INTERVIEW: Grab your phone to experience ‘DevilsGame,’ a new cyber novel
Image courtesy of DevilsGame / Provided by KSA PR with permission.
Michael Wolk has crafted a brand-new reading experience for lovers of suspenseful, thrilling stories. Rather than releasing DevilsGame, his new literary project, as a standard hardcover or paperback book, the author has designed an online experience that allows readers the chance to interact with the story in a host of unique ways. They travel on an adventure with the protagonists, Claire Bodine and Nathan Rifkin, in order to stop the spread of an electronic virus that is embedded in a mobile game and proving deadly for users. Readers follow this journey by checking out Wolk’s text, but also heading to websites, both real and imagined, that point the plot in different directions.
DevilsGame, which goes live today, Nov. 19, leans into the future of literary storytelling, while also gaining inspiration from the interactivity of choose-one’s-own-adventure books from the past. Although the book has a structured narrative with a definite conclusion, there are “decision trees” to experience all along the way.
“In part, it’s based on my own experience of crises,” Wolk said in a recent phone interview. “It’s sort of imagining for myself, as a paranoid person, how would the end of the world look if I was experiencing it through my smartphone. … Really the format and the function of the story seemed to kind of mesh when I could use hyperlinks. I realized hyperlinks are not available to the page-turning book reader, and without that superpower of being able to hyperlink to other sites, you couldn’t do what DevilsGame does.”
Wolk said the experience of reading DevilsGame is a journey between reality and unreality, which, in his mind, mirrors how people use social media in 2024. “We’re more dependent on social media as a means of getting news, especially younger people,” he said. “So I wanted to reach readers where they were, and I wanted to give them a story that lets them experience the story the same way they would experience a real news event.”
At first, Wolk and his team tried to create DevilsGame as a standalone app, but the requirements to use the established platforms on the internet didn’t seem to work for him. Instead, it was easier to build the book/game on its own website.
“You download the app through the website itself, so that was a journey just figuring that out,” Wolk said. “It seems almost primitive to me that having hyperlinks in a fiction story isn’t really a regular thing, but it’s not. Publishers aren’t even set up for this. This doesn’t appear in print this book; it’s only digital. It’s oddly on a frontier, which I didn’t expect.”
Wolk has an extensive résumé that encompasses everything from film to theater to books. He wrote the screenplay for Innocent Blood, which was directed by John Landis, and he has a few mystery novels to his name. He’s also an accomplished librettist and lyricist for several musicals, including Deep Cover and Ghostlight 9. He’s currently represented on Broadway as a producer with The Hills of California and Once Upon a Mattress.
DevilsGame is certainly a new entry on his CV. He’s hoping the project puts him on the vanguard on how a novel can be experienced on a mobile device. “We have the good fortune to have on our team a wonderful web developer and designer and technician, so he’s got it so that he gets a report if somebody is hitting a dead link on the story chain,” Wolk said about the maintenance of the cyber novel. “He does a monthly check. These things do happen. The links go dead. They change. They pull the articles, so yeah, it is alive to that possibility, and we correct for it.”
Wolk added: “I must say it’s a structured narrative, so you don’t really get to choose how it ends or whether your character lives or dies. You don’t get that, but you do get the involvement in the sense that every page has a few decision trees. You click on this or click on that. Whether you take a side quest to learn more about the topic from the real news site, or whether you take the trip to one of the creative websites, it’s your choice in real time. The story is set in real time, with a 24-hour clock, and you’re experiencing it largely through the text messages between the hero and heroine. So hopefully you feel like you’re involved and invested in real time as if you’re experiencing it live, moment to moment. That was the idea, so that you feel like you’re there. It’s on your phone because it’s happening to you.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
DevilsGame by Michael Wolk is now available. Click here for more information.
