As some of you know, I’ve long been interested in using technology to tell stories. In 2008, I brought some of the characters from AMC’s drama Mad Men (created by showrunner-turned-novelist Matthew Weiner) onto twitter and worked with other Mad Men on Twitter exploring how to make TV characters live between episodes and between seasons. In those early days when Twitter was data-heavy, driven mostly by business, we explored ways to use the platform to stage twittertainment.

Later, I published my first novel with a digital epilogue which links to online content where readers can explore material created by each character.

Since then, I’ve gone retro, writing novels on paper, but I’ve followed with interest colleagues who continued to push story technology forward. Now, there’s an Ivy League university department devoted to using technology to tell story. Columbia has a Digital Storytelling Lab founded and directed by Lance Weiler, a pioneer in the field. What does digital storytelling entail? Last night Weiler hosted a “meet-up” at Lincoln Center where he staged a prototype for a story-using-technology project he is working on. “Where There’s Smoke” is a memoir work about his volunteer-firefighter father, with whom he collaborated on the project until his father’s recent death. It’s a story told in vintage slides, experimental film, audio and immersive theater and explores a possible connection between two fires and his father. His father was a firefighter. But was he also a fire-starter? The story has chapters called “fragments” which are presented not linearly, but in an order assembled in response to audience participation. Some elements of the work incorporate aspects of Escape Rooms which I recently discovered on a trip to reunite with digital storytellers in LA.

Escape Rooms are like birthday parties you used to go to as a kid, where some sort of participatory entertainment was organized, a haunted house or scavenger hunt. Only now the rooms are as tricked out as Broadway stage sets, great for grown-up birthdays or reunions or team-building. You “bond” while trying to solve a case, or get inside a pyramid or discover an alchemist’s formula before it blows up the world. Anyway, there were elements of that in Weiler’s work, which made the work immersive and interactive. In explaining this new approach to telling a story, he cited The Museum of Ice Cream, a brilliant approach to storytelling by a brand who has figured out that the most valuable thing they have to sell isn’t a product, but a story.

Last week, my twin 15 year old nieces came to town. They’d been here a year earlier with their parents and had seen most of the tourist sites. In searching for stuff to do, I came across The Museum of Ice Cream.  I thought we’d just visit. It was a museum, wasn’t it? When we got to the address, a factory front on 14^thand the Hudson, it was raining. “What time is your tasting booked for?” asked a greeter in pink dress, pink labcoat, pink boots at the door. No booking? She pointed to the looooooonnng line wrapped around the back of the building. It was raining. I took out my phone and (to my surprise, and that of the greeter) I got a booking for three in the next few minutes. “They must have changed the rules?” she said, unhooking a pink velvet rope and letting us in. It was like stepping into an Instagram filter. Everything—the walls, the floors, ceilings, shelves, almost all the merch for sale was pink, pink, pink. We gathered with a group to go upstairs to our “tasting” where we were greeted by a perky guide in pink wearing a crown, whose ice cream name was…sorry I can’t remember, but it was something very clever. (Getting the job, I read later, is super competitive and the interview begins with “What is your Ice Cream name?”)

The guide/queen led us on a tour of the History of Vanilla which featured a real vanilla tree and waftings from test tubes in which various ice cream flavors—vanilla, caramel, chocolate, etc. could be inhaled. Then, we moved on to what looked like a lab table in high school chemistry. Each visitor was given a pink (of course) lab coat to wear and a slab of test tubes and beakers and tiny glass plates where we mixed flavors and smelled and tasted different flavors of ice cream. The whole time, a lot of phone action was going on, selfies and group shots—photos were encouraged, be sure and tag #museumoficecream! (As I write, there are 167,404 of these posts on Instagram.) After the “lesson”, we were ushered downstairs (sans lab coat) and encouraged to take more pics in instagram-friendly sets with giant bananas or pink rotaries or other props. On your way out, you get a free pint of ice cream, flavor of your choice. We left with Chocolate Crunch and Cherrylicious and once home, I realized that it’s not the ice cream you’re buying—because when you’re not eating the ice cream surrounded by pinkness and photo-ops and laughter and music, you realize the ice cream itself is worth far, far less than $33/pint (the price of the ticket). But the story you’re experiencing—having fun with post-milennial nieces, watching them pose for themselves and for friends back home—the story is priceless.

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