Broadcast/interactive drama: a beginner’s guide (part 2)

6)       Point and click / exploration narratives 

Point and click games were one of the earliest popular forms of interactive narrative.  In the early 1990s Tim Schaffer’s games such as Grim Fandango and Monkey Island were pretty influential in this genre.  Monkey Island has actually just had a re-release with a graphics spruce. 

The user clicks around an environment, interacting with props and characters to reveal a story.  The mixture of exploration and observation suits detective stories particularly well, like the current hit Professor Layton, on the DS.

 This kind of interaction works well with video loops in a green screen environment, and broadcasters have used these types of games.  Check out CDX and Bow Street Runners for impressive examples 

7)       Video Blogs

The video blog drama has become hugely popular.  Lonelygirl15 was the first breakout hit, Kate Modern (from the same makers) got even more press.  Since then we’ve had various spins on the ‘vlog’; Sophia’s Diary, Kirill, Sam King and many others.  Vlog narratives have many advantages, the first person address gives the audience a sense of an intimate, one-to-one relationship.  The single shot also means that they are cheap and quick to make – meaning that they can be very responsive to audiences and remain topical. 

Broadcasters have tried to experiment with video blogs, but come up against a problem of platform.  Lonelygirl15 and Kate Modern worked because they were on Youtube and Bebo respectively.  The audience can suspend disbelief immediately because other people actually were vlogging on Youtube and Bebo; in fact the platform is part of the story.  Put a video blog on the BBC, ITV or C4 and you have to get past the fact that no-one else is vlogging on those channels.  It already feels false. 

Another frequent problem with broadcasters and vlogs, is that they want to make them broadcast quality. Vlogs aren’t broadcast quality, they’re made on handycams at best, mobile phones and webcams at worst.  They also keep wanting to cut away to broaden the scope of the drama.  This also doesn’t look like real vlogs.  So what you end up with is something that doesn’t look like a vlog on a platform that doesn’t really support them.  Brilliant.

 8)       Alternate Reality Games

ARGs create a universe in which the story unfolds.  This universe might be established in a TV show, movie or game (sometimes none of the above), and the fiction will usually include several ‘in narrative’ websites, blogs, Wikipedia articles etc.  Many ARGs spill out into the real world with treasure hunts, actors, and dead drops. 

Probably the most famous ARGs have been Mind Candy’s Perplex City and The Lost Experience  as well as Lonelygirl15 (I know, I know I put LG in the previous category).  Hollywood has been using ARGs to promote movies recently – Cloverfield and The Dark Knight are recent examples. 

In the UK Sixtostart are probably the most famous ARG creators, with great work for Penguin among others.  Other notable practitioners include the Emmy winning Xenophile Media and Hoodlum. 

It seems like ARGs have been ‘the next big thing’ for ages.  Maybe the rise of location-based content and GPS mobiles will help the alternate reality converge with the real world. 

 9)       Voyeurism

I didn’t put this entry in just to give HBO Voyeur its own place on the list.  Honest.  In voyeur narratives, the story takes place in real time (within the experience), yet the use can only watch one thing at a time.  Perhaps the best example of this is actually Big Brother’s cam selector.

 10)        Crowd sourced story / user generated content

So this isn’t strictly an interactive narrative – more interactive authorship.  Crowd sourcing allows through the internet allows several people to work together to create a story.  This can be through the writing and production of a film, like A Swarm of Angels or even as part of an ARG like World Without Oil.

Broadcast/interactive drama: a beginner’s guide (part 1)

When I was at ITV I tried to categorise different types of online drama and the ways they relate to broadcast television,  so I could explain them to the head of continuing drama.  

I came up seven categories.  This was 3 months ago.  Now I’ve identified ten.  That could be a sign of an exponentially expanding medium.  Or it could be a sign that I’m slow to catch on to stuff. 

Anyway, this is very much a beginner’s guide not an in-depth report, but I’ve tried to include examples for each category, and list some of the potential pitfalls of the genre.  What I haven’t touched on is gaming narrative.  For an excellent introduction for storytelling in games read this Gamesport article.

1)       Parallel Storylines

The web is often used as a platform to show additional storylines featuring secondary characters or off screen locations from the broadcast narrative. Under the ‘more is better’ rule, parallel scenes are often the first port of call for linear producers.  It’s linear drama on a new platform.  It’s not strictly interactive, as TV has been doing this for years with spin offs on digital channels or late night editions of popular shows. 

Examples (with varying degrees of success) include Skins, Corrie Confidential, Secret Diary of a Call Girl and many others. 

I think there are conditions for making successful parallel storylines: 

• A sense of place: viewers should understand where the protagonists are and how this location relates to the broadcast programme. 
• A sense of time: when is the parallel narrative taking place in relation to the broadcast programme.
• Added value: the parallel narrative has to be worth something to fans of the broadcast programme.  It should give a fresh perspective or additional information that helps viewers enjoy the show they love in a new way. 
• Appropriate production values: the parallel story should be filmed, scripted and acted to an equivalent standard to the broadcast programme.  Too often the online videos are poorly filmed with second rate acting which, aside from being no fun, detracts from the broadcast brand. 

2)       What happens next? (Branching narrative)

This is the ‘choose your own adventure’ school of interactive storytelling.  Viewers are presented with different options of where the story goes next or how a story ends.  This is an idea that comes up a lot from nostalgic fans of Fighting Fantasy Books, but is often put aside due to some major concerns: 

• You end up shooting a lot of footage, much of which may never be seen by the user, which seems like a waste.
• The story ‘tree’ expands exponentially.  By the time you have had 3 decisions in five consecutive scenes, there are 729 possible outcomes
• It ruins suspension of disbelief.  Part of the joy of drama is seeing a story unfold.  William Goldman talks about a perfect ending being at once surprising and inevitable – you can’t choose that. 

Having said all that, Channel 4’s Dubplate Drama was an interesting experiment with this kind of storytelling.  And we geeks all did love those FF classics. 

3)       Fragmented narrative

Currently being explored to spectacular effect in HBO Imagine, fragmented narratives show you different elements of a story and challenge you to piece it back together.  This allows online producers to use different interfaces to explore story, and hopefully to give the user a sense of control over how they consume it.  

The flip side is that an interface that isn’t intuitive and pleasurable to use can feel like a barrier between the user and the story.

 Fragmented narrative isn’t an online phenomenon.  I think you can put films like Memento and even Pulp Fiction into this category.  Hell, go back a bit and Rashomon probably fits the brief.

4)       Linear video with integrated games 

Full motion video or ‘cut scenes’ top and tailing play is well established trope in gaming.  Being better at the video than the gaming, broadcasters have tried to invert the relationship, giving us long form video scenes interspersed with flash minigames. 

An early example of this was BBC Switch and Endemol’s Signs of Life.  I worked on ITV’s Primeval Evolved which had a similar structure.

I found that biggest challenge was creating the right balance between video and game.  Gamers often want to cut to the chase and get to the game, whereas if you’re enjoying the drama, it can feel like everything grinds to a halt (with a massive amount of exposition) to squeeze in the game. 

I think it’s important to maintain a sense that even the video heavy content is an interactive experience, so the viewer / player is already sitting forward by the time they are called upon to play, and avoids the jarring gear changes. 

5)       Games using video assets 

This is really an extension of the above category; but I think it has exciting enough potential to warrant its own spot.  

Using hot spots and layers in flash video, you can turn linear video into a fully interactive game experience so the transition from cut scene to game is pretty seemless.  

The downside is that using video does confine you to an ‘on rails’ experience.  It’s still good for arcade fun.  A couple of good examples are: 

Toon Crisis­ – this walkman advert is a good fun arcade shooter 

FPS in Real Life – however, I find this amateur effort from American teenagers far more impressive.  It’s potentially NSFW though.

***

I hope this is useful.  In part two of this article I’ll look at some of the more involved examples:

6)  Point and click / exploration narratives

 7) Video Blogs 

8)  Alternate Reality Games 

9)  Voyeurism / perspective control

10) Crowd sourced story / user generated content