The 1996 Psychic Detective Postmortem

[Music] this presentation is being sponsored by the Writers Guild of America motto if you have a plot hire a professional if you don't make a game before we begin we're gonna be showing clips of psychic detective that depict characters in extreme psychic torment if you are experiencing likewise because of hangover this morning don't sit by the speakers and then note about showing clips from the game or an interactive movie in looking at clips instead of playing them it's a little like looking at a court transcript of a Robin Williams monologue you're going to get the gist of it and you're going to appreciate a lot of it but you're going to be painfully aware that something is missing for you and in this case it's making decisions and making choices and having the movie

instantly react to you was assemble what we refer to as the psychic detective cliff notes how many people have actually played psychic detective at least once from beginning to end be many uninitiated we're going to take you through a breakneck tour of what this is about and then talk a little bit about the pragmatic challenges of trying to create this kind of animal so with no further ado I was just going to say that it's a title that we created with Electronic Arts it's published on the 3do PlayStation and PC cd-rom formats it's five hours worth of live-action material which you are playing through twenty to forty minutes at a time because they see it beautiful we refer to it as an interactive film that's 30 minutes long and five hours wide but

more to come here's your basic my concept Oh a little non-interactive intro which tells you something about the main character and the plot [Music] [Music] [Applause] we have psychic powers [Music] [Applause]

[Applause] my name is Eric better known as the psychic flash yeah I was doing what I do best the old freak of nature routine myself a psychic flash [Music] your grandfather gave us to you on his deathbed very moving for you very boring for us anyone else out there have another her name was Elaine opposed ah

she looked like an angel but she sent me to hell with one shot she said my whole world is spinning out of control she showed me had a transmitter my psychics and in the consciousness of others to see in pirate style [Music] [Applause] [Music] my sister Monica very cute very weak and gullible who's the plastic dress [Music] and him [Music] he was hoping to come in the curse believe it your sister doesn't waste

much time who's the toy boy where's mr. Raj meet him at the tea room 10 o'clock [Music] disappear that'll have to choose actions for the main character here and the up might be overkill on the first date come on perhaps you are a man who enjoys we tell me a man shouldn't sell stuff that isn't yours do you also judge and receive retro cognitive flashes the icons for those can appear on the bottom of the screen [Music] and when you touch one you get a movie and these are gonna lose and backstory and information that you are going to have to in your hand assemble nice logo many quick maxi quick mirage quest if Institute for

self-esteem maximum you maximum me what about the screaming cat and I have no idea what you're talking [Music] we will discover their MacGuffin in the flat which is called the psychic collector the psychic collector when it is activated as is just about to be you say that now will enhance your powers and therefore [Music] chasing after before psyching collectors three even found one is still missing [Music] now you have the ability to jump in difficult heads from a distance or in this case read the psyche of a character who's with you

[Music] [Music] [Music] also you are reading me invading my psyche you also have the ability to throw thoughts at other characters and make them do things these icons appear at the bottom here yes it's a comedy those could be very

very strategic now those are the sort of things that as a player these are the choices that you're making on the fly what happens if you want to sit back and just watch the movie we allow you to do that as well late in the game yes oh I was just going to say that that that it may be obvious or not obvious but every time you take advantage of something you're changing what's going to happen next obviously when we touch the object still via reacted to the fact and we renew something a little bit more about Sylvia the blonde woman with the Mirage quest pin when we told Chad to get lost we were active and the objects that appeared afterwards would only appear if we had told Chad to get lost if we do things throughout the entire movie we're going to change what is and is not available to us as we play through that's the idea of creating a narrative that works like a nervous system and you make one choice up here and it's telling the entire story what you've done and it's going to ripple all the way through

now so what we want to demonstrate now is late in the story you come to you come to Sylvia you're looking for notebook containing vital pieces of information if you sit back and do nothing the scene might unfold like this [Music] we ever get a scene together you know what max is doing I was just in his Hannity inviting a little poem for the princess we're still on the rebound you haven't stop bouncing you one way of getting even could I hit hard you can't compete with the trophy wife she's nice she's adorable anyway [Music] I won't get one back many

let's look at it again and in this case John is going to activate the collector [Music] throwing submission [Applause] [Music]

[Music] hi I'm Lance [Music] [Music] I want you to have it just like you pictured okay [Music] the fact that psychic detective doesn't stop is really crucial to understanding a lot about the structure a lot about the challenges that we had to tackle and what makes it different from other products that call themselves interactive movies the most popular

entertainments out there that are interactive movies tend to work a certain way you get a bit of film and then you have to solve a puzzle and then you get some more movie and then you have to solve a puzzle a little more movie puzzle that could last 60 minutes before you get more film those are very entertaining experiences what they lose is a sense of film time I mean what we respond to in movies what we think is great is the relentless pace the fact is films and even TV shows they don't pause with the possible exception of Winky ding you know which was the grandfather of all interactive movies we do a seminar on Winky Dink later we will what happens is if the movie is hurdling by then you've got to make your choices on the fly if you're wondering what's gonna happen next even as it's happening next and trying to decide well what's the proper decision to do here you know we think that becomes an interesting

experience and it's it comes from the fact that we decided to tie all of the different prompts to the dramatic action riot it also means that what we're doing is we are treating the film as the puzzle itself because you are sitting there in deciding who's head should I jump into what object should I touch what thoughts should I throw when should I use the collector and by doing that you're editing the movie on the fly which is two people from Hollywood a very sacrilegious phrase to say but it is honestly what goes on here it seems like a good idea because because if you set up a set of characters both characters are operating according to traits which you have communicated to the audience those traits for us were themselves a set of rules that certain characters are going to do certain things and if we if we push the characters into different emotional arenas they're going to react in character according to the rules that we've set out for them and if we think

about that challenge as being the beginning of the game then the puzzle aspect is threaded throughout the entire experience because we're asking you not to figure out whodunit but to figure out why everybody done it why not there's what are you doing things John likes to call it a whodunit instead of a wide done it and I like that very much because an interactive story is horizontal by nature it's got to be wide there's got to be a lot of parallel possibilities existing side by side there's got to be a lot of backstory and a lot of subplots that you can wander at will whodunnit is going to basically build to one point answer and once you know it end of story a wide done it can be about the fact that a did this to be later on see did this to a now a B and C are going to meet over here unless of course D finds out about it that becomes a what wider map of story and there are a lot more possibilities

that you've got to uncover and connect I mean films we think lend themselves to this sort of puzzle method because they're so fragmented to begin with it it is a puzzle a film is a puzzle that's been assembled for you you know it begins at the writing stage where you're putting your scenes on index cards and trying to decide what's the proper order you're breaking it down into the pieces that you're going to shoot most efficiently for production and then the editor and the director are sitting together and they're stitching together the most meaningful whole now what if you made a Rubik's Cube of a film where there was more than one meaningful hole when we're each different sequence in different order that you might put together was going to give you a different kind of experience that's what we're dealing with here one of the ways that you do that is to play with time and sequencing you set certain actions in stone within the story and you allow the player to

come to them at their own pace in their own order they that yeah they're they're essentially dramatic modules right that have different entrances and exits and can be altered depending on previous action and if those dramatic modules are attached to a certain number of set in stone tentpoles people can play through experiences in different time order with different emotional states and different sets of knowledge both in the players mind and the character's minds when they approach those different modules so here are a few Givens and we'll show you how they play out the fourth collector is hidden over here there is a blackmail scheme very dangerous going on over here the old lady is waiting for us in the mansion here and Sylvia is going to show up and try and kill her and down the hall in the mansion is a hidden room which you may or may not have found out about at a certain part in our movie our

hero Eric Fox is going to return to the mansion to see the old lady and the fact is this can happen a number of different ways depending upon what order you've taken them you can show up and you know absolutely fantastic here I trust you behave yourself [Music] and when you must stick to himself only two options appear because we know nothing by one max made out now he went to the

blackmail scheme and we got psychically fried we're showing up but we were able to save the old lady [Applause] how do train him [Music] I love your blouse I'll tell you what I'm comparing both collector and the village idiot make a special delivery and then maybe I'll give you back one sister Wyatt boy I've always wanted a pet

[Music] he only has three otherwise your cabin on the other hand you might have got to the fourth collection and showing up in time to save madam tea you can use the port Lecter you call me Eric make her to waste No [Applause] [Music] mr. Sanford Ross you get another one cowboy [Applause]

[Music] on the other hand live later in time No you cannot must typed in not ready the sky [Music] years [Music] another possibility is that you had found out about the hidden room so

[Music] [Applause] [Applause] and there's lots of stuff to see in the hidden room more clues and backstory that will help you piece the whole mystery together but if you stay too long there's a gender obviously Jeopardy's involved in that but in this game time yes left in time Neal the crash

turned out she settles for three time yourself you can't hide he can't make the block done that's what he means you've already got food [Music] [Music] not send you lately [Applause] and of course another example is you could find the hidden room you could go in you could touch objects to your heart's delight but what that means is you're gonna probably [Music] now what this does is it gives you a

sense that your choices really matter as you're playing the film from a production standpoint it allows us to deal with a lot of possibilities in an efficient and budgetable manner I mean was all of that it means we were locked in Madame T's bed for two full days in terms of the development of the of the movie we've got six chapters the moment we just showed you is towards the end of the fifth chapter but the the way the moments the way the dramatic modules are played mean that when you can arrive too late to save madam T you can arrive early and she can still be in jeopardy we've tried to make something that has the floatation of these dramatic modules in time and also something in which the variables are shifted because of what you've done previously through the movie so we tried to track and estimate what

you would know at that point and what the hero would know from a production standpoint we did a very smart thing early on and it's something we had done with Jim at Electronic Arts which is that we played the game on paper with a lot of different people not only to get their reaction to the tone the kind of interaction and the scale of what we were trying to attempt but it was a useful thing because we had a 500 page script which Michael wrote and for most productions that seems impossible the limits of physical video production are that you need the cast and crew on site to be able to turn out usually maybe five or six pages of dialogue day if you're moving at a real clip in in terms of making a motion picture with 500 pages we had about 20 days to shoot in fact exactly 20 days in which to shoot all the material which meant that

we were covering a great deal more than five or six pages a day and in order to be able to do this and not go crazy we did some things in production that made a lot of sense we lit a lot of the environments we were working in theatrically so that we could shoot more than one or two angles at a time in fact in some instances we could shoot an entire 360 degree number of setups looking at different actors from different angles because of our switch of POV or building the scene in traditional filmic style with white shots masters and and close-ups twos and singles the other thing that we did when we played the game beforehand was we educated the cast and crew to understand why something that might seem abrupt and completely discontinuous even though it we were shooting out of continuity order would make a certain amount of game sense because of what we were intending so after a while even though the actors

were porting around a shrunken copy of a 500-page script they were well versed enough in knowing the threads of the drama to be able to know exactly why they were doing things for example Sylvia's reactions to being pulled off Madame Pia there's seven eight nine different ways that she's stopped from killing the old lady she had to know each time what was going on in the plot so that she could react to it because something that's subtle in her performance is what she does and doesn't know what the bad guy max mirage has been keeping from her and what's in the foreground it's one of the things that hew as Eric Fox can use to elucidate stuff you can use her jealousy of Monica to your advantage but the performer has to be able to communicate that to you in a subtle sort of way so you know what her state of mind is which also means that we're setting you up for the throwing of thoughts at various characters because

if you throw aggression submission or affection at particular characters you're going to get different reactions depending on who they are at that moment we might get something we like from the bouncer by throwing affection if we ever try throwing affection at Sylvia in certain circumstances she's really going to take it the wrong way you know so from a production standpoint we did a number of kind of interesting things in fact we found that the actors after a while we're a little bit more on the ball about exactly where we were coming from and where we were going because we were we were concentrating too much on the actual details of production so there was a great advantage to - to playing the game in advance with everybody come background now - the idea of the film as a puzzle we were looking at how you can play the movie in different orders and how that's meaningful the other idea is that we're trying to get our audience to connect the dots visually you know our supposition is anyone of you sat on an

airplane and watch the movie without headphones you'd know what happened in the story you could tell us the story without necessarily having listened to it or even paid extremely close attention to it when John talks about it being a wide done it we've taken a great deal of the backstory and of the subplot and literally chopped it up and scattered it around the movie we've sort of turned the film or the story into a landscape and we want the player to wander through and find different moments and slowly start to connect them what the hell is the screaming cat about you will eventually learn that if you happen to come to the right place for it doing things like having psychic memories be able to read the history of people and having psychic flashes allows us to create these sort of sequences right we're gonna we're gonna now take a look at reading the psyche of the arts villain max LaRoche

[Music] this is how you do it all of those fragments they mean something well yeah along with being abstract yes there are there are lots of moments throughout the piece in which we are very very explicit about what things mean so in a way what we wanted was we wanted the the thoughts and ideas to percolate in everybody's head through multiple viewings and then when when the the apparent nosov what things mean occurs to people and they get to the right place at the right time there is an explicit explanation of what they may

have thought that was going on in the process of putting together a story that works this way you are inevitably going to want to shuttle the player to certain areas you can call these areas funnels or bottlenecks but they are a pain in the ass because you know that they're going to see them a number of times or they're going to pass through this area a number of times although we figured out a way around this race well in the in the end you know the true answer I think is to have the player and the computer construct those sequences almost on a shot-by-shot basis doing montages on the fly in psychic detective we tried a couple of solutions we didn't necessarily cover all of our bases but a number of times we use two methods the first is to create a short scene that is really like

the hub of a wheel it has a lot of different options coming out of it so even though you're going to hit it a number of times you can go different places with it right and and one of the things I think that you may have noticed about psychic is that when you decide to take action when you decide to either jump into somebody else's head touch an object to respond to an action from you are cutting off the the moment that you're in the middle of and you're jumping to another moment so we can write and this is a prime example of that you can just a little more I do not trust this narache quest' you're going zapper I have to don't agree what just hate me if you must nope you can follow her idiot you've been jumping her hair come I never thought about going I can tell you

sliding around in the back of my head we spent a lot of time talking about the the combination of reward and frustration what can we reward people with as they play through psychic detective and what level of frustration are people going to feel because they don't understand what's going on and we we decided explicitly to throw people into the soup in the very beginning in the exact position of our main character which is you've been laid into a film noir world you've been lied to and you've got to figure things out because your ass is on the line we are anticipating that people are going to bring their personalities to playing psychic detective some people are going to simply sit back and let the movie play and the movie will talk to them and tell them a great deal of story some people are going to jump in and touch everything that comes up first

it's the first thing they're gonna do they're gonna just grab anything that comes up there are rewards and frustrations for that we're going to mete out equal equal amounts of that was a good move and maybe that wasn't exactly the brightest thing so that people will adjust their rhythm to the rhythms that we put in front of them the rhythms of the characters the rhythms of the videos of the scenes and the rhythms of the the available choices that come up depending on what they've done another way then to deal with funnel points is of course to have different variations of the scene in this particular case in time where the little weasel named mokey is picking you up after you come out of jail you may know different things the movie is going to track that and the scene and the appropriate teams are going to say use the damned you want a collective we can get one on Brook Street sure sure on genuine Rolex the fourth collector is in a pawn shop why nobody's positive baby do you realize what we could do with two collectors like a

country remember we got Lexie by the balls excuse me don't play dumb you think the max Mirage comes out of nowhere you face me whack same old slime dog Lexie Golitsyn [Music] [Music] maybe I just want to use the dance why not we snag the collector psychic mercenaries you with the brain meet with the rolodex that collector belongs to Lena the hell it does I shall doubt cash 4 years ago sir you say don't you get it Lexy never die face job and allow Jack worse than yours max more so if you've

actually gone with mokey to this drop it means that you did a handful of things earlier in the movie and we realize that at this point the vital piece of information you need to know is that max Mirage our present-day bad guy is actually a rather evil ex-soviet spy named Lexi Golitsyn in disguise the best metaphor that I know for an interactive story you're playing an interactive story is ironically a future film and that's Groundhog Day where the player is really Bill Murray you are in a universe that is full of rules with actions that are fixed in time you've got to decide how you're going to behave how you are going to deal with everything and what you're ultimately trying to do is be in the right place at the right time and be best possible version of yourself to be able to advance and to break the cycle one of the things that interactive movie

has to do is let you know how you did throughout the film we try and talk back to you and have characters let you know not only how you're behaving but what you've accomplished and what you might know but what all of this is ultimately building to is something that is referred to throughout the movie which is black diamonds and black diamond is both a physical board game but more importantly a mind game a psychic battle that is going to take place it's unavoidable it is sort of our High Noon showdown and yet there are so many different ways that you can head into it depending upon not only what you know who you helped who may still be alive who may be stronger because you found secrets that could heal them all of those things are taken into account yeah we didn't want to say anything about okay we'll take a look at it first so

you have your that's the bad guy little demons he's turning on all four collectors [Music] which ones are stronger then he's sending us into a psychic battleground space which is 32 they reflect how you play through the movie and what we think you know the first four and Matson pick the other four you're trying to pick the food that you think are the strongest for you that you understand it's the others I never lost it would be and then

basically you're battling him you're playing what you think is a strong piece for you against to what you think the maximum max maximum obedience silence a lot of characters like Lena and Madame takuna the old lady and our heroine did you really think you could be her knight in shining armor I wanted to help bad just damn Johnson characters can be in different states by the time we get here this point madam T is a very smooth Atlanta was a very big be careful boys she'll suck you dry she needs you to keep herself strong everything she's is your ass that one was particularly tasty for some other lifetime

[Music] is that the best you can do sacrifice yourself so we get one of 14 possible conclusions to the movie depending on how we play you're so handsome [Music] if only I could [Music] we've suffered severe brain damage as you can see and at the very end the game will tell you which of the 14 conclusions you triggered and it will

give you a little hint for your next playthrough which is based on something you didn't see the first time right we've been talking a lot about the puzzle and the movie being the same beast I thought it would be appropriate now to to hear from mr. Simmons who in many ways was safeguarding the agenda of the game itself and dealing with two people who had never made a game before and were prepared to run wild yeah I guess just to sort of finish up on the Black Diamond game part of it and had what Michael had said about needing to find a way for the game to talk back to the player you know the the conversational model that we talked about an interactive design a lot you know the player thinks if something says it into the game through the interface the computer analyzes that input thinks

about it formulates a response now something's different we think about it during the course of an interactive drama there's less of that than we're accustomed to you know in a gaming experience where the conversational loop is really tight other than the kinds of things like we do something and in the next scene we mention it to mokey and mokey goes oh you know what you don't know it is and then he gives us some stuff back so that the the feedback loop is slower at that point but in order to to think of if you want to think of I'm winning the game I'm accomplishing some particular goal then what you're able to do in this very very simple little board game of these these eight icons have values relative to each other and they may come and go depending on if your brains been fried your your the value of the pieces you're

playing with are lessened if as you're just don't have the powers so the feedback loop in terms of win/loss if that's the way the player wants to come you know think about the experience for themselves and some people think about it that way and some people don't he is very long it's 30 minutes long but because the piece is only 20 to 40 minutes long people will sit down and in one sitting go through that loop two or three times to see what how they're doing and grow a lot from doing it one of the things that we had no idea if it was gonna work or not which is why we played it on paper so many times Michel playing the role of mr. memory and standing in front of somebody and just playing the game for them all day long I mean we'd bring people and lock them in this room and they'd play the

thing for you know eight times I'm having bad flashback and what I had to sit in there in referee because he would have this tendency to want to help people out a little bit so the way he would play the game as he would describe the scene and all those little icons that are around the screens we had three by five cards of and he would slide them forward than they were available and Madame to you walks out of the room and icon disappears and some of you be oh no you can't have it but he would want to go okay you can have it back so we play all the way through that we would get to the end and we pull out this board and put it on the table and have all these little icons spread around and you know and Michael figure out which icons had to go on and then some of them sort of depending on how the story goes all eight may be dictated by the playthrough you've done perhaps four are dictated in

the four we go grab kind of at random you know okay let's one of the women in let's bring a minor character in you know we haven't used the skull on a time or two let's bring that in and we throw that on there and we didn't tell anybody anything about what they were supposed to do other than you know you can you can pick this piece up and move it and they try to go you know all the way around the board said no you can't move it that far okay and so we do it and then we would take the two pieces and you know do a little kids game away and this one stays and even then he would describe the movie that would plug as a result of it I mean the first time we did it people were just totally baffled and they just thought this is you know this makes no sense whatsoever we okay let's make a note of that makes no sense whatsoever and then they play it a second time and they would see a correlation between what they had done before and what had

happened the second time they would notice that oh these are different icons that came up this time they came up the time before Oh they noticed that okay that's a good thing and after about the third time they would begin to formulate some firmly held opinions about what's going on here and here's what I'm gonna do the next time I'm gonna go after this and I'm gonna get that and I know and they were dead wrong but they had formulated an opinion they had made a commitment they were starting to got it yeah they were engaged and I backed her about the fifth time had some firm opinions and some of them were right and they could see that they were right in that feedback mechanism you know okay if cigarettes you know if I've got the cigarette and such-and-such has happened and I see that skull and I do that I know every single time that that's what's going to happen so you start formulating a set of patterns which

sometimes results in I've got to see a certain movie repeatedly but more often dozen and the vectored toward improvement and getting things to happen the way they wanted them to with very very with no instruction manual hints and help they they put that together and that's when we realize ok it's gonna work and that this feedback mechanism that we've structured at the end does allow them to put the whole story together and know what's going on and why and to feel like they have some power over control in it and having control and an interactive experience over what's going on instead of just feeling at the mercy arbitrary designs decisions is is a real challenge and so we felt like we did a pretty good job with that in many ways hope is that we find an audience for psychic detective

has a series of reactions to the material the first is the impulse to win or to play it as well as possible the second is to know the whole world of the story find it and put it together and make for themselves a coherent narrative and the third is hopefully to find all the cool stuff I mean John has stalked this project with brilliant and twisted and funny little movies if you get engaged if you find a character that you really like hopefully you'll seek it all out in many ways is we got involved with psychic detective I was reminded of an experience that I had when I was in high school when I bought a comedy album by the Monty Python group called matching tie and handkerchief that had on one side a double set of grooves and I played that side eight times and I got the same comedy routines and the ninth

time the needle dropped in the second set of grooves and there was 15 minutes I had never heard before and that was a moment where technology and comedy conspired to blow my little mind and it was a great experience and it was a great sensation and my feeling is that cd-roms of this nature hold that potential that we could be making interactive stories animated pieces full motion video pieces where you pop it in you don't know where you're going to begin you don't know where you're going to go and you certainly don't know how it's going to end we you know we started with looking at the the puzzle aspect of putting all these pieces together we with Jim's brilliant help and his original impulse about jumping into the minds of other people to be somewhere where your body shouldn't we realized that we could take hurdles if interface hurdles away from people

and we could give them impulsive but instinctually correct material with which they can drive the movie which which they can navigate through a realm of character driven story possibilities it occurs to us now that we can up the ante on that quite considerably by going deeper into the story the world that the characters live in and the characters because everybody connects with those elements and everybody knows the language that we're speaking it's it's necessary to take the pieces and chop them up even smaller and it is very necessary for the movie to know how many times you've played it listen before we wrap up we'd be happy to take some questions yeah yeah [Applause] the average user it's a really difficult

question to answer if you want to see all 14 endings you know 20 or 30 hours kind of talking average intelligence we might stretch that out a little bit more but the average gamer is a pretty smart customer 10 to 20 is reasonable operational results 20 one of one of the things that we tried to do was open up the funnels of the bottlenecks we realize that hey you know we keep coming to the scene and we're going to come to it every time but people are gonna get pretty damn sick of it so let's drive let's try it open see yourself yeah we also built a prototype of the first chapter with still images and voice over and it just voice-only

between different characters and it was more there was a lot more internal musing on the part of the main character which we realized we didn't need because that the user the player was going to be doing that and was going to be filling in a lot of the blanks so actually we realized we could take a great deal that we thought we were going to have to give to people they could create their own jumps and leaps between things they were the glue between the different puzzle pieces we also realized that there were some important clues that end up having some abilities in the final black diamond game that we needed to make a little easier to find and some that we need to obscure a little more Oh we the whole thing took a little over two years I think because we were in very undefined territory three months of brainstorming and six months of writing

and twenty days protection and then the year of editing and coding I think yeah we were working with a proprietary authoring environment that electronics of Electronic Arts created and the overlap of post-production and authoring was not quite as neatly dovetail as we would have liked well obviously there's no way to rough cut an interactive movie so we have all the pieces made and then oddly enough I ended up authoring it but that ended up being pretty cool because I could if I reached an authoring problem movie wise I could quit the authoring environment go back into Adobe Premiere recut the movie and bring it back into the authoring environment and that proved to be actually a fairly interesting way of being able to manipulate these elements way up there in the back way this parsley the new part partying away around

necessary [Music] don't know if I meant that they were not necessary it was necessary so that the script did not explode into chaos or thousands of pages it was necessary at times to shuttle the main character and the player to certain areas the point is you can do that with one scene that will always be the same you can do that with an array of scenes and depending upon what that player is done different ones will play or go for a really short scene with a lot of choices right up the bat right but in more recent works that we have been developing we've just looked at the overall structure in a completely different frame of mind and looked at how to not only create the dramatic modules but how the the different levels of interaction move them around and and actually change them as Michael said before on the fly and that's that's one

of the things that we're investigating we start with the mystery genre and I know comedy-thriller [ __ ] anything you want comedy we want to make comedy well we think that actually interactive comedy is perfect because you change the setup you change the jatoba I think that there is a presupposition right now that because you want it to have one foot at least planted in the game world there's got to be a quest involved or some goal and I think that often that will shuttle you towards some aspect of mystery to my mind one of the main things to break is supernatural powers I think it's very very easy to traverse this territory and have your choices be about powers I think it's a lot of fun

I think one of the great goals is to go beyond that and create an environment where nobody's really questioning why am I making choices why am i tweeting the narrative by my playing god they're just going ahead and doing it right because because the drama demands those choices actually a mystery seems to hold a lot of promise for an interactive thing I'm trying to figure something out but one of the pitfalls of mystery is that in linear media we accept things that we don't understand in a mystery we enjoy the feeling out of touch and out of control because it's it's meant to be an eerie feeling that we know will come to a resolution over fixed by the time it's over interactive experience who needs to have you a little bit more in touch with I'm on top of what's going on I mean your your vacillating all over the place but it's kind of a delicate balance and if people

feel too out of touch they're very unsatisfied with the experiments sherry Guster [Music] I wouldn't have turned 20 days into 40 does that cost a lot of money he wouldn't he wouldn't let us and very early on production things it's interesting because we've been thinking a lot recently about animation and about different kinds of graphic environments for this kind of piece or you know for this sort of storytelling advance and the advantage of live-action for certain things is kind of interesting because there's a and I think we communicate it pretty well as you play through it there's a certain level of physicality that I think people want and episodic television when you get into a TV series that you really love there are certain

central issues that are always constant and things that change I would I would go further into that where you're taking characters you know into very weird situations we've got a comedy idea in mind in which we're anticipating taking a host of characters into a number of very far-out situations and that's production you know that's real production value thank you very much for coming [Music]