The internet sucks at stories (and virtual worlds are crap)

Second main missive from Web 2.0

An enlightening presentation from Elan Lee last week at San Francisco event Web 2.0. Lee is a video games developer who now runs his own outfit

Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios

Fourth Wall Studios which aims to create experiences for audiences way beyond what the web has to offer at present. It’s a bit of a far out concept but it convinced me. Lee’s basic thesis is that the internet in its present guise is a flawed medium, one that has yet to find its feet as a cultural medium. By that he means it doesn’t work as narrative. While we can find information or socialise on the web it has yet to convince him that the medium as yet can tell stories. “Shrinking (existing) media into web pages, that really sucks,” he says, or an alternative line: “Slapping movies into the internet, that makes me sad.”

Lee cites history as a precedent for our inability to find the best way of exploiting a new

medium. It took us 150 years to work out the novel was the best form for the printed page, 35 years from movie camera to movie, 30 years from TV to sitcom.

So what is next for the web (or the

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