Continuing the exploration of interactive 'new entertainment' experiences both online and offline with a few more opportunities to try it out for yourself...
The breathing wall uses an experimental piece of software that monitors your breathing, and modifies the story as a result of it. There is a demo available here but not of the hyper trance fiction matrix element, which you have to buy a cd to experience. Surely if it was any good they'd show you up front, however the narrative is interestingly told in slick transmedia format.
The narrative uses an easy emotive hook - you are in prison for your girlfriend's murder, but you didn't do it - but brings it to life in an engaging way. Depending on how it plays out it could be worth an investment of time, but not of £15 (breaking the first rule of monetising experimental entertainment - the money has to come after you have proven the value).
Rotozaza creates audio experiences in the real world that make actors out of the viewers by feeding them lines and direction through headphones. Etiquette is the most famous of its productions so far, now in its final week at Cafe Oto in Dalston in which two protagonists discuss the world and their take on it. But instead of it being raw and real - putting words in your mouth that you struggle to say - it goes back to the abstract, the arty, the pretentious and borrows from Ibsen and Godard, rather than Skins and Eastenders. If you took a bit of grit, made your audience enact it in front of each other and in public, then added in the opportunity to insert your own dialogue, or at the very least choose from options like in an RPG and you'd be getting somewhere pretty exciting.
To end on a more engaged high, the new interactive functionality on Youtube has finally been exploited. This Batman and the Joker game is slick, entertaining and fun. In this instance the level of interactivity and involvement is just right. All we need is to take this format into a proper story so that we care about what happens beyond just winning...
Did you actually do Etiquette? Seems wierd to include it in a piece about 'gaming' - it's theatre, not an attempt at RPG...
Posted by: Reg Davis | March 14, 2009 at 07:05 AM
This isn't supposed to be so much a piece about a gaming as interactive entertainment in general. The Etiquette piece seems to me to be one step away from being a role-play, and I think we will see this step taken soon...
Posted by: Ben Mason | March 23, 2009 at 12:47 PM