When I was wee little lad, I loved this book so much. It’s a book in the time machine series (of which I’ve read quite a bit), it’s from the makers of choose your own adventure. Back before the interactive days of the internet, Choose Your Own Adventure books were the best way to keep entertained for hours and hours on end. I used to love the idea of choosing different paths and seeing what happens each time. Lots of times, I’d “cheat” and basically read all the future options at the same time, and try to keep all the different parallel paths in my head at the same time. It got pretty confusing (who knows, maybe it generated an “opposable mind,” that’d be great wouldn’t it? Sometimes I remember I gave up trying to keep them in my head and I drew a graph like a huge nerd (Apparently I wasn’t the only one).
Many of you might have seen the internet video used to mimic choose your own adventure before, but this is the first time I happened to stumble across the idea…
Check out this video from SMPfilms… It’s put together pretty well. Can you find Sparta?
I have totally wondered for a while now why there hasn’t been a proliferation of the CYOA model for media like movies and TV shows, with the advent of fast home delivery and technologies that enable On-demand entertainment. Then it occurred to me that to create all those different paths that would probably go unused COST a lot of extra money for TV/film producers. (Also, in the theater, there’s no way to “choose” an adventure until theaters are retrofitted… so the only extra revenue that Hollywood could hope for would come from DVD sales).
Well with the YouTube, cheaply created media, all this CYOA stuff becomes possible. If Google is smart, they’ll adapt YouTube to enable this type of interactive choice within the video medium. If not, I think that a video platform that enabled CYOA interaction would be great as a standalone service. I know that I would personally be far more entertained by it.
In fact, if TV was more interactive and game-like, I might even be willing to spend a few hours a week on it, who knows?!
In the late 90’s I remember reading something about a company that was going to equip theaters with voting devices so the audience could vote on branching paths for films. I think a few movies were made, but obviously it went nowhere. The YouTube idea is interesting, but it sort of requires web video to start including longer form media rather than just short clips right? There’s no technical reason it couldn’t be done, but I just don’t know if people are looking for that when they watch video on the web. Maybe they could just string all the existing YouTube videos into a CYOA. “Click here if you want the hero to get hit in the crotch with a flaming skateboard, or here if you want him to wander into a montage of adorable kittens”