Nightingale's Playground

It's raining in 1989. Teenage schoolboy Carl lives with his grandmother on an anonymous housing estate and spends his time hanging out with Alex, an oddball kid obsessed with pseudo- philosophy and computer games. When Alex disappears for no apparent reason, things begin to change: Carl finds weird objects in his gran's sideboard; his science fieldwork book reveals mysterious numeric codes; and none of his other friends even remember Alex.

Created by Dreaming Methods authors Andy Campbell and Judi Alston, Nightingale's Playground is an ambitious work of digital fiction divided into four interlinked parts: an atmospheric browser based experience; an interactive virtual book with pages you can turn with the mouse; a short eBook download; and an immersive 3D game-like application that takes the written word into strange new dimensions.

http://www.nightingalesplayground.com

Carving a written narrative into a 3D environment

I've been thinking about producing a narrative in 3D for a long time - the concept in my mind goes back a long number of years. The difficulty has always been the availability of software to do the job well (and without requiring years of experience), the right 'story' to suit the medium, and indeed the time it would take to pull something off that actually (hopefully) worked.

We're close to letting Consensus Trance II out of the box. It's not an iPhone or iPad App (so just carry on with what you were doing, publishers) and we're not telling a simple story in a regular way: this is a complex, multi-layered narrative that tries to do something that I hope is relatively new and pushes the boundaries of where a written narrative could go.

There is no particular target audience and no association with any famous writers, mythical stories or indeed TV programs or films. It's a work that's been generated out of nothing and has no particular connections with anything 'hip' or 'happening'. It's only inspiration comes from a very old, 8-bit computer game called The Sentinel - a unique strategy game that baffled magazine reviewers when it was originally released back in the 1980s.

Consensus Trance follows the story of a young man reflecting on his own rather bleak and depressing school days - only to discover that some of the simple memories he believed were true (and had always based his principles on) seem to have been completely twisted and self-invented. Further reflection leads to some frightening revelations - including the fact that he might actually be part of some omnipotent and sinister reality experiment.

Dreaming Methods on The Literary Platform

"We believe readers – as well as writers – are evolving and that the type of work we’ve been creating for a decade now may potentially have a serious future."

http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/2010/08/unchaining-writing-from-its-paper-based-roots/

Impossible Journal

Celebrating 10 years of digital writing, Impossible Journal is Dreaming Methods' first magazine-style publication and features a series of stories-behind-the-stories from our ambitious digital fiction projects.

Presented through issuu.com - a leading-edge virtual publication portal - the first edition of Impossible Journal includes dream-inspired prose and fiction set amongst striking graphic design - plus an atmospheric soundtrack - Music In The Shape of Eleven - created by sound artist Matt Wright.

From a man who one day decides to violently attack his neighbour (an epilogue to Floppy) to a pair of schoolboys intent on burying their science fieldwork books to increase their authenticity (an extract from our forthcoming work Nightingale's Playground), Impossible Journal offers new insights into Dreaming Methods expansive digital fiction portfolio that has been online and growing since 2000. 

http://issuu.com/dreamingmethods/docs/impossible_journal

 

Digital fiction is a different type of reading experience altogether

These days reading from a screen is considered pretty normal - every day millions of people read emails, news articles, blogs, online journals (often long) and book reviews from laptop screens, computer monitors, iphones, ipads or other portable devices - without considering printing anything out. Publishers are starting to finally, sluggishly embrace the digital transformation the music industry went through years ago and reproduce their catalogues in electronic format for paperlessly downloading and reading.

Although these moves into the digital arena are to be applauded, Dreaming Methods remains interested not only in trying out new ways of writing fiction, but presenting new and challenging ways to approach reading it.

Whilst many ebooks are now available in "enhanced" editions with audio soundtracks and other DVD-style extras, very few publishers are experimenting with the truly new storytelling possibilities offered by this gradual shift into digital.

In the digital world, text does not have to stand still, can be superimposed against colourful backgrounds, animations and imagery with no print design restrictions or costs, and it can also change and mutate depending on a user/reader's interactions. It is as if the physical entity that is text itself has changed from static to liquid, has learnt to move around and react in response to other media - and is thus able to form new narratives-in-motion which require different methods of both writing and reading.

Textual narratives are approached by Dreaming Methods as a key part of the multimedia mix rather than as the absolute central backbone - purposely open-ended, ambiguous, short, fragmentary - and are often additionally considered to be a powerful visual element: blurred, obscured, transient, animated, mouse-responsive.

Reading from the screen is not the same as reading from the page, and being able to fully read-to-the-end and/or completely understand (or even properly see in some cases) the streams of text within Dreaming Methods projects is not considered a requirement for a piece to "work".

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New Work : Glimmer

A new visually rich short digital fiction work is now available to experience on Dreaming Methods called Glimmer. A small parcel containing a bizarre and seemingly meaningless object arrives one morning triggering an unexpected memory in the protagonist.

http://www.dreamingmethods.com/uploads/glimmer/

Prize for New Media Writing

Dreaming Methods' Andy Campbell is on the judging panel for a major new UK prize for new media writing - alongside Michael Bhaskar, Tim Wright, James Pope and Tracey McGarrigan. Poole Literary Festival have partnered with The Media School at Bournemouth University to establish the Prize, which will allow writers working with New Media to showcase their skills, provoke discussion and raise awareness of new media writing and the future of the written word. The competition is now open for entries. The deadline for entries is Midday, 15th September 2010.

For more information visit http://www.poolelitfest.com/new-media-prize.php