There are tons of ways to join the search and participate in The Amanda Project! Once you sign up as a member (don't worry—it's free and we won't send you spam), you can use all the hidden pages. You'll be able to:
Comment on Our Stories
Every Friday at 3:30 PM, we post new stories about what's going on at Endeavor High and in the search for Amanda. The stories are constantly evolving, and we're looking for your help to figure out what they mean and what we should do next! You can read the stories here, and comment by writing in the box where it says "respond." Some good stories to start with:
• Cross My Heart and Hope to Die
• It's in the Cards, Or is it?
Post in the Debate Club
Want to introduce yourself? Talk about the book? Post your own random theories about Amanda? The Debate Club is the place to do it. That’s where everyone can combine their brainpower to come up with ideas about where—and who—Amanda Valentino really is. Some good threads to start with:
• Hi My Name is... (the introductions thread)
Submit Your Art or Writing to the Zine
You can post your own art and writing (it doesn't have to be about Amanda—we just want to see your awesome stuff!) in the Zine for all our members to see. Plus, the Endeavor High Zine will be published quarterly compiling the best writing from the site, and edited by Endeavor High’s own alexafleur. Submit your work for possible inclusion!
Make Your Character
You can edit and expand your profile by clicking on the “My Profile” link next to your username on the right hand side of the page. You can be anyone in Amanda's world—a classmate who knows Amanda, a teacher at Endeavor High, or just someone who lives in Orion (our town) and has been noticing really strange things going on! It’s totally up to you, and everyone is someone different. Once you decide what kind of character you want to be, you can take the Totem Quiz to find out your secret animal totem.
BECOME A CHARACTER
Remember, this is your chance to be creative and become any character you'd like to be! Are you:
• The girl that sits behind Callie in homeroom at Endeavor High?
• A member of the track team at Amanda's old school in Jupiter, Florida?
• The cashier at the Just Desserts coffee shop in downtown Orion?
• Anyone else?
The possibilities are endless!
Thank you for helping us find Amanda!!
Wait! I have another question!
Are we just making stuff up and pretending? How do we know what is part of the real story? What happens if my story conflicts with someone else’s?
Meet the Amanda Project
ince Amanda Valentino started at Endeavor High on that fateful Halloween, she changed everything. Brilliant or diabolical, visionary or bizarre, she turned ordinary life into a work of art, with herself as her best creation.
Then March 15th, Amanda vanished. No one’s seen her since…although we do keep getting these weird clues that make us think she’s definitely out there, maybe even closer than we think.
Amanda moved around a lot, so when she first showed up at Endeavor she asked us each separately to be her own special guide to the new school. Once she was gone, we found out there was a trio of us!
So if we weren’t unique, then we figured there were probably lots of people who knew Amanda, and we all want the same thing—to find out why Amanda disappeared, and where she’s gone, and why. And that’s why we made this website.
Once you register, you can:
• Tell us about yourself—are you a student at Endeavor High, one of Amanda’s old neighbors…maybe a teacher who knows something important?
• Read our stories, examine the clues as we collect them, and help us try to solve the mystery of where—and who—Amanda really is.
• Take Amanda’s Animal Totem quiz and see what the your totem reveals about your true identity.
We need your help. If you know anything about Amanda’s disappearance, or want to help us figure out what happened, please join the search!
— Callie, Hal, and Nia (the guides)
The Amanda Project is the story of Amanda Valentino, told through an interactive website and book series for readers aged 13 & up. On the website, readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for Amanda.
The Amanda Project story is a collaboration between the book characters (Hal, Callie, and Nia), and all of the members (you!). The site is a place for everyone to tell their version of Amanda and her story. Amanda was many things to many people, and everyone has their own story to tell. As we see it, it’s OK if two people come up with conflicting points of view, because that’s what they are – points of view. There is no wrong answer. The narrative written in the books, and by the main characters will become the official narrative, but there is always room to create stories behind the stories, and to challenge what other members say happened. We also continuously weave your comments and theories and characters into the stories we tell online each week, and into the books themselves, so please keep writing!
Who is my character? Am I supposed to be myself on the site or should I be pretending to be a character?
The site invites you to create a character and become a part of Amanda’s world. That character can be a lot like you or nothing like you at all. You can be anyone you want to be – maybe you go to Endeavor High with the main characters, or maybe you work at the movie theater downtown. There are a million possibilities!
Where does the Amanda Project take place?
Amanda’s school is located in the (fictional) town of Orion, a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland in the United States.
Tags: Add new tag, Amanda Project, Bamboo Ridge Press, Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Story Media, GalleyCat, HarperCollins, Lisa Holton, Multi-platform series, teenage girls, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
