Justin Hampton at The Bookloft

I didn’t come right out and say it in the last post, but implicit in my final statement regarding BM was a realization I made back in ‘99 that sadly and ironically enough, words would not be enough to reach a modern audience looking for something new. What drew me and others to the playa was an environment that spoke back to them, that would react to me, rather than a static entity that didn’t respond to me as an individual. In a word: interactivity, the final threshold the written word has to cross.

But how does one create a story that makes you a character, that responds in its own way to the actions you perform in relation to it? Most of the solutions I’ve seen to this are not in publishing, but in gaming – namely in ARGs (Alternative Reality Games), which are unfortunately the general province of very rich corporations looking to promote media franchises like LOST or Spielberg’s A.I. Very few writers have attempted to tackle this question, and those that have tend to think more in terms of gimmickry and theme park ride thrills than in creating significant and mature works that can challenge and beguile their readers.

Take Cathy’s Book: If Found Call 650-266-8233, the YA novel written in the form of an artistic teen’s lost diary and devised by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, a sci-fi writer/game designer team, both with backgrounds in marketing. Websites and phone numbers like the one on the cover seek to immerse the reader in an erzatz universe where Cathy is embroiled through her ex-boyfriend in a dark mystery surrounding the Chinese Eight Ancestors, disappears and cries out for help. Initial controversy surrounding the book dealt with the authors’ cross-promotion deal with Cover Girl to shill their products through “Cathy” in exchange for ads on Cover Girl’s tween website beinggirl.com. I myself got most unnerved by reading between the lines of Cathy’s oddly contrived speech and hearing underneath two aging, ultra-wired West Coast geeks emulating tweengrrl l33t speak 4 lolZ. Of course, guys have been impersonating young girls on interactive forums since the advent of the Internet, but stuff like Cathy’s Book and lonelygirl15 was an unsettling indicator of the weird and vaguely pedophilic turning pro. For someone like me to participate in these deeply manipulative scenarios seems like an indictment.

Then there’s the recently released Level 26 by CSI creator Anthony Zuicker. For those who’ve never seen Zuicker deliver his pitch, he’s a bubbly, rotund, well-groomed, ultra-enthusiastic alpha geek with a sleek, self-aware charm about him. His canny synthesis of the drama behind the intersection of science and police work has made Hollywood a lot of money, so naturally, people here in town think he’s a genius. Apparently, so does he, since he’s now selling an interactive book series (Oh, and did I mention that Cathy’s Book spun off into a series? Publishers, just like movie studios, love a franchise, after all.) entitled “Level 26″ with the same tones of gleeful excitement he brings to the “CSI: The Experience” branded museum exhibit he’s brought to science museums throughout the country, and which I saw in Portland, Oregon in August.

Of course, the only truly “interactive” elements of this “Digi-Novel” – and yes, it’s already a trademarked name – involve embedded codes within the text that allow one to unlock “cyberbridges” on the book’s website that access filmed content that give more of the story. Problem is, though, the story’s already WRITTEN. A done deal. You may be consuming the preordained plot information in different ways than in the past, but your own agency is severely limited in both the models proposed by Zuicker and Cathy’s Book.

It also doesn’t help that Level 26 is hands down the WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY LIFE. Manipulative and utterly derivative in the worst tradition of violent Hollywood thrillers, Level 26 pulls out all the stops and serial-killer cliches in conveying the lurid, hackneyed tale behind a supervillain named (I kid you not) Sqweegel and his impossibly efficient crimes, as well as the haunted-yet-super-attractive police officer Steven Dark (cue brooding synthesizer groans) pulled out of retirement to snag him. You can see all the plot “twists” coming a mile away, and worst of all from an interactivity standpoint, there’s no real need to even “unlock” the cyberbridges to get the novel. The interactivity (provided, unsurprisingly, by EQAL, the production company that lonelygirl15 built) is a vestigial, unnecessary component to the book.

Oh, an in what appears to be a telling trend in these sorts of ventures, Zuicker also decided on a questionable cross-promotion with the execrable Suicide Girls softcore porn website, where two of the site’s models dressed up in Sqweegel’s BDSM-gimp bad guy costume (transforming them into Sqweegees, I guess.) and took it to a predictable conclusion for a shoot. Considering the gleefully detailed bloodlust exhibited by all the book’s main characters, such a partnership makes its own sad sense. The grim spectre of advertising creeping into books through this model is also raised as well by the examples set forth in Cathy’s Book and Level 26.

What’s saddest of all is that all the tools in place for brand-new forms of storytelling to take place, and none of them are being used. And I’m not just talking ebooks or “vooks” (Simon & Schuster imprint Atria’s terminology for ebooks with videos, a goofy marketing ploy which conveniently ignores the fact that ALL ebooks can incorporate videos as well as other forms of multimedia within them. They’re digital, after all.). The online widget Bookbuzzr allows book excerpts to be posted like viral videos across social networks. And the miraculous LiveScribe/Smartpen technology, which synchs up a voice-recorder/pen to microdot-embedded paper and allows for instant playback, translation and aural transformation of notes.

The tech continues to change and evolve every day, faster than most writers are probably comfortable with. That’s a pity, because all of it is waiting for a visionary to make something extraordinary with it. Despite all the hype you’ve heard, it hasn’t happened yet.