[ibimage==33283==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
If you watch House of Cards, you might recall viewing the superimposed SMS snippets that Zoe Barnes sent to Frank Underwood, or the ones between Doug Stamper and Rachel Posner. Sherlock fans might have noticed the same narrative tactic, particularly when Sherlock texts an entire crowd the word “Wrong!” as Detective Lestrade hypothesizes about a case.
Despite – or maybe because of – their quotidian nature, texts contribute realism and intimacy to a story. They reveal a character’s thoughts outside of a verbal conversation, and they offer an almost voyeuristic glimpse into an activity that nearly everyone engages in every day. The narrative potential of the mobile conversation is growing, and few people are more aware of this than Shaun Sims.
Sims is the co-founder of Tap Fiction, a startup devoted to the concept of “mobile storytelling.” Tap Fiction delivers stories designed to encourage user interaction, including Choose Your Own Adventure-style narratives and SMS conversations wherein readers can text characters.
“We sort of had this realization that the popular entertainment platforms like film and television just can't capture, let alone dramatize, our increasingly mobile lives,” said Sims.
Tap Fiction’s library consists of five stories, each of which takes a different approach to interactive reading. GAVEL, for example, chronicles a juror who secretly texts her husband throughout the trial as he bets on the verdict, the entire story told through her text conversations. To further understand her psyche, the reader has the option to text a character. The somewhat meta FUNDED, which Sims authored, tells the story of a tech entrepreneur looking to secure investors for his startup (complete with AngelList and Sublime Text 3 references), with an option for the reader to choose the decisions he makes (for example, which business idea to pursue or whether to cut a deal).
[ibimage==33284==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
Co-founder Shaun Sims at the 2014 Texas Book Festival. Source: Facebook
These stories, Sim said, are simply a sort of prototype, a primer for what will become a more robust collection. “The stories we have now are very much minimally viable stories and written by myself and some friends,” he said.
To supplement its library, Tap Fiction has begun to accept third-party submissions for SMS stories and intends to commission writers and movie producers. To increase the interactive potential of each story, Sims also plans to experiment with new features and smartphone technology.
“The current stories, with the exception of PROM [an SMS story about teenagers preparing for prom] and GAVEL, don't do our vision justice. We're working hard to fill Tap Fiction with stories that take full advantage of our platform,” Sims said. “In the future, we will pull in a reader's location to place the suspect in a thriller novel down the street from the reader. An airborne virus will start infecting friends in a reader's contact list. We can leverage the ambient awareness of the phone to make a horror novel scarier the darker the room gets around you.”
Currently, Tap Fiction consists of Sims and co-founder and engineer Tony Nuzzi. While Sims provided the company’s initial financing, Tap Fiction is in the process of fundraising (SEC regulations precluded talk of numbers).
Though his startup’s size is modest, Sims’s ambitions are anything but. “This year, Tap Fiction is going to create an entirely new category of entertainment that reflects and dramatizes the way modern people live, all through mobile. It's not like anything else out there, and it's not supposed to be. We are the next big entertainment platform. Stay tuned.”
