10 March 2016
On the hunt for an interactive “something”.
So I gave it a little more thought, and decided to go with the “choose your own adventure” style question. After considering the logistics involved with resourcing information relating to the science of smelling, human behaviour and the technical feasibility of attaching a gas-like “scent-vent” unit to a TV, it all began to seem too complex. In short, I threw it into the too hard basket.
The feasibility – and reality – of giving someone the option to change a movie outcome is much more do-able, and apparently, it’s actually a reality. After finding an article suitably titled “First interactive movie to debut: Audience to decide plot twists.” (Zeiger, 1995), I discovered the article was relevant, but staged on a larger scale, where the interactive movie, “Mr Payback” (1995) was screened for theatre audiences in a select number of US cinemas that featured specially-equipped seating with voting buttons on the armrests. This plot path method worked on a majority rules model. So, yes, in a way it meets the “Choose Your Own Adventure” function, but I was looking for a more personal level, where the individual user would control the plot twists, not based on a majority rules vote.
Nevertheless, this now presented me with a conundrum: My fantasy has already become a reality, so can I still write about it? So I emailed Scott…standby for response…
I still continued to search, and found a more apt term used for this experience – “multi-threaded narratives”, a term used to explain an interactive movie experience that was under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media lab sometime around 1993. This was found in an article that argues the importance of an ending to a movie and whether it follows a traditional structure, and how the true understanding of the story may be affected by the user-controlled experience. This article was beginning to look more like what I was looking for. So now I feel I can begin working on my annotated bibliographies.