This week, Neil Calloway argues that allowing viewers to decide what happens next will lead to lower quality stories…
Wednesday brought the enticing news that Netflix are planning on creating a show that has an element of interaction, where viewers will be able to choose what happens next.
Initially this will be for children’s programmes, presumably because it’ll be cheaper to make different versions of a CGI kids show rather than alternative storylines for House of Cards, but there’s no reason why it can’t be expanded to more genres. The other possible reason for starting with content aimed at children is that kids who have grown up with iPads demand interactivity from all their entertainment, whereas adults are happy to be more passive in their viewing.
It is not a new concept, of course. Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will be familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, which later expanded into using Disney and Star Wars stories, among other franchises, and the geekier among you will remember playing the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, which required dice, adding an element of chance into the story. It’s been done on TV too; I have vague memories of Sylvester McCoy presenting a BBC show where viewers phoned in with suggestions what might happen next in a drama specially made for it.
Making the reader (or in the case of the TV shows, viewer) a participant means we will no longer be passive; film studies scholars might argue we never were, but you will not have complete control over what happens next, and you will still limited by the film-makers’ choices and budget constraints. Sadly there won’t be a version of Love, Actually where every character is brutally murdered. In many ways it will be an interactive version of deleted scenes that are contained on DVD and Blu-ray; fun to watch if you enjoy the film, but nine times out of ten they are an inferior version of the finished product; there’s a reason they didn’t include them in the final cut. Writers slog for months – years, in some cases, to create something unique and entertaining; to come up with alternative scenarios makes me think there will be the “right” choice for viewers and then inferior scenes.
I don’t want to choose how I am entertained; I want to be surprised, shocked, moved in ways I never imagined. Surely letting the viewer choose what happens next spoils a big part of why we watch films and TV; the most memorable stories have twists we never imagined.
It’s a nice idea, and a good way of keeping children entertained, but I doubt it will take over completely from traditional films. If you want interaction and stories where you control what happens, play a computer game.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
Originally published March 12, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
