eBriefs
Computer
Games - Interactive Movies - Players
- Stakeholders -
Local
Censorship - Overseas Censorship - Developer
Responses - Accusations
What is an interactive movie?
A sub-category of computer
game, interactive movies involve visual depictions of real human actors
engaged in complex storylines. They are the result of the technological
convergence of traditional film making techniques with computer gaming.
As with movies, every action of every actor needs to be carefully filmed
rather than quickly and cheaply generated on a computer as is the case
with traditional computer games. Video files take up much more storage
space on any electronic medium than animation files. This all means
that interactive movies can only be produced at considerable costs of time
and money and that interactivity is seriously limited.
Interactive movies were most
popular in the early to mid 1990s when video compression technology had
matured sufficiently to allow visually crude video to be placed on cd-rom
discs. This development coincided with the last surge in popularity
of adventure games - computer games that empahsise strong plot, characters,
and problem-solving in the manner of movies rather than more or less continual
combat and/or action. Multiplayer capability is generally impossible
with these sorts of games unless people seated near the same computer discuss
their interactivity choices while playing a particular title.
Most gamers welcomed interactive
movies for their novelty value for a few years until they largely tired
of their comparative lack of fast and frequent interactive opportunities
in comparison to combat and/or action titles. These days, only a
very select few radical directors such as David Wheeler are keeping the
traditions of interactive movies alive, but this time primarily for DVD
and with even less interactivity than was seen in this type of game's cd-rom
heyday. The current trend is to make these products more like movies
than computer games and thus to try to break into the mainstream movie
as opposed to computer games market. It is unclear at this stage
whether interactive movies will thus experience a resurgence in popularity
or meet their permanent demise.
Some famous (and infamous)
cd-rom based interactive movies include: The
11th Hour, Harvester, and
Phantasmagoria.
Some recent examples (both by David Wheeler and available on DVD and cd-rom)
are Tender Loving Care and Point
of View. All examples in the former group contain adventure
storylines involving horror, while those from the latter group are primarily
thrillers that are more like movies than games.
Interactive movies have a
much greater chance of being banned for sale in Australia than standard
computer games owing to their particularly mature
storylines and degree of visual realism. The DVD medium used
for most interactive movies sold in the world today has considerably enhanced
this latter quality.
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Bonus Material
by
Anthony Larme
Interactive movies university
project (2002)
Convergence, Control, and Gratification Within
the Interactive Movie Phenomenon
( 187 Kb WinZip ZIP containing
Microsoft Word DOCs and a PowerPoint presentation )
Psychiatry in interactive
movies university essay (2000)
The Portrayal of Psychiatry in Recent Film
( 94 Kb Adobe Acrobat
PDF )
Phantasmagoria
and Phantasmagoria 2 Web site
Point
of View Web site