Netflix to let viewers pick how TV episodes and movies will end
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
[1]: Violent Lasergun Battle
[2]: Tedious Paperwork
For example you could show slightly different versions of the show to different viewers, of you could subtly alter the show when viewed on second or third viewing. Or the show could change depending on the time of year that you watch it. This kind of breaking of the fourth wall and breaking of fiction from reality could fit extremely well into a Black Mirror type of story. I'd love to hear what others suggest.
As far as interactivity, and 'choose-your-own-adventure' style of story telling I think that will probably get boring pretty quick. We already have this kind of story telling with games such as Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls and while many people view those games as innovative forms of cinematic games, I would say they are pretty tedious and non-immersive forms of cinema.
You don't need big branching paths for choice to matter, it mattering in the moment is enough, but Telltale's way of making a big deal of choices makes you realise that _nothing_ ever _actually_ matters. It undermines that in the moment nature; they'd be better off just not making you expect it to come up again.
Regardless, I remember two instances from Season 1 -- currently replaying episode 2, I think I finished it last time and I know the "plot twist" of the dairy farm -- where you choose to save one character and the other dies, and your choices seem to stick (so far, the other character is alive and even remembers you chose her/him over the other option). The problem for me is that it doesn't really matter who you chose, because these are cardboard characters and whoever survives is going to fill the same role. And of course, the same situations play out with minor differences no matter what. I suppose it'd be too expensive to actually have the game vary wildly depending on who you save or where you go.
If you mean the person you saved eventually dies anyway, isn't this also a flaw of the source material. I stopped watching TV show because of this: it ends up becoming a monotonous series of main character deaths.
Major plot points turn out completely differently on every playthrough. I played as a nord - storm cloak (nationalists) in my first run based on the tradtitional mold of the warrior hero freeing their country from the Invaders.
Mid way through the game their facist side became more apparent, and I helped a genuine asshole of a person become king.
This made my 2nd playthrough as the empire (colonists/settlers) just that much more fun, as I tried to seek revenge on the asshole that I didn't like from a previous life.
It has been 8 years since it came out, and no game captured me quite like it. (Borderlands and Witcher came close)
The 1985 movie Clue was released with three different endings[1]. And if you really wanted to see them all, you had to go to the movie at least three times in different theaters.
First, go watch it before the rumored Ryan Reynolds remake. It's a fun movie and holds up fairly well.
Second, when released for home they rolled all three endings into the storyline so you get to see all three.
Three, watch it again after the viewing the endings to see how all three actually do work in the story. May require more than one additional viewing to get it all, but worth it in my opinion.
Four, relatively safe for children and my kids love it.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monty_Python_Matching_Ti...
Though maybe not has innovative as you would like, probably logically the next step as for a majority of viewers this would still be "fresh".
Heres an example. In the very first scene you have to flee a crime scene. You could leave the murder weapon where it is, or try to hide it. If you hide it, the game doesn't show you where you hid it. Later on, you play as the cops investigating the crime scene. If you didn't hid the weapon, it's in the same spot, but if you hid it, you'll have to look for it now. Most changes to the movie follow this structure. Demonstrating a higher level of play results in a movie with more and longer scenes, and all those extra scenes make it very clear that your actions caused them to exist in the movie.
To be honest, if true, it provides yet more indication how much Channel 4 contributed unseen to Black Mirror, as it's got significantly worse since moving to Netflix. Despite the bigger budget.
I really hope you’re wrong. I mean, watching Metalhead put me off watching Black Mirror for a couple of months because that episode was just so extremely fucking dark. But I really don’t want to be able to choose a different ending to that story.
In my opinion, we shouldn’t be able to water down Black Mirror with happy endings, and extend our denial about what tech can potentially do to our lives.
Most great art is the product of one mind at the most basic level. Of course with something like a TV show or movie there are thousands of people involved, but there has to a captain to the ship, so to speak. Otherwise it just floats around aimlessly because multiple people can be pulling it in different directions.
It's riskier, because if that person is bad, the whole thing is going to turn out bad, but it's the only way to get something truly good.
He says, "My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision."
In fact, the article even notes "two of the projects are adaptations of video games!" Maybe one reason why in my view there aren't a lot of great movies based on video games is because there's something missing in the form that Netflix can improve upon. Hacker News shouldn't be a place where innovation is always so immediately viewed so skeptically. Most new ideas will fail, but shouldn't it be encouraged anyway?
Taking a step back, and more to the substance of your point, I don't think participatory art is any less one person's vision. You look at something like Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Rooms and you come away with a very clear vision from her. In the same way, what Black Mirror is trying to do with this experiment by incorporating audience participation seems to be very much a part of the story that they are trying to tell.
On the children shows, I think you are actually outside of this debate because the question is more what's better from an educational standpoint than from an artistic standpoint.
It's certainly possible to have a singular vision but multiple endings.
It probably also makes for more engaging children's programming, where story is less important than keeping the audience active and engaged.
For the general case of TV shows, I'm against multiple choice endings.
Heck, I experienced this last night. I finished the last few episodes of the new season of Bojack Horseman and was actually yelling at the screen in confusion and mild anger at a very meta season. Thankfully, I wasn't involved in the writing process, so they were able to take it in interesting directions I would never have gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure
They were all the rage
Says who ? I mean, you do realize their goal isn't and shouldn't be to make the best content possible, but to make the content that the most people would want to watch and be willing to keep their subscription active for ?
If they let their series run that long, it's because it makes sense for them.
Most people have a few thing we like where, when it turned to crap quality wise, we're still following along because we love it too much to let go. How many people have kept reading the Dune sequels when they were published despite the clear fall of quality and lack of focus compared to the original book ? It isn't different.
(not that I'm not answering with your two other phrases, with which I agree, but to that one only)
That is dangerous due to second-order effects. Initially, this strategy will work and be quite effective at maxing revenue. But over time, consumer perception will shift to 'Netflix makes shows that run too long' just like GP post demonstrated. This reduces the perceived value of netflix content and makes consumers less likely to start watching future netflix content.
For example, my perception of House of Cards has been diminished by the subpar later seasons.
The challenge in these discussions is how subjective this stuff is. If you didn’t like the season, it “went on too long.” If you did, then it didn’t. The volume of anecdotes in HN threads show how useless that information is.
We like to think we’re all art critics, but that’s not how people watch television.
That "shouldn't" is doing a lot of work here, and I don't think the rest of the comment is supporting it. Unless your assumption is "making the most money in the short term is the greatest good," I don't see why you'd think that aiming for a broadly inoffensive mediocrity is something they should do. That sounds like creative failure to me.
But this seems more like "we made A and B endings, and you can pick which one you watch!". If you've ever seen the movie Clue, I would imagine it's like that with all their alternate endings.
Edit: just my understanding, this is not a part of N that I have particular knowledge of..
I think Maniac and Series of Unfortunate events are both a bit of a push back to that (both are excellent btw). Having a hard ending makes sense for some shows, but if the creators have something they want to make, that the consumers want, then they should keep going. I see that as a benefit over traditional ratings wars type shows.
That's what amazed me most about Breaking Bad... how effectively it undermined our storytelling expectations.
Strangers things, Maniac, The End of the F*ing World, Narcos, On my block, Master of none, El Chapo, Ozark, Glow, Disenchanted, Black mirror, Dare Devil, 13 reasons why, Jessica Jones, The Punisher, A series of unfortunate events, The OA, Orange is the new black
Those are just some of the ones I can recall at the moment.
Only other shows that I use popcorn time to watch are Game of thrones and Homeland.
First, when I sit down on the couch to watch TV, I want to relax and have the entertainment fed to me. If I want to play a video game, I'd fire up the Atari system. Really don't want to be jumping for the remote and make a decision several times in the show, and keep track of all the plot lines so I can see everything.
Now if you can set it to not prompt you, but randomize each pivot point, and / or give each permutation a number that you can select at the beginning, then it may be interesting to watch the episode multiple times to catch each variation.
Err, no, it represents a big bet on the really old form of entertainment known as "interactive TV", which is older than a great deal of the HN denizens reading this and replete with a history of failure despite multiple attempts.
The question is, will this be the iPad of interactive TV, the implementation of a long-standing idea replete with failure that finally succeeds, or just another in the long line of failure? If the people involved are unaware of the history, the latter seems more likely, but I can't tell if those involved are unaware or just the person writing this article.
"Interactive TV" as an idea isn't quite an instance of what I call the BOAC fallacy [1], but it's a related idea. The short version of that idea is that you can take a new technology and computerize it, and that it will be just exactly like the old technology with all the same affordances and capabilities and business structures, "But On A Computer!", instead of realizing that the act of transferring the technology to a computer will cause profound, sweeping changes. Interactive TV is like the stupidest, simplest idea of what adding computers to video can produce; the same video system, the same production mechanisms, the same delivery mechanisms, the same amount of control over the audience, But Now It's Interactive! In the shallowest possible way. Literally; in information theory terms audiences will be given single-digit bits worth of control over the result, and ultimately I would expect the experiences to be at least semi-optimized for the viewer still watching everything in the end, which reduces the choices down to an ordering choice rather than a "real" choice.
Instead, the technology that permitted interactive television permitted video games, mobile apps that take interaction to a much higher level there as well, YouTube and all accompanying experiences, Twitch and all accompanying experiences, and so on, a rich ecosystem of options and opportunities that aren't just "it's video, hooked up to some quick time events! Wow!" Dragon's Lair is already a super-slick version of the "interactive TV" idea, and we consider it an interesting historical curiosity of an ultimately failed development line, not something content producers all strive to emulate.
Given the nature of Black Mirror, it's a decent guess they'll at least exploit some artistic possibilities out of it, but in the end I doubt this will take off. Not because it's necessarily a "bad" idea, but because the space is already saturated with better ideas that are already multiple generations into their development cycle that will crowd it out, just as the newspaper web experience is now fundamentally different than the paper experience.
(So much so that it's easy for young people today to not realize that the original promise of "newspapers on the web" was very often painted not as a modern hyperlinked site with comment sections, etc., but basically as downloading a PDF (in modern terms) of a newspaper, formatted identically to the modern newspaper, with people talking about how nice the experience would be of clicking "continued on Page 8" to go to page 8 instead of having to fuss with the pages. Particularly forward-thinking prognosticators might consider the possibility of a Letters to the Editor page being updated on a better-than-daily schedule, but still, nothing much like what we actually got. I'm speaking of the general press here; the very technical people made better predictions, but this idea was very much in general circulation.)
I'm always surprised the niche for this type of work in so small and revolves around the same themes and for a young audience. I think the fear of missing out on the alternate stories might be a factor but nothing would prevent you from reading all branches. Where are the "choose your own romance", the multiverse science fiction, the time travel stories where you pick the changes the hero does to the past, etc.
Reminds me of the scene from Fahrenheit 451.
This would remove both.
I’m not doing your job for you for free, Netflix. >:|
done. you're welcome netflix ;)
I'd see it primarily as a hype vehicle, not as a general indication of the direction Netflix will take in the future. (If I'm mistaken I fully support your argument)
I actually don't think this is true. If you actually look at their original programming they aren't constrained by the same things as traditional TV. They aren't bound to specific episode lengths, or writing around commercial breaks, or refreshing the viewer on what happened last week, etc. Those might not seem like a big deal, but IMO they are more meaningful than a choose-your-own-adventure gimmick, which will certainly not become mainstream.
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I don't know where their quality is at, nowadays. HBO is just leagues ahead of everything else.
2nd language learners greatly benefit from translated content. Sometimes we even discuss how the content was translated a bit differently from the original...
for example, even for their own content they have dumb rules such as having french subtitled and french dubbing, but unless you're in France you won't have the option of french closed caption (I.e getting the french text for what is actually being spoken in the french dubbing)
Try Ozark, Atypical, Stranger Things.
I can't call those daytime cable tv quality.
(And just to clarify I actually like Fuller House but I can see someone watching just that - and without of context of Full House - and getting that reaction)