Online stories show great potential for marketing and branding

When you talk about a good story, you are actually talking about “narrative desire”. The story created a desire in you – and then it satisfied that desire. You want to know more about the characters in the story – and you want to know what happened next. This is the real secret behind movies and TV-series and books. But, strangely enough, the Internet has not had its own storytelling format – at least not yet. For years, we have been copying other media types onto the web and wondering why they don’t really engage the users for very long. The game company, Investigate North, is trying to create this ‘’narrative desire’’ within online stories with their videogame, Cloud Chamber.

What we've done with Cloud Chamber is to create an online story form that works on the terms of the Internet. What the Internet does, at a basic level, is to give people the ability to seek their own answers – and to discuss those answers with others. With Cloud Chamber, we created an online mystery story that users must explore and discuss, together. If, for example, you work out