Interactive Video - How Cloud Chamber Makes a Game out of Movies - Extra Credits

The concept of interactive video is something that's intrigued me for a long time. Back in the '90s, we experimented with adding full-motion video to games, which sometimes had endearing, if slightly comical, results, like the Wing Commander series or Seventh Guest, and other times, well, less endearing. Unfortunately, at the time, we could only render low-quality video due to limited storage capacity, and many studios didn't have the resources to professionally produce high-quality film work. So, the dream of mixing media and using video coupled with interactivity died as developers realized that they could produce better-looking CG cutscenes than anything they were going to capture on a camera. The torch then passed to the film studios. With the advent of DVDs, some companies saw that adding interactive elements to their movies was a decent way to push DVD sales. It was an extra you could only get if you bought the home release. Unfortunately, the clunky implementation and the lack of true interactivity left us with products that, again, just didn't live up to the dream of interactive video, which brings us to today and Cloud Chamber. Over many

late-night cups of bubble tea, James has argued that we were approaching the use of video fundamentally wrong if we wanted it to be interactive. He knew interactive video couldn't just be cutscenes because they don't have any real interactivity, but at the same time, he also knew that interactive video can't be relegated to simple links between alternate scenes that the player chooses from at key points in the plot of an otherwise non-interactive movie, as those destroy both the pacing of film and the game's immersion. Unfortunately, he's just never had a very good answer for what the proper method of using interactive video and he'd never really been forced to work on the problem professionally, so it remained a topic of idle speculation for he and his designer friends on nights when they had run out of other things to talk about. Until we saw a game called Cloud Chamber. We covered Cloud Chamber on an episode of James Recommends, and it will almost certainly come up on Games You Might Not Have Tried eventually, but I want to talk about it in depth here, not because it's perfect, not by any means, but because it illuminates for us a a of interactivity that is so integral to our modern existence that it almost goes overlooked. A form of interactivity that

is perfect for interactive video titles, collaborative investigation. Cloud Chamber is something between an ARG and a mixed media project. In it, you the player are tasked with unraveling the events that went down at a research institute in Denmark over the preceding months. But, instead of having you take on an avatar and walk around a virtual landscape, they've created a virtual database of sounds and images and most importantly film clips for you to sort through with thousands of other players. The game has a cyberpunk vision of the net where our online reality is represented by different landscapes and all data is represented as nodes within that landscape with the player hopping from one node to the next in order to piece together what's going on. Each node contains some of the narrative for the player to unravel, be it a brief video clip, uh text file, or a picture. But, the key is that these are often cryptic and out of order. The narrative itself is handed to the player in a way that is itself a puzzle and puzzles are interactive. If you've ever watched a movie like Primer or Pi and sat around with your friends afterward trying to wrap your minds around what you've just

been shown, you know exactly what I'm talking about. That coffee shop moment where you debate the meaning of a film or try to piece together its story is interactive. It's an interactive element that's already inherent to film. By putting puzzles and mysteries into our video, we can create video that is fundamentally interactive without having to resort to cheap gimmicks or immersion breaking menu choices. Cloud Chamber helps to take that idea to the next logical level not only by building its videos entirely around this concept, but by creating within the game that encourages players to discuss the videos and piece together the narrative as a group. There are real comment boards built into the game and they basically unlock new aspects of the narrative for you once you've made enough comments on the videos that other players find worthwhile. The system is far from perfect, but it forces the player away from passively watching and instead gets them to actively jot down notes, try to figure out where things go in the timeline, and unravel the mysteries the game provides. In fact, this is about the only thing in the game that one could consider a system or a mechanic in the traditional sense, but it does just enough to push it from being a disjointed movie to being a truly

interactive use of film. Cloud Chamber is only a starting step in exploring this concept, but it serves as an excellent example of how we can create interactivity in film without relying on anything outside of what's recorded. From here, I hope to see other bold experiments that take up this idea that interactivity can be inherent in film itself and explore its use in more traditional gaming. It might turn out to be a total failure, but I would love to see an Ace Attorney style game play with these concepts. And James has got some thoughts on a killer horror game that uses this as its premise. I don't think these will ever be more than a niche, but I'm always interested in new elements that we can bring into games. And just by changing how we think about video, we might be able to add another tool, albeit a very specific one, to the designer's tool belt. I hope that gets you all thinking. I'll see you next week.