six to start

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.

PSFK introduced The Purple List earlier this month. In their own words:

At PSFK, we’re trying to find more ways to spread inspiration to help companies change to make things better. One way is to help them find the right people in the right place for the right job.

Introducing The Purple List - a network of 100 of our trusted contacts. The Purple List is a community of trends and innovation professionals who can help you with projects big and small, full time or ad-hoc.

There’s no longer a need to find inspiration from the other side of the world by hiring a big local agency - simply contact a member of The Purple List.

One of the first projects we helped PSFK out on was having Amanda and Christine bring over a couple of representatives from Apple - Harriet DeVoy, Creative Director for Apple Europe, and Danika Cleary Lasuzk, one of Apple Graphic Design Planners over to our new offices so we could talk a little about what we do, ARGs, big games, and how fantastic the iPhone could be as an ARG platform (and we’re not the only ones to think so, either - GigaOm thinks Perplex City would’ve been fantastic on the iPhone). For all that Apple do, though, they’re tremendously conservative in their communications (not for want of people like Harriet and Danika trying, though) but it was a great opportunity being able to get them excited about the ways in which gaming and ARGs in particular help connect brands with audiences.

We’re really, really proud to have been invited to join PSFK’s Purple List European network - we’re in tremendous company and it’s great recognition from PSFK to be part of their network. Thanks, Piers!

I’m speaking at SXSW Interactive this year on a panel co-organised by myself and Rachel Clarke - Stories, Games and Your Brand. The esteemed Roo Reynolds and Jeremy Ettinghausen (who’s leading the Penguin Books side of a project we’re doing) will be joining us, and we’ll be covering such diverse topics as:

• advertising and gaming
• soap operas
• virtual worlds
• storytelling and engaging experiences
• brands engaging in entertainment
• gaming versus advergaming

and a whole host more.

As Rachel points out, we’re a very English panel (it’s like an invasion), so here are some suggestions for why you might want to come along:

• no one can resist that English accent, never mind four of them
• we’re scheduled against Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook
• all the cool kids have moved on from Facebook already
• we’re making an amusing bet about how many times we can not mention Facebook seeing as we’re scheduled against Facebook. Facebook.

It’ll be fun - come see us - Sunday March 9, 2pm, Room 8.

We’re really excited about a project we’ve been working on for the last couple of months with Jeremy Ettinghausen and Sam Binnie over at Penguin.

Story, alongside gameplay, is at the heart of what we do, which is why teaming up with a publisher with such rich history and commitment to storytelling has been a great opportunity for us, and an opportunity to do something a little different from what we normally do. We’re conscious that the only prior example of our work has been Perplex City, which is markedly different from the projects we’re working on now.

While Perplex City was very game and puzzle heavy - or at least games and puzzles had equal weight to the story we produced, our work with Penguin is all about telling a great story and exploring new ways of telling those stories, ways that wouldn’t be possible without the internet. This doesn’t mean there’s going to be no gameplay in the Pengrin project…

There’s not a lot more that we can say at the moment, apart from give you a glimpse of part of our planning process:

We’re launching in March, so if you’d like to know when everything goes live, please sign up.

Update: Some people think we’re working with Eric Harshbarger on this project. Sorry, but we’re not. Eric’s fantastic and while we thoroughly enjoyed working with him at Mind Candy, we’re not currently working with him on anything. We do look forward to having the chance to work with him in the future, though (Hi, Eric!).

Six to Start-ers Adrian and James are both working on a campaign with Cancer Research UK called Let’s Change the Game:

Let’s Change the Game is a competition to design an ARG (alternate reality game) to help the work of Cancer Research UK. The winning designers will receive funding to develop and run their game, and will be mentored by some of the best ARG designers in the world. Entry is open to anyone who wants to enter.

which, I think you’ll agree (and I’m not being biased in anyway) is pretty damn cool. There’s a prize that’s running at £1,300 as of the time of this post, and if you’re American, then that’s probably half a million dollars by now. Adrian’s managed to put together a great panel of judges who’re all pretty much the leading lights of the ARG scene so there’s an opportunity for some fantastic feedback as well as designing a game that could potentially have a big effect on society.