Tracy Reed is an American writer who created the first episodic online story, the ''
QuantumLink Serial'' on
AOL (then called Quantum Computer Services).
The series debuted in 1988, and was played out in online chat rooms, emails and traditional narrative. The series also went by the name ''The
AppleLink Serial'' and ''The
PC-Link Serial'' on those services before they were all unified under the AOL brand when Quantum changed its name. After each week's chapter was published, users wrote to author Reed suggesting how they could be part of the story. Each week Reed chose one to a handful of users on each of the three services and wrote them into the story, depicting how they interacted with the fictional characters. The project was personally greenlighted by AOL Marketing VP (later President)
Steve Case and produced by Kathi McHugh.
Later titles, the most famous of which was ''
The Spot
The Spot, or thespot.com, was the first episodic online story (1995–1997), and covered Bandwidth (computing), bandwidth and production costs by offering paid advertising banners on the web pages and product placement within the journal entries ...
'' added photos and video to the stories, and introduced the advertising-supported model that became standard during the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
dot-com boom
The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Intern ...
. Reed's work also is a building block in the development of
Alternate reality game
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
The form is defined by int ...
s.
In 2010 a Northern California
interactive theater group announced that they were producing a new interactive drama by Reed, "The Koi Pond."
"'The Koi Pond' by Tracy Reed is a completely new kind of Interactive Theatre that takes place on the Net."
Sausalito Electric Theatre Company, Accessed April 30, 2010
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reed, Tracy
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
AOL people
Place of birth missing (living people)
American women in business
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American women writers