Now, I don’t mean writing a story in e-mail. What I mean is to tell a story by using e-mails, IM’s, notes, messages, or whatever little bits of short media that a character would write.
PlanetFall by John Burnett is one example of how such a story should be done. Following what happens to a crew of a doomed spacecraft, the entire story plays out through the ships log system. The author reveals the story through his characters notes to each other. All the character development, plot, everything is in there.
I’ve only seen this done once before in games like F.E.A.R. or Doom 3, and then the character development was only secondary to the developer’s desire to tell you what was going on. In PlanetFall, John uses the medium to its fullest to give us that human factor missing from what had been done in games. He also used technology to give faces to his characters and a feeling of an advanced computer system in a well designed interface to the logging system.
This is a good peer into the future of story telling, especially in a mixed-media/on-line setting.
