Black Pill or White Pill?
Can Twitter be used to tell interactive stories?
Some time ago I wanted to create an interactive twitter story, wondering about the possibilities and potential the idea has. The initial idea is to create a click-through list of multiple choices leading to their own epilogues.
If we can link one tweet to another, why not use this in our favor?
Despite how the story is experienced, from the first tweet to the last tweet, they needed to be tweeted in reverse order as the latter ones need to be one of the selections of this interactive multiple choice as links. Therefore posting everything in reverse order was the solution. A lot of manual work s you can imagine.
I’ve made a simple fun example of this. You can experience the tweet here:
The idea got a lot of attention over twitter, reached to (by today) almost half million twitter users. The initial tweet is from 2015 but I still see it being retweeted by many on random times. Sometimes passionate people are charmingly creating their own theories on the tree of options of the story. Here is a recent one, one of my favorites so far as it’s pretty close to how I’ve formed my version of the story.
After realizing this could be an interesting idea to play on Twitter, I’ve decided to automate the posting process, and create something that can easily upload* my interactive stories in this nice format.
As a result I’ve made Micromoira, another twitter account that posts interactive stories as the one above. With the help of the small automator I’ve written I can now upload json-formatted interactive stories easily. A json tree is read and posted in reverse order, if more than one path leads to the same tweet it’s automagically discovered and added to the corresponding order-of-tweets. I call the initial tweet, the “gate” tweet as it’s the one that initiatess the interactive micro fiction. Here is an example gate:
As you see it’s more complex than the “White Pill or Black Pill” experiment. If you like the example above there are a few more similar ones on the simple Micromoira homepage I’ve created to collect gate tweets.
This is an old experiment and I didn’t bother with creating more stories after it was done. Even though I initially hoped this could be a fun way to express certain things using a different method over twitter, then I realized creating the stories (writing them) takes a lot of thinking even for a satisfying short story, as every option needs to be created and with only a few steps the amount of things one need to create is easily expanding.
In other words, this is not something that I invest time on any more, but I believe it deserves a separate post about where this pill story gate came from. In a way Micromoira pushes more boundaries then many twitter experiments. Maybe the evolution of it inspires another idea..
