For the past five weeks, I have been obsessed with logging onto www.wetellstories.co.uk on numerous occasions each day. We Tell Stories is Penguin’s latest digital initiative – an exciting, innovative Alternate Reality Game (ARG), blurring the boundaries of fiction and real life. Each week, a different Penguin author launches their own take on one of six classic novels.

The launch of the series saw Charles Cumming retell John Buchan’s The 39 Steps , using Google Maps to engage readers and immerse them in the world of the story. In true ARG style, there were clues aplenty – following the story across London gave us phone numbers to call, real-life places to visit (the statue at St Pancras station held some keys…) and leads to investigate.

 

 

 

Roll on Week 2 and Toby Litt introduced us to Slice, a teen girl whose parents had made her move with them from America to London. Wanting to take their daughter away from ‘bad influences’, they took part in a house-swap with another family with a teenage girl who also needed a change of environment. Before they left for England, Slice’s parents deleted all of her social networking profiles and blogs so she could have a fresh start. Once in London, Slice spent all day in her room whilst her parents went out househunting – little did they know she was logging back online, and had created a new blog for the world to see… We were able to follow Slice and her parents through their own blogs and Twitters. Combining this technology that we normally associate with real life was dangerously addictive, bringing Slice and her parents off our screens and into the real world.

 

Do you remember those books you could get as kids, where you wrote your own bits of the stories and chose the endings? Kevin Brooks enabled us to relive our childhood in week 3, with a digitally interactive version of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic Fairy Tales .  I decided to call the peasant’s daughter Aria, and the evil king King Vincent. I made Aria conquer a drunken knave on her way to meet the king, and I opted for a Very Sad Ending. What will you choose?

Choose your journey through the fairy tale:

 

As if I wasn’t already hooked by week 4, I soon became even more obsessed, logging on to the website at 6.30pm on the dot each evening. Don’t worry, I had a good reason – highly acclaimed authors Nicci French wrote hour-long live, real-time updates on their story Your Place and Mine, a new take on Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin .

 

Last week saw the release of the penultimate We Tell Stories. Written by Matt Mason and designed by Nicholas Felton, Hard Times is an ‘infographic’ modern-day interpretation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. There are virtual pages full of interesting facts of our time – did you know that 52% of boys report a screen time of over 42 hours a week, and 48% of US teens didn’t buy a single CD in 2007? Times are a-changing: it took 40 years for the radio to build up 1 million listeners, as opposed to less than a year for Napster & Hotmail to achieve the same user base.

 

 

Although you won’t be able to participate in the live aspects of the weekly stories, you’ll be glad to hear that you can still experience all six stories mentioned above. Just surf on over to www.wetellstories.co.uk - and look out for the final instalment… I wonder what it’ll be…