A cyberpunk story to choose from, entirely made on Twitter

“MetaVerse Black“is almost certainly the first and only sci-fi short story designed as an adventure to choose from, using a series of interconnected tweets to tell a story. It was created by Catherine yu, an MFA candidate in Interactive Media & Game Design at USC, and I have to say: that’s pretty 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 interesting perspectives on his approach to this kind of storytelling:

There is not a lot of space for the nuance in 280 characters. Professor McHugh’s advice, then, was to make sure that each individual tweet felt it could be interesting on its own or provide enough intrigue that someone felt compelled to explore further. I knew I could use the existing archetypes and tropes of film and television to help scaffold the world I wanted to build and let the player fill in the gaps. I’m a big fan of shows like Law and order, and I immediately focused on a character finding a “dead avatar” as a way to hook someone up as quickly as possible. This is usually what happens in the first five minutes of a criminal proceeding.

Metaverse Black [Kathryn Yu / Twitter]

The genius behind the best metaverse Twitter feed [Angela Watercutter / Wired]

Image: public domain via Pixabay