Every Sims Picture Tells a Story

“What no one imagined — least of all The Sims’ designers — was that thousands of players would quickly bypass the album’s intended use and instead use it to create dozens of staged snapshots, crafting what can be complex, scripted, multi-episode social commentaries, graphic novels or even movies, as it were, with the Sims starring in the lead roles….Initially, it was all superheroes all the time. But users quickly began making the albums richer, with multilayered characters and multiple episodes.” Daniel Terdiman —Every Sims Picture Tells a Story (Wired)

I think it’s a stretch to call a series of still photos with textual labels “novels or even movies”. They are certainly digital narratives, created with a new media tool that happens to have been marketed for a different purpose.