Brief Description

SyncStory is an effort to create a text adventure/choose your own adventure (CYOA) using Twitter as the plumbing. The branching story structure is developed by prompting the reader to choose the next action. With each 140-character event, the reader must select one of two choices, which then propels the story forward.

Try it for yourself! Friend @syncstory on Twitter. Then send a direct message (DM) to @syncstory to begin (the body of the DM is not important). In return, you will receive the first line of the story with a choice of two actions in brackets. Reply to @syncstory with your choice. Once the narrative is complete, you will then be sent the next line of the story. Please be patient, I’m now charged with developing the narrative to fit in this new framework.

Continued Development

After creating this framework, the most time-intensive task is to write the narrative content. As I try to accomplish this on my own, I’m also exploring ways of creating a content-management system to “crowd-source” narratives that automatically feed into SyncStory — Providing the SyncStory audience with choice.

I’d also like to implement a scoring system, possibly with different levels of achievement. I see @syncstory’s tweet timeline as an announcement feed. For instance, “@twitteruser has reached level 5!” Click on the thumbnail to the right for a mock-up of a scoring interface. This mock-up assumes only a leader board, but I also see value in a login-system as a portal to the user/readers stats associated with SyncStory.

Background

The idea for SyncStory developed out of a recent interest in the choose your own adventure format. More specifically, I was recently introduced to the text adventure Zork. Also, I had recently been thinking about the effect of SMS and Twitter, 140/160-character messages on the way we communicate. There seems to be a shift from long form communication (books, email, etc.) to this shorter form. So, I decided to explore reversing this trend by turning a short message form into a longer form of communication (i.e. A full-length narrative).

Now butt each tweet one after the other in paragraph form. The perceived effect is that we are now writing one, extremely long story (narrative, documentary, autobiography, etc.) This is what my project aims to explore.

Whether or not you are aware of it, your Twitter account, @alias, has a persona of its own. And if you were calculating about it, you may have purposefully created the personality perceived through your tweets. In a serendipitous event, while I was trying to form this idea of “short messages combined to form narrative,” a friend (unknowing of my new project) sent this to me in an email. Briefly, Andrea Pitzer writes about Peggy Nelson’s intentional use of Twitter to bring characters (fictional/historical) to life. Can Twitter and SMS be leveraged to create a narrative 140/160 characters at at time?