Netflix is still trying to make that whole interactive movie thing a hit
Choose Love, an interactive rom-com starring Laura Marano, Avan Jogia, Jordi Webber, and Scott Michael Foster, premieres August 31
Film News Netflix
Question: do you think the directors of Clue (1985) knew what they were setting in motion when they released the film with three different endings? Yes or No.
If you weren’t immediately prepared to pick a lane, you have some real boning up to do. That’s right: Netflix is doing yet another audience participation film. Remember those? Half a decade (!) after their first interactive outing—Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch,” a “choose-your-own-adventure story about a young man’s efforts to finish a choose-your-own-adventure video game based on a choose-your-own-adventure cult novel,” in the word of The A.V. Club’s reviewer Zack Handlen—the streamer is once again trying to make choose-your-own-adventure happen. (By the way, there are way more of these than you probably remember. It’s not just Black Mirror and that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt movie—Bear Grylls also did one?)
Anyway, this time it’s a rom-com not-so-subtly titled Choose Love, starring Laura Marano, Avan Jogia, Jordi Webber, and Scott Michael Foster.
The “story” itself is standard fare. Marano plays a young, hot audio engineer torn between three young, hot guys. Foster is her long-term, about-to-propose boyfriend. Webber is the childhood crush who got away. Jogia is the dangerous rockstar. For all the Conrad vs. Jeremiah shippers out there, this one may be for you; all the stress (or fun, depending on how you look at it) is taken out of the love triangle since Marano’s choice is 100% in your hands.
Like “Bandersnatch” and its nesting-doll of choose-your-own adventure plots, Choose Love really hits you over the head with the whole “these characters are merely puppets in your hands” thing. It’s… a little eerie, quite frankly. Just in the two and a half minute trailer, characters warn each other that “the clock is ticking” (a reference to the timer that limits how long viewers can ponder their answers), “you are about to be pulled in all different directions,” and “this is the fun part, when you don’t know how it ends.”
All in all, this does seem like an hour or two of fluffy fun, despite being yet another foray into a technology that has proven over and over to be just… fine. Let’s just hope streamers don’t start looking to audience-driven narrative as yet another excuse to not pay their writers.
Choose Love premieres August 31 on Netflix.
24 Comments
“Let’s just hope streamers don’t start looking to audience-driven narrative as yet another excuse to not pay their writers.”Explain how that would work.
The simple answer would be that the studios would try to classify them as game writers rather than TV writers, so it’d be non union work at whatever price they want to pay. Or even just arguing that one branching episode deserves the same pay as a linear episode, even though it’s exponentially more work because you’re writing tons of alternate scenarios. I actually think branching narratives are one of the few areas of writing where there’s a decent argument for AI usage. You give your audience 8 meaningful choices and suddenly you’ve got 64 endings to write (and all the shit that leads up to that). People will tolerate a lower quality of writing if they are involved in the narrative (compare most game writing to most TV writing). You’d still need talented writers to shape and oversee it and I’d hope they’re well paid. As a failed videogame writer and an occasional screenwriter, it’s interesting to see the two mediums begin to converge and overlap.
Edward fucking Packard didn’t need no AI. And this isn’t an argument for AI so much as for unionisation of the games industry.
I’d imagine the content of the future will need to have more depth and interactivity than Choose Your Own Adventure books.I’m a writers guild member, I’m all for a videogame writers union (and testers, coders unions etc) But AI or not, branching narratives are fundamentally harder to quantify than say, a TV half hour. As far as I’m aware, no union has figured out a way to formalise it. So it’s inevitable that the big studios will use that as an excuse to shaft writers.
I’m finding it odd that you say you’re a guild member, yet every single argument you’re raising are exactly the arguments management would raise.It’s worrying that you’re a writer (or a least a member of its guild) and are willing to palm this off to the techbros instead of rising to the challenge.Like I said, actual, real humans have done branching narratives before, and have managed to get paid for it. There’s barriers that only AI, not humans, can surmount in it, as you seem to imply.And it’s worrying that you’re only worried about the accounting aspects of it – not the actually, y’know, quality of the work or the livelihoods of the workers.
To clarify I’m WGGB not WGA, but I’m in full solidarity with our American cousins.The thread started with someone asking how studios would use branching storytelling to shaft writers, so I’ve been explaining the various ways they would. Branching narratives are not something I write (tho I’ve friends that have) They’re not covered by any of the writing guilds as far as I’m aware. I don’t think there’s any good argument for AI assisted linear writing, since people can do that well. I think there’s a decent argument for AI assistance with branching narratives. I’d like guidelines in play so that the writers working with that AI are credited, compensated and treated fairly. Not just “handing it off to the tech bros”Of course I’m concerned with lots of aspects of AI. It’s hard to convey much nuance on a message board without it being a wall of TLDR, but the “accounting aspects” are about worker livelihood. Phrases like “rising to the challenge” are meaningless unless the execs are willing to pay. My agent bills my boss on the basis of me delivering a script for an episode. If the page count (and associated pitches, beat sheets, scene by scenes) becomes 5-10 times as long and complicated, they won’t pay me 5-10 times my rate and I can’t pay my bills. Charlie Brooker talked about how Bandersnatch took as long as a whole series. That’s fine because he’s a successful nerd who loved the experiment, but it’s not a sustainable business model for a working writer. Choose Your Own Adventure had lots of “you ate a bad apple. You are dead.” stuff, which was fine for the time, but isn’t at the level of sophistication an audience expects.
I may be alone in thinking Bandersnatch was brilliant, but that’s because the whole notion of the characters as puppets and free will being an illusion fit perfectly within the Black Mirror milieu, and while I started out trying to make the “right” choices for the characters I found myself pushed toward making more and more “bad” choices to the point where the protagonist broke the fourth wall to call me out and oh my god I’m the main character in a Black Mirror episode. Not seeing how it works in a genre that’s not meant to be dark or cynical and bent, but good luck to them.Anyway, I also vaguely remember that it didn’t work with my Apple TV and I had to play/watch the damn thing on a desktop computer. I hope they’ve resolved that issue.
I liked it ok, but as a noncommittal completionist, I watched it once, realized how much time and effort it would take to see every path, and promptly gave up. And I didn’t even get that far in, I don’t think. Maybe thirty minutes or so.
i was compelled to run it back a few weeks ago, and it’s still a lot of fun. you’re easier on it because of the format, so i hesitate to call it ‘good’, but it’s definitely still ‘interesting’.i personally just think this is a niche within a niche. people don’t like interactive storytelling, and the ones that do play videogames. i have no recollection of the kimmy schmidt interactive one, but i did watch it.
I was also motivated by the need to find the ending with the complete rendition of “O Superman,” so I understand niche.I gave up on video games after investing too much time in what started started out as nice problem-solving/decision-making adventures only to get stymied by something that required twitch-reflexes to survive or landing on the exact pixel out of thousands to activate.
You should try “Pentiment,” “Roadwarden,” or “Disco Elysium.”
If you feel like checking the medium out again, maybe look into visual novels and “walking sims”. There’s a lot of wholly narrative stuff out there, especially from smaller studios.
oh when i first played it spent hours doing everything. love some of the sillier endings and tracks.i basically play a videogame every 18 months because that’s how often one that appeals to me comes out. the new zelda games are very fun and reward outside-the-box thinking, but honestly the entire artform has been in a nadir for what feels like a decade.
I think past a certain point it more or less *is* a videogame. Hell, one of them is a pseudo-port of a Telltale game.
oh yeah fully agree. that’s why i don’t think it works. too much for most people, not enough for others.i also deeply miss telltale games. i loved getting a few hours of a game every couple of months. that model really worked for me.
I think Telltale’s just come back with an Expanse game
See, I hated Bandersnatch because everything in its narrative steered in the direction of Mental Unhealth=Great Art and why? For real, if you make the healthy choice of working in the office with a team and support the game gets done and… it’s terrible, 0 out of 5. If you work alone in your dank bedroom and go down some rabbit holes of bad mental health choices, well, you make a decent game, 2.5 out of 5. BUT if you go off your meds and go completely, murderously OFF THE RAILS, well, at least the game you made was AMAZING, 5 out of 5.
HATE IT.
Why would I want to watch a thing like that? I chose not to watch “Choose Love”. I chose to watch somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got a million other shows to binge.
Curious – has anyone watched any of their existing interactive content more than once? I worked my way through Bandersnatch with some friends when it first came out and it was a lot of fun for 2-3 hours. But haven’t given it much of a thought since and definitely never considered rewatching it like I have other Black Mirror episodes. Because it’s always a bit of a dredge to get through the scenes you have to watch over and over again to get to the options.Just don’t know if I buy that this is really an area of entertainment worth investing in. Could be wrong.
I’ve only gone through two more than once. I did Escape The Undertaker twice, though the second time was just to show it to a friend who is a fan of 90s wrestlers. I’ve gone through The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend three or four times because I just really like it. Now that this has got me thinking about it again, I might just go through it once more before the week is out.
The “choose your own adventure” one with Bear Grylls is absolutely perfect for my 10-year old nephew. We try to reason through it together, but the show requires us to choose an option during a very brief countdown. I think the gimmick has the potential to be really great, but the new movie here sounds exhausting.
Hope it’s not like Mindspace that has interactivity that doesn’t work on an Apple TV.
(By the way, there are way more of these than you probably remember. It’s not just Black Mirror and that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt movie—Bear Grylls also did one?)
The Bear Grylls show (You vs Wild) was pretty fun to play through with the kids. We enjoyed making bad choices (like swimming directly towards shore while in a rip current, or trying to run as fast as possible across a frozen lake) and also making him eat poop. It’s definitely my favorite of the “choose your own adventure” shows.
I’m a Black Mirror fan, but found Bandersnatch tedious. The Kimmy Schmidt one however was genius because it was absolutely loaded with jokes which rewarded “repeat” viewing.