"MetaVerse Noir" is almost certainly the first and only sci-fi short story designed as a choose-your-own-adventure, using a series of interconnected tweets to tell a story. It was created by Kathryn Yu, an MFA candidate in Interactive Media & Game Design at USC, and I gotta say: It's pretty freakin' cool!
And from there, the story takes off! Explore at your own risk.
Yu also spoke with Wired about the project (which was, indeed, a class assignment), and shares some pretty neat perspectives on her approach to this kind of storytelling:
There isn't a lot of space for nuance in 280 characters. So Professor McHugh's advice was to make sure that each individual tweet felt like it could be interesting on its own or provide enough intrigue that someone might feel compelled to explore further. I knew that I could use existing film and TV archetypes and tropes to help scaffold the world I wanted to build and let the player fill in the gaps. I'm a huge fan of shows like Law & Order, and I immediately zeroed in on a character finding a "dead avatar" as a way to hook someone in as quickly as possible. That's usually what happens in the first five minutes of a crime procedural.
Metaverse Noir [Kathryn Yu / Twitter]
The Genius Behind the Best Metaverse Twitter Thread [Angela Watercutter / Wired]
Image: Public Domain via Pixabay
