I wandered into the The Pirate’s Dilemma keynote video the other day and found it pretty interesting. It’s worth watching if you’ve got some time. There’s also an accompanying book and blog.
I subscribed to the blog and got an interesting bonus recently. Nicholas Felton ( of dy/dan fame) worked with Matt Mason (Pirate’s Dilemma author) as part of the We Tell Stories series.
My brief was to come up with something based Hard Times, the Dickens classic which illustrates the growing pains of the industrial revolution. My story was to be about the growing pains of the information revolution, the subject covered in The Pirate’s Dilemma. If that wasn’t an intimidating enough way to enter the world of fiction for the first time, the story also had to be told as an ‘info-graphic novel’, using mostly statistics and numbers, mirroring Mr Thomas Gradgrind’s (the main character in Hard Times) obsession with cold hard facts.
He didn’t quite follow those directions but I like what he came up with. It takes some focus to really appreciate it (or understand it in some cases) but I think that’s a good thing.
We Tell Stories is an interesting project with 6 authors telling 6 stories in interesting ways. There’s a lot of variety and some interesting things to think about in terms of projects and story telling. I like that someone “legitimate” has finally done a story using Google Maps. I still think it’d make for an amazing choose-your-own-adventure medium.