(Source: technology.timesonline.co.uk)
Revolutionary gaming with infinite possibilities: Sophisticated video games with multiple plot lines, such as Heavy Rain, are pointing the way forward for film and TV
In Bully on the Bus, the decision is yours. It says so on almost every page. You’re a kid on a bus, obviously, and there’s this bully. What do you do? Fight? Talk to the bus driver? Ask your teacher? Ignore him? The Decision Is Yours, a series published in the late 1980s for primary-school children, included titles such as Finders, Keepers? and First Day Blues. Then there was the Fighting Fantasy series, launched in 1982 with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, a sub-Tolkien romp where a roll of the die determined whether you beat a monster and turned the page to the next one. These “interactive novels” usually read as badly as you would expect, but they were about the best thing publishing had in its arsenal to counter the new demand for interactivity in its teenage, computer-game-playing audience.
Almost 30 years on, television and film are having to face the same challenge. Those teens are now in their forties, and accustomed to thinking they decide how stories end. “There is a generation that is used to fragmented game narratives, where time is chopped and spun,” says the games journalist David McCarthy. “In fact, 1960s postmodern concepts of the carved-up narrative are part of their everyday story experience.”
In a recent series of lectures, Stephen Garrett, the new visiting professor of broadcast media at Oxford University, outlined just how radical he thought the response should be. “The best stories are changing shape,” he argued in his closing talk. “The assumption in the world of TV drama has been that a possible convergence between TV drama and games would simply entail an offering of choices along the lines of: should Life on Mars’s Sam Tyler turn out to have really travelled back in time? Should the Losties get off the island? But games potentially offer something far more interesting, something much more in keeping with the storytelling traditions of the novel, of theatre, of cinema, of TV drama itself ...
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