six to start

Sorry for the rather short notice on this one - Adrian and I will be speaking tonight (6pm to 8pm) at Yahoo! Brickhouse: We Told Stories: Dan and Adrian Hon (Six to Start) on ARGs & storytelling online .

Learn about how leading alternate reality game studio Six to Start works, the projects they’re working on next, and the kind of toys they like to play with.

Go behind the scenes of digital fiction project We Tell Stories that turned mapping into a storytelling engine.

It’ll be fantastic, I promise!

Adrian’s got a great post on his blog about some of the process we went through creating the last story in the current We Tell Stories series, The (Former) General In His Labyrinth:

I love all the stories in We Tell Stories, but I do have favourites. Back when we were planning the six week schedule for the stories, we decided to structure it like an album - start with a bang, and end with a bang.

The first story was The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming. It was the most visually striking of all six stories, using the Google Maps engine, and we knew that it would generate quite a bit of buzz among the tech crowd, so it seemed like a natural choice to open with. It certainly paid off - The 21 Steps has now been read over 150,000 times, which is more than all of Charles Cumming’s book sales put together. I believe he told BBC Radio Scotland that he was now better known for The 21 Steps than his books, which I don’t think is an overstatement. [read more]

We’ve had some fantastic coverage for the work we’re doing with Penguin Books for We Tell Stories. Here’s a quick, brief roundup of some blog entries and articles from everything that’s out there that have caught our eye:

Contagious Magazine - Penguin Tells Stories

Another week, another cool ARG-type story to report on, this latest from perma-cool publishing house Penguin.

The company has teamed up with Six To Start, newly formed by the creators of ongoing ARG Perplex City Dan and Adrian Hon, to launch a project that encourages six top authors to explore how the interactivity, connectivity and immediacy of the internet can enhance and evolve storytelling. Readers who can answer six questions about the stories are in with a shout of winning themselves the entire library of Penguin Classics – that’s 1300 titles (or 25 feet of shelf-space). [more]

Wired - Perplex City Creators Spin New Thriller

Alternate reality game-maker Six to Start, whose co-founders helped create the popular ARG Perplex City, has a new project that’s just as mysterious: The 21 Steps, a thriller that uses Google Maps, of all things, as its storytelling medium.

The 21 Steps tells the story of Rick, a man with a checkered past who finds himself mixed up with a dangerous organization that wants him to smuggle a mysterious vial into Scotland. A blue line traces Rick’s path across satellite images from Google Maps as you work your way through the story by clicking on location markers. [more]

Google Lat-Long Blog - How do you read a map?

Well, on a new Penguin Publishing site, you read it like a book. The text of select stories is literally displayed on maps. The site promises “Six authors. Six stories. Six weeks.” The first is a short story by Charles Cumming entitled “21 Steps,” inspired by the John Buchan novel The 39 Steps. And you can read chapters, snippets, and dialogue on a map of London. The interactive map guides you through the protagonist’s travels, revealing the next chapter of the story as you–and she–reach the destination. Visualizing the connection of the story to its physical setting expands the reader’s perspective and makes the story more palpably real. [more]

News.com - Interactive game mixes classic novels with Web 2.0 mashups

The alternate-reality game genre has a new friend, and a new format, thanks to Penguin Books, the famous British publishing house.

On Tuesday, Penguin and startup Six to Start launched their new ARG, We Tell Stories, a new-style game that its creators say is a hybrid of traditional story-telling, Web 2.0-style mashups, interactive games and classic novels. [more]

USA Today - Tell me a different story

What happens when you mix classic literature, modern writers and alternate reality games? You get We Tell Stories by venerable publisher Penguin. The site mashes up all those ingredients for a six-week experiment in digital fiction. Game designers Six to Start and six top authors re-tell six classic stories over the course of six weeks with one goal: to blend the ‘immediacy, connectivity and interactivity’ of the Net into a new form of storytelling. As the site says, ‘These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.’

[more]

Gamasutra - Q&A: Perplex City Creators Craft ‘We Tell Stories’

The milieu of digital games has been significantly extended by the Alternate Reality Game, which was pioneered by titles such as Majestic and The Beast, and uses puzzles and clues hidden in webpages and even real-life to entice readers.

UK ARG startup Six To Start, founded by Dan and Adrian Hon - previously at Mind Candy, where they developed the collectible card-based Perplex City, described as “the world’s first commercially successful ARG” - is now embarking on its first projects as a new company.

[more]

We’re always on the lookout for interesting clients to work with. Do you have a story to tell? Let us know.

We’re really excited to announce the launch of We Tell Stories - an exercise in digital writing that we’ve created in partnership with Penguin Books.

We Tell Stories is Six to Start’s first public project, and it’s something we’re incredibly proud of - we’re also glad to be working with Penguin on this project, who’ve been incredibly helpful and about as good a partner as you could expect - Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin jumped into the project with great gusto, and talked a little about the reasons why the project’s interesting to Penguin at a panel at SXSW - you can find notes at Clickable Culture and at New Media Buzz.

We’re producing six stories in total, and releasing one a week - this week’s is The 21 Steps, a thriller written by Charles Cumming and set in Google Maps, and each story will have a different method of presentation.

There’s also a prize draw this week in which you can win signed copies of Charles Cumming’s latest books - just visit http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/prizedraw to enter.

If you see a rabbit somewhere on our website, who knows where it might take you…

Here’s some coverage around the web that we’ll be keeping up to date:

• Gamasutra: Q&A: Perplex City Creators Craft ‘We Tell Stories’
• PSFK: We Tell Stories - Literature Meets Gaming
• Jeremy on the Penguin Blog trailing the project: Stories and Games

Here’s the press release in full:

Penguin UK is today launching its most ambitious digital writing project to date. In collaboration with fêted alternate reality game designers Six to Start Penguin has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller author Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. We Tell Stories begins with Charles Cumming’s Google Maps adventure. ‘He was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time’. Now you can follow his adventures across the nation and across the world, step by step.

But somewhere on the internet is a seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl called Alice. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape Alice’s journey and help her on her way. These clues will appear online and in the real world and will drive readers to the other six stories where they will have the chance to win some wonderful prizes, including The Penguin Complete Classics Library, over £13,000 worth of the greatest books ever written.

Expectation is already high – the gaming community has been awaiting the first project from SixtoStart and the next digital publishing initiative from Penguin whose last project, the wikinovel (http://amillionpenguins.com) generated 85,000 unique visitors in five weeks, arriving at a rate of 10 per second at one point. We Tell Stories will be widely promoted, through traditional and new media channels and will be a significant event in publishing, gaming and new media communities.

We Tell Stories will create new fiction and offer a unique, immersive and innovative experience to readers everywhere.

For more information contact Jeremy Ettinghausen at Penguin Books or Adrian Hon at SixtoStart

Safely arrived at Austin after the journey from hell (thank you, weather patterns, for disrupting flights out of Dallas Fort Worth), so just a quick reminder that I’m now on two panels:

• Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs with Tony Walsh of Phantom Compass and Dee Cooke at 3:30pm on Saturday 8th March at room 8; and
• Stories, Games and Your Brand with Rachel Clarke, Jeremy Ettinghausen, Roo Reynolds and Dan Heaf, at 2:00pm on Sunday 9th March at room 8.

I’m also on Twitter as danhon, but you’ll have to add me to find out what I’m up to.