Interactive Movie: Reloaded (3/6)
Challenges of choice, multiple endings and time pressure
In Part 2, I elaborated on balancing realism and control to achieve the right interactive experience.
I pointed out that only a thin line exists between a video game and an interactive film. To achieve complete balance, we must consider the actual movie’s complexity, particularly the number of choices and endings it should offer.
Forest of Endings
A film delivers a linear experience with a single, predetermined ending. As much as there are interactive movies with a single ending (like the Kinoautomat I mentioned in Part 1), I think more endings hugely improve engagement and repeatability. After all, why stick to a single ending when you don’t have to?
Having numerous endings increases not just the movie’s complexity but also its cost1. Interactive movies face physical limitations when using conventional filmmaking methods.
So, how many endings are good? As many as you can afford!
Tree of Choices
Excessive choices lead to an overwhelming number of branches, necessitating the filming of all possible paths and outcomes.
Look at Chess,
where each of your moves explores its own subtree of possibilities and choices, including the responses your opponent can make and your reactions to those responses. Considering the typical number of legal moves available at a given position is 35 (b), and the typical number of plies is 80 (d), the tree of all these combinations contains up to
nodes. That’s over 40 orders of magnitude greater than the number of atoms in the universe. But even games that can attain numerous internal states frequently reduce almost infinite possibilities to a few potential endings. Chess into win or lose. The interactive film also adopts a graph structure of a decision tree that eventually collapses into a few endings.
When you make a movie with real actors in real environments, it can be cumbersome to get everything into the same setup for multiple choices: items, lights, body positions, and people’s faces, especially!
The greatest challenge with multiple choices is achieving a seamless and smooth transition when cutting the scene.
One thing you should avoid is loops. Loops create a sense of déjà vu. Each moment in the movie must be unique!
Interande: The Snake of Choices
Interande is also designed as a decision tree, shaped into a linear, snake-like shape thanks to the flow of time. It includes up to 28 decision points and 5 different endings. I’ve visualized the structure for you:
The red node represents the start, the blue nodes are endings, the green nodes are decision points, and the grey nodes represent regular scenes (cut scenes). There is one unique checkpoint leading to the first ending that decides whether you make it to the main part of the movie. Can you find it?
The gameplay contains internal variables that shift with the player’s choices, allowing for multiple endings through conditional decision nodes. This system unlocks choices that might otherwise be inaccessible and opens paths that would otherwise stay hidden, enhancing the complexity and personalization of the experience. The two variables tracked globally in Interande are the ❤️Chemistry Index and the ⌛Runaway Index. I’ll share what they do later.
In Interande, you typically make a choice every 20 seconds, choosing from up to 3 options. So, for a 15-minute experience, there are around 35 minutes of video content, represented by 113 nodes in the snake. However, the shortest path through the movie requires only 57 scenes to reach an ending, while the longest path consists of 66 scenes. There are no loops, no checkpoints, and no save/loads.
You can compare it with the decision tree of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which, according to Netflix, contains as many as five endings, 31 decisions, and no variables.
The cut scenes are very long, and there is unlimited time to make choices, making the experience quite different.
Run Forest, Run!
Every movie must maintain its pace, inherently imposing time constraints on the player and enhancing interactivity. In the real world, your date won’t pause for two minutes while you contemplate what to say—there are consequences for that. This leads me to the next limitation: time to choose. There are two general ways to handle timed choices to maintain a good experience.
The first one is manipulating time, using a bullet time or a pause. There are cases where this makes sense for sure. The other tries to maximize the fluency and the immersion; the ingame time must go on, and the scene must be directed to allow the player enough time to decide while keeping the pressure of the surrounding world just continues to live.
This constant pressure actively increases the player’s engagement. Like in life, choices may appear at any moment and quickly disappear. Once gone, one of the choices is usually taken automatically to maintain the pulse—usually a poor one!
Sometimes, however, a hidden pathway leads beyond the presented choices, especially in moments when silence or nothing is the preferred course of action.
I mentioned that the ⌛Runaway Index variable is tracked throughout the movie. You can use it to achieve the best endings because sometimes, it’s simply the best to do nothing…
Show the Clock?
An intriguing problem is whether and how to visualize the remaining time during the decision. Not telling the player is interesting but likely unsuitable for casual play. In the original Czech-only version, we used a shrinking progress bar at the bottom of the screen,
whereas in the Reloaded version, I redesigned the choices to fade out slowly with the time running out. This doesn’t say how much time the player has, only when it is about to run out:
Which one do you like better?
Our Niche
Our concept was innovative. I created a scalable, publicly available web application built on a reusable platform, which allowed us to glue movie scenes into the snake and provide the experience of a “point-and-click” adventure. That alone is not enough. Many components must come together perfectly. If you’re curious about which ones,
Thank you for reading!
If you’re more interested in the cost breakdown, I plan to discuss it in one of the next parts.