trendpreneur

I like The Big Bang Theory, identify closely with the characters and setting, and have even lived with real physicists (oh my) so can attest to its truth in various ways. So it was remarkably cool to stumble across @sheldoncooper and friends tweeting about their lives, entirely in-character and entirely well done. I also recently saw that the paragon of schoolboy charm Molesworth had found his way on to the platform (chiz chiz).

This tickles all my spidey-senses about ARGs, improv, the blurring of fiction and reality, and how easy it is to be someone else on the Internet. Still, if toasters and plants and ovens can tweet, why not characters? It’s just a new tool in the arsenal of mixed-media marketing, of sucking people into your world, be it via a miniseries or games or interactive fiction. Old-school (ha!) ARGs tended to have a blog as the main point of contact between the protagonist/’eyes’ of the story, and the audience, precisely because blogs were easy to concoct. Taking that on to social networks is an obvious step, and content-experiments like Dinner_Guest are emerging to challenge what we think is real.

Keeping up a Twitter account in-character probably isn’t too hard in and of itself, but when viewed as part of a larger story — such as an ARG or other interactive fiction arc — I imagine it must be pretty exhausting. It’s basically constant improvisation; to truly seem real, you need to tweet like a real person, which means you can’t just tweet from 9 to 9.30 AM and have that done for the day. I think there’s some crossover here, as well, with brand identity and trust, and maintaining a ‘face’ to a corporate, and co-tweeting consistently… Where does the real user begin and the brand stop? Where do the fictional character’s tastes start reflecting the author’s?

I’m unsurprised to see there’s already been attempts at a Twitter ARG, but this platform has such potential for the form that’s as yet unrealised; there’s this wonderful ready, willing, participatory audience who are aware of each other without any need to set up forums or wikis. Oh yes, there’s definitely oodles of possibility here. I can’t wait to see what happens with it.