Thursday 26 January 2017

figment or playable character

Visionary and legendary video game designer Hideo Kojima suggests that the future format of entertainment will be merging of the film, novel and game.
Instead of different progressive—or regressive, franchises that see a story’s arc pass from page, to stage to screen to costume sequentially, audiences, readers and players will be able to choose their level of interaction within a narrative. A particularly engaging passage of a book or movie could be explored further by entering down a rabbit-hole that let’s one interact as the protagonist. Challenging scenes that are emotionally or physically taxing could be allowed to play themselves through. It’s a curious to think that a novel could be a fungible experience and is hard to imagine how choice and demand works for story-telling. What do you think?  Of course, our imaginations are already quite good at creating fantasy worlds in outsized formats and allowing ourselves to be drawn in to all sorts of situations, and I only hope if such technology comes to pass, paired with the right prose, it would enhance rather than dull our creative and imaginative capacities.