They’re here. Oh god! They’ve found you! Run: @wnd_run Hide: @wnd_hide
— A dreadful start (@wnd_go) January 11, 2015 Choose your own grotesque Twitter adventure
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Whether it’s sexy space dinosaur bots or collective storytelling, Twitter has turned out to be an amazing fiction medium. But the short, charmingly gruesome “A Dreadful Start” is the first time I’ve seen it used for “choose your own adventure” stories. Have Twitter users “Weeping Softly,” “Too Many Tears,” and “Soon” really all been waiting empty since 2009, in anticipation of becoming microfiction? Or did they have some older purpose, before any existing tweets were deleted? I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter.
Spoiler: the game / story is, as far as I can tell, advertising a book. If you don’t want the fun of getting to the end yourself (seriously, it takes 10 minutes), writer Kelsey Atherton has collected it all on Storify here.
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