Story Seek

Offering five virtual-reality journeys combining color, sound, and site-specific poetry, memoir, and fiction, StorySeek is a multimedia love letter to Philadelphia's streets, neighborhoods, and secret, favorite places. Works by top Philadelphia authors Yolanda Wisher, Beth Kephart, Alyssa Songsiridej, L Feldman, and Krys Belc trace paths through  Germantown, Center City, West Philadelphia, the Wissahickon, and Fishtown. Story Seek’s unique desktop app is part immersive theater, part video game, and part neighborhood poetry slam, offering users a new template for interactive, place-based digital art that celebrates contemporary urban life. 

StorySeek is a  collaboration between the Philadelphia-based literary quarterly Cleaver Magazine and the Drexel Entrepreneurial Game Studio. Works are also published traditionally by Cleaver Magazine in its upcoming 44th quarterly issue. StorySeek's interactive playthrough experience will be accessible for all as an archive of videos. Story Seek is funded in part by the William Penn Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. 

Note: To download for Mac OS you will need to override your computer's security settings using these instructions from Apple. The app will be saved as an exception to your security settings. 

You can also view complete playthroughs of all games on Cleaver's Story Seek page. 

Cleaver Magazine is Philadelphia’s award-winning international quarterly literary magazine. Founded in 2013 by Karen Rile and Lauren Rile Smith, Cleaver is now celebrating 10 years of publishing the finest in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, essays on craft and the writing life, and book reviews.

The Entrepreneurial Game Studio (EGS) at Drexel University is an educational game incubator focused on developing the next generation of leaders in the game industry. Founded and led by Dr. Frank J. Lee, EGS teaches students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset by helping and mentoring students to form their own game companies. Since its founding in 2014, more than 15 LLC have been formed within EGS, including two successful Kickstarter campaigns. EGS is one of the most awarded university-based incubators in the nation, garnering more than 30 national and international awards and recognitions by its students. They include winning the 2018 Intel

University Game Showcase and the 2019 E3 College Game Competition and being a finalist for

Best Student Game at the 2019 Independent Game Festival.

Dr. Frank J. Lee is a Full Professor of Digital Media at Drexel University with appointments in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering and founding director of the Entrepreneurial Game Studio. Lee also co-founded Drexel's Game Design Program in 2008, which has been consistently ranked as one of the Top Game Design Programs in the US since 2009. Lee’s own projects have won national and international recognitions and have received extensive media coverage. His installation project, Skyscraper Tetris in 2014, was mentioned in over 1500 news stories worldwide and had an estimated 2.2 Billion views. It was also recognized as a Guinness World Record for the Largest Architectural Videogame Display. He was selected as one of the Smartest People in Philadelphia by Philadelphia Magazine in 2012, Hacker of the Year by Geekadelphia in 2013, and one of the 50 Most Admirable Gaming People by Polygon in 2014.

Gameplay Videos: