Interactive film

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An interactive film is a

In the film industry, the term "interactive film" refers to interactive cinema, a film where one or more viewers can interact with the film and influence the events that unfold in the film.

Design

This genre came about with the invention of

The hardware for these games consisted of a laserdisc player linked to a processor configured with interface software that assigned a jump-to-chapter function to each of the controller buttons at each decision point. Much as a Choose Your Own Adventure book might say "If you turn left, go to page 7. If you turn right, go to page 8", the controller for Dragon's Lair or Cliff Hanger was programmed to go to the next chapter in the successful story if a player activated the correct control, or to go to the death chapter if they activated the wrong one. Because laserdisc players of the day were not robust enough to handle the wear and tear of constant arcade use, they required frequent replacement. The laserdiscs that contained the footage were ordinary laserdiscs with nothing special about them save for the order of their chapters and, if removed from the arcade console, would play their video on standard, non-interactive laserdisc players.

Later advances in technology allowed interactive movies to overlay multiple fields of FMV, called "vites", in much the same way as polygonal models and sprites are overlaid on top of backgrounds in traditional video game graphics.^[1]

Origins

The earliest rudimentary examples of mechanical interactive cinematic games date back to the early 20th century, with "cinematic shooting gallery"

An early example of an interactive movie game was Nintendo's Wild Gunman, a 1974 electro-mechanical arcade game that used film reel projection to display live-action full-motion video (FMV) footage of Wild West gunslingers.^[4] In the 1970s, Kasco (Kansei Seiki Seisakusho) released The Driver, a hit electro-mechanical arcade game with live-action FMV, projecting car footage filmed by Toei.^[5]

In 1975, Nintendo's

In the United States, the game that popularized the genre was Dragon's Lair, animated by Don Bluth and released by Cinematronics.^[11] Released in June 1983,^[20] it was the first laserdisc game released in the US. It contained animated scenes, much like a cartoon. The scenes would be played back and at certain points during playback the player would have to press a specific direction on the joystick or the button to advance the game to the next scene, like a quick time event. For instance, a scene begins with the hero, a knight named Dirk, falling through a hole in a drawbridge and being attacked by tentacles. If the player presses the button at this point, Dirk fends off the tentacles with his sword and pulls himself back up out of the hole. If the player fails to press the sword button at the right time, or instead presses a direction on the joystick, Dirk is attacked by the tentacles and crushed. Each unsuccessful move, however, would produce a few moments of black screen, when the LaserDisc switched to the scene showing the death of the character, which interrupted the continuous flow of gameplay found in other video game graphic systems of the time; this was a common criticism of some players and critics.

There were generally two styles of laserdisc games that emerged. Those that followed the lead of Astron Belt integrated pre-recorded laserdisc video with

Real-time gameplay

Among those that followed the lead of Astron Belt, combining pre-recorded video with

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.^[opinion]

DVD games

A DVD game (sometimes called DVDi, "DVD interactive") is a standalone game that can be played on a set-top

The world's first live interactive movie was My One Demand[36] filmed and premiered on 25 June 2015.^[37] Created by Blast Theory, the film was streamed live to the TIFF Lightbox^[38] on three successive nights. The cast of eight included Julian Richings and Clare Coulter.^[39] Audiences in the cinema used mobile phones to answer questions from the narrator, played by Maggie Huculak and their answers were included in the voiceover as well as in the closing credits.^[40]

Modern developments

Later video games used this approach using fully animated computer-generated scenes, including various adventure games such as the

, have numerous branching storylines that result from what actions the player takes or fails to complete properly, which can include the death of major characters or failure to solve the mystery.

Cast members' work during the 1990s on interactive movies'

DVD-ROM and one of the last "interactive movies" to make heavy use of live-action FMV. In 2014, the Tex Murphy series continued with a new FMV game, Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure

.

With advances in computer technology, interactive films waned as more developers used fully digitized characters and scenes. This format was popularized by Telltale Games, achieving success in The Walking Dead series of adventure games. These have sometimes been called interactive movies, as while the player can make choices that affect the game's overall narrative, they do not have direct control over characters, making the experience comparable to watching a sequence of cut scenes. This idea was even further realized in

Dontnod Entertainment

.

David Cage: video games referred to as interactive films

At its release, Heavy Rain (a 2010 video game by Quantic Dream) received very positive reviews and won several gaming and film and television awards. What is most striking, however, is the unanimity of critics in defining it an interactive-film more than a video game.^[42] This definition is certainly inspired by the phenomenon, typical of the Nineties, of films available in home video or computer that presented to the viewer a series of pre-recorded sequences, at the end of which it was possible to make choices that directly influenced the direction of the story.^[43] Cage himself will define his Heavy Rain as an interactive film^[44] and, in fact, the goal of the video game coincides with the type of film just mentioned; to combine the interactive potential of the video game with the expressive richness of cinema. However, unlike its predecessors, Cage chooses not to work with live-action, but to use only synthetic images, avoiding, at least in part, the effect of estrangement typical of interactive films in the passage from moments of exploration to sequences of narrative exposure.^[43] From the interactive films on DVD Cage assimilates two different aspects in his videogames, respectively the use of Quick time events (QTE) and the freedom of choice left to the player to determine the development of the plot. In the gameplay of Heavy Rain, however, QTEs are not used solely for the purpose of succeeding in certain actions but also as a vehicle to perform the countless narrative choices placed on the player. In the first case the player will find himself testing his reflexes by pressing the keys that will appear on the screen, In the second case, up to four different keys can appear to be pressed, each of the which represents a choice that will affect the narrative of the video game. As for non-interactive phases, it is difficult to distinguish from the interactive phases, as what can appear as a simple cutscene can often hide several QTEs. Regarding identification with the main characters; Heavy Rain removes each element of the challenge typical of graphic adventures is removed to ensure that the player can be fully focused on it. Also, as already stated, in Heavy Rain there is no game over: depending on the player's actions and choices, the video game shifts to different storylines, culminating in one of the many endings planned for the story.^[45] The identification with the characters is not given only by the type of actions that we are asked to perform but also by how, at game design level, the player is required to complete QTEs that aim to make the player feel the physical effort of the avatar. in an interview, director Cage stated that the game was to designed to be focused on physical immersion by letting the player controlling the animation of the character with the right analog stick. The idea behind this is to put the player further in the same physical space as that of the character.^[46] Although the innovation given by this type of mechanics in the gameplay is undoubted, interaction remains a very small part of the experience offered by David Cage's titles; The relationship between gameplay and cutscenes in Cage's works is broken by what we could define as the insertion of the first into the second creating interactive cutscenes.

Another example comes from Quantum Break, published by Remedy in 2016. Between the game's acts, episodes from a TV show filmed in live action are displayed to the player: the scenes in these episodes change conforming to the decisions the player has taken and the objects he has interacted with.^[47] The looks of the characters are maintained between the live action sequences and the 3D computer generated ones, thanks to the use of the motion capture technique.

Interactive films in the internet era

With the advent of

Although interactive movies had a filmic quality that sprite-based games could not duplicate at the time, they were a niche market— the limited amount of direct interactivity put off many gamers.[52] The popularity of FMV games declined during 1995, as real-time 3D graphics gained increasing attention.^[53] The negative response to FMV-based games was so common that it was even acknowledged in game marketing; a print advertisement for the interactive movie Psychic Detective stated, "Yeah, we know full-motion video games in the past sucked."^[54]

Cost was also an issue, as live action video with decent production values is expensive to film, while video shot on a low budget damages the overall image of the game.^[55] Ground Zero: Texas cost Sega around US$3 million, about the same as a low-budget movie would cost in 1994.

Though not as crucial an issue as the limited interactivity, another issue that drew criticism was the quality of the video itself.

Defenders of the genre have argued that, by allowing the player to interact with real people rather than animated characters, interactive full-motion video can produce emotional and visceral reactions that are not possible with either movies or traditional video games.[52]

Other uses

Some studios hybridized ordinary computer game play with interactive movie play; the earliest examples of this were the entries in the Origin Systems Wing Commander series starting with Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. Between combat missions, Wing Commander III featured cutscenes with live actors; the game offered limited storyline branching based on whether missions were won or lost and on choices made at decision points during the cutscenes (Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, with some of the same actors, was similar).

Other games like BioForge would, perhaps erroneously, use the term for a game that has rich action and plot of cinematic proportions—but, in terms of gameplay, has no relation to FMV movies.

The term is an ambiguous one since many video games follow a storyline similar to the way movies would.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Web documentary
• List of interactive movies
• Interactive cinema
• Interactive video
• Interactive art
• Art game
• Interactive Adventures
• Chad, Matt & Rob
• Full motion video
• Cheer screening
• Adventure game
• Pioneer LaserActive
• Halcyon Game System
• AnimePlay
• Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

References