User:Playclever/Sandbox/Interactive Movie

The interactive movie is a form of interactive storytelling in which viewers can influence the content or structure of a movie. In practice, this can be either a movie where different scenes are shown according to viewers' input, or a video game that adopts cinematography and storytelling techniques from the film industry. The medium is also known as interactive film or interactive cinema.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the term "interactive movie" was widely applied to games that relied on full motion video (FMV) of pre-recorded footage or animation. The term is applied less frequently today, following the decline of FMV in games.

Interactivity

At the heart of many interactive movies, as with gamebooks such as the Choose Your Own Adventure series, is the branching storyline. The earliest known interactive movie, Kinoautomat, branched at several key points based on an audience vote. The two-projector setup required to display either outcome dictated, however, that the branches merged in time for the next decision.

While interactive movies like Kinoautomat present a mostly passive experience with just a few branching paths, many have a greater variety of interactions with win or failure states, and are classified as video games. The arcade game Dragon's Lair had many more decision points than Kinoautomat, but the decisions were based on the protagonist's immediate actions, for example direction of movement, and there was only one correct action. The sequel to Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, followed a similar format, but some paths branched and re-merged rather than having just one critical path.

Some interactive movies, like the controversial Night Trap and Voyeur, allow the viewer to participate by switching between hidden cameras as the footage plays out in real time, setting traps for intruders.

In interactive movies with well-defined decision points, the choice is conveyed using a variety of mechanisms. Super Don Quix-ote and Esh's Aurunmilla (both 1984) overlaid crude computer graphics on top of the animation to indicate the correct input to the player, while Dragon's Lair and others had relied on cues in the video itself. These devices have become known as Quick Time Events, and still appear in games today.

• Adventure games, solve puzzles to see more of the movie (Under a Killing Moon, Fahrenheit)
• Action games interspersed with interactive cut scenes (Wing Commander III)

Storytelling

In her book Excitable Speech, Judith Butler notes: "Like the interactive narrative in general, the interactive movie is seen as an oxymoron. It is not possible to tell a story by putting the storytelling in the hands of the spectator."

In a 1995 lecture, Ernest Adams identified three problems with storytelling in interactive movies: the problem of logical consistency, the problem of narrative flow, and the problem of amnesia. These problems relate to the affect of interactivity on the integrity of the story, the player character's behaviour, and the pacing of the narrative.

Adams explains that the established solutions to problems of consistency and narrative flow are to limit interactivity, force the plot to proceed whether the player is ready or not, or give up and allow the player to dictate matters, as with adventure games where dramatic flow is driven entirely by player action, or games where characters and plot are so bland that all actions are consistent. The problem of amnesia, where the character knows more than the player, can be resolved by placing the character in a mystery or hero's quest, or by literally giving them amnesia, but these approaches limit the kind of stories that can be told.

Technology

Staged in the Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo '67, Kinoautomat required human mediators both to talk the audience through each choice, and to swap a lens cap between two projectors according to the decision made. The Kinoautomat format was not widely imitated, and Kinoautomat itself was shown again at both HemisFair '68 and Expo '74.

Laserdisc players, first marketed in 1978, allowed random access video playback, removing the limitations placed on choice by Kinoautomat's two projectors, while a microcomputer allowed viewers to interact with the movie without human mediation. This principle was demonstrated in Rollercoaster, an experimental text adventure written in BASIC for the Apple II that could trigger a Laserdisc player to play portions of the 1977 feature film Rollercoaster. The project was completed in 1981 by David Lubar and published in the January 1982 issue of Creative Computing, along with articles by Lubar and the magazine's editor David Ahl, who claimed in his piece that Rollercoaster was the first video/computer game hybrid. In 1983, Dragon's Lair brought this concept to the arcade. The arcade unit contained a standard Laserdisc player, linked to a processor and interface software that assigned different jump-to-chapter functions to the controller buttons at each decision point.

The CD-ROM and DVD formats, which could encode both video and the interactive elements on a single disc, brought the interactive movie into the home. Instead of relying on custom technology and unwieldy Laserdisc players, video could be stored as a file on disc and accessed like any other media.

In the early 1990s, Atari Corporation's last game platform, Jaguar was developed and in 1994 received an add-on CD-ROM module. An interactive movie format named GameFilm was developed and patented for Jaguar CDs that used Apple's QuickTime format video clips. These clips were organized in a branching tree-like structure that offered users alternative paths to solve mysteries or to succeed in a quest. Several interactive movies were produced for Jaguar and demonstrated at trade shows, but the Jaguar platform failed in the market soon after.

The DVD format was created in the mid-1990s as a successor to laserdisc, and its original specification included the ability to use an ordinary DVD player to play interactive games, such as Dragon's Lair (which was reissued on DVD), the Scene It? and other series of DVD TV games, or games that are included as bonus material on movie DVDs.

With the advent of 3D graphics and motion capture technology, many video games have substituted live footage with motion captured cut scenes, allowing non-interactive segments to blend more effectively with interactive segments. Quantic Dream, developer of Fahrenheit, has invested heavily in motion capture technology, and is incorporating detailed facial motion capture, including eye movements, into its new "interactive drama" Heavy Rain.

Notable movies

A variety of interactive movies followed for the arcade, and to cut costs, several companies simply hacked together scenes from obscure anime, creating games like Cliff Hanger (with footage from the Lupin III movies Castle of Cagliostro and Mystery of Mamo) and Bega's Battle (with footage from Harmagedon).

As CD-ROM drives started to become commonplace in the early 1990s, so a variety of FMV games, often labeled "interactive movies", began to emerge, such as Night Trap (1992), The 7th Guest (1992), Voyeur (1993), Phantasmagoria (1995), and Daryl F. Gates' Police Quest: SWAT (1995). These FMV games frequently used D-list (or worse) movie and TV actors and promised to create the experience of playing an interactive movie. However, production values were quite low with amateurish sets, lighting, costumes, and special effects. In addition, the video quality in these early games was low, and the gameplay frequently did not live up to the hype becoming well-known failures in video gaming. At this time, consoles like 3DO, CD-i, and Sega CD borrowed this concept for several low-quality interactive games.

Some notable games were considered adventure games, for example Voyeur, Star Trek: Klingon, Star Trek: Borg, Ripper, Black Dahlia, The X-Files Game, Bad Day on the Midway and The Dark Eye. Others, in the action genre, are Braindead 13 and Star Wars: Rebel Assault. Other games were early rail shooters such as Tomcat Alley, Johnny Mnemonic and Sewer Shark. Full motion video also allowed the creation of several interactive movie adventure games, such as Gabriel Knight II - The Beast Within.

Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie, was the first FMV title made by a Hollywood Studio. Sony Imagesoft spent over US$ 3 Million on the title. Instead of piecing together the title with filmed assets from their movie (directed by Robert Longo) of the same name, Sony hired Propaganda Code director Douglas Gayeton to write and film an entirely new storyline for the property. The CD-ROM's interactivity was made possible with the Cine-Active engine, based on the Quicktime 2.0 codec. This PC and Mac CD-ROM was notable for being a full screen experience without an onscreen interface. When the film showed Johnny's POV the shot became letterboxed, allowing the user to select the next shot in the film. If no decision was made the interactive movie returned to full screen mode and continued with the story.

Aftermath Media (formally Trilobyte) released two notable interactive movies for the DVD platform. Their first release was Tender Loving Care (featuring John Hurt), this was then followed by Point Of View (P.O.V). Currently, such games have appeared on DVDs aimed at younger target audiences, such as the special features discs of the Harry Potter film series.

Rise of the video game

Cinemaware were among the first to apply the term "interactive movie" to interactive experiences that did not contain FMV. Instead, they hired people with film and television experience (David Riordan, Kellyn Beck) and began to create games that took inspiration from the movie industry to create movie-like experiences using bitmap graphics. As Cinemaware producer and designer Pat Cook explained, Bob Jacobs "thought that melding his storytelling abilities with computers would be a 'backdoor' way into making movies." The company did eventually use FMV for the TurboGrafx CD version of It Came From the Desert, replacing the original bitmap characters with live actors.

In 2005, Quantic Dream relased Fahrenheit, an adventure game marketed as an interactive film. Like the early Cinemaware games, the title does not include any FMV. Instead, it features a large amount of motion captured animation, branching story lines, use of split-screen, and time-based event triggers that help to maintain pacing. It also included interactive cut scenes, rendered in the game engine and using quick time events, where the player has to press the right button at the right time in order to proceed down the storyline. In a similar manner as interactive movies like Dragon's Lair, there is only one critical path in these cut scenes.

Criticism

Cost was also an issue, as these games were often very expensive to produce: Ground Zero Texas cost Sega around US$ 3 Million, about the same a low-budget movie would cost in 1994. Others attracted Hollywood stars such as Isaac Hayes, noted R&B singer/songwriter and performer (Shaft), who appeared in Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie, Dana Plato (Diff'rent Strokes, cast for Night Trap), Debbie Harry (lead singer of Blondie hired for Double Switch), and Ron Stein (fight coordinator of Rocky and Raging Bull, who was hired as director for Sega's boxing game Prize Fighter).

Another issue that drew criticism was the quality of the video in early interactive movies. While the video was often relatively smooth, the hardware it was displayed on, particularly in the case of the Sega CD, had limited color palettes, which resulted in notably inferior image quality. The content was also a point of some criticism, as many FMV games featured real actors and dialogue, which was problematic if the acting itself was poor.

Due to the limitation of memory and disk space, as well as the lengthy timeframes and high costs required for the production, not many variations and alternative scenes for possible player moves were filmed, so the games tended not to allow much freedom and variety of gameplay. Thus, interactive movie games were not usually very replayable after being completed once.

Dragon's Lair was developed by Cinematronics and featuring full motion video (FMV) animation by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth.

See also

• Interactive storytelling
• Interactive cinema
• Interactive video
• Adventure game
• List of FMV-based games

External links

• 2007 Links to Online Interactive Films and Movies
• The Dragon's Lair Project: A repository of information about laserdisc interactive movie games
• Façade - a one-act interactive drama (Mac + Win)
• FMV WORLD - The Home of Full-Motion Video Games
• The Interactive Movies Archive
• The Digital Pictures Project
• The Rise & Fall of Full-Motion Video - Retrospective on the genre and why it failed
• "Laser Daze", from The Dot Eaters: Videogame History 101
• The lives and death of the Interactive Movie