As You Like It

Choose Love, Netflix’s recent “interactive rom-com,” is a special kind of terrible—the kind that sticks, that spreads darkly in the mind, demanding answers. Every scene is lit like a mall, every set decorated like a WeWork; the characters are formed by adding a hairdo to a tone of voice—the heroine, a recording engineer and aspiring singer-songwriter named Cami Conway, is snark plus a wavy lob, and her three suitors are earnestness plus curls, smarm plus hair gel, and vague Britishness plus a bleached mop. But those faults are familiar, even comforting. The more disorienting failure breaks through every few minutes, when the action skids to a stop and we are asked to make a choice: “Kiss Him” or “Don’t Kiss Him,” perhaps. Or maybe Cami turns to the camera herself and asks, “Should I tell him about Jack?”

These moments make it impossible to sit back and watch—you are constantly fumbling for the remote, rousing your brain from the torpor of spectating to make a decision. And yet these choices offer none of the detailed, sustained control that even the most minimalist video game does; the occasional multiple-choice check-in is not enough to make you feel any ownership of the action. You are left with a joyless in-between, both game and movie and somehow neither.

The choices also sap most of the life and significance from the story. You are encouraged to rewind to previous decisions, to see how things might have gone differently—which often reveals how meaningless they actually were. A choice between Cami being blunt or appeasing at work, for instance, results in almost exactly the same scene (Cami gets what she wants) either way. Some choices do matter, of course: the movie can end with Cami coupled up with any of her three romantic possibilities, or none, depending on your preference, with a few minor variations thrown in as well. And with these we are confronted by a more fundamental meaninglessness—not of any individual choice but of the entire film.

We all know that plenty of the things we watch (or read, or play) are arbitrarily slapped together, perfunctory products of the content mills, shaped not by internal logic or artistic vision but by a series of guesses about what will please the most people most efficiently. But it’s one thing to sense that in the background and quite another to see that very pandering turned into a feature—to have a movie splay itself across the screen, shouting, “Please like me! Just tell me what you want!”

Netflix has been experimenting over the past few years with the possibilities of digital streaming, including several interactive quiz shows (Triviaverse, Trivia Quest, the extremely odd “trivia cartoon” Cat Burglar) and a show whose episodes play in random order (the surprisingly decent heist miniseries Kaleidoscope). The most ambitious of its efforts has been a series of interactive movies, and they are not all as dire as Choose Love. Kimmy vs. the Reverend, an interactive spinoff of the sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, has a kind of sprightly pointlessness (though it is still more of a slog than a good episode of the noninteractive show), and Bandersnatch, an interactive installment of the sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror, is bleak and creepy in a way that reflects how it feels to watch—or use, or perhaps be used by—this form of entertainment, funneling you toward despair whichever path you decide to follow.

But even at their best, they all present the same frustrations; watching them you still hear the shriek as two very different forms of media grind against each other, with you caught in the middle. And always there is that undertow of narrative nihilism, the sense that no matter what you choose, some fundamental mistake has already been made.

It’s a mistake, though, with a surprisingly long history—how long, exactly, might depend on your definition of “interactive.” In some sense interactive cinema is almost as old as cinema itself. As film historians have pointed out, early hand-cranked motion picture devices like the Mutoscope, patented in 1895, were more interactive than what came after, letting viewers control the speed at which the images flicked by, rewind them, and pause on particularly interesting (or salacious) frames.¹ In the early twentieth century there was a brief vogue for cinematic shooting galleries, in which patrons fired real guns at projected footage—the film would freeze briefly after each shot, so the shooter could see whether they had hit their target (generally exotic animals, though after the outbreak of World War I footage of enemy soldiers seems to have been tried as well).²

The game designer and theorist Brian Moriarty has pointed out that “a case can be made for calling 13 Ghosts,” a 1960 film by the huckster auteur William Castle, “the first interactive movie.”³ Audiences were given bifurcated filters, colored red and blue, through which to watch the screen: look through the top half and the ghosts could be plainly seen, look through the bottom and they disappeared—a fairly limited form of interaction, to be sure, but it does mean that “each person in the audience can decide which version of a scene will appear on the theater screen, individually and at the same time.” A few people have claimed, a little perversely, that the first modern interactive movie was Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus (1961), near the end of which the audience was asked to vote on whether the main character should be punished or spared, with the ending ostensibly determined by the result. But the vote was a sham: Castle filmed only the “punishment” ending, on the assumption that audiences would always choose it.

In 1967 the Czech director Radúz Činčera did it for real, with a film called One Man and His House—generally regarded as the true dawn of interactive cinema. Shown in a special “Kinoautomat” theater as part of the Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, it used a pair of projectors running in tandem, loaded with different versions of the film, and a pair of buttons at every seat to allow the audience to periodically vote on what the main character should do. Should he buy his wife a fur coat for her birthday, or a ring? His half-naked neighbor has locked herself out of her apartment—should he let her in or turn her away? The projectionist would then switch from one projector to another in accordance with the vote.

Since there were only two projectors, no choice could have lasting consequences: whichever way the two branches of the story went, they would have to come back together in time for the next vote. (If not sooner—the birthday question turns out not to be a choice at all: he buys her flowers either way.) Technological limitations made narrative choices futile—and the futility remained, even as the technology changed. As Moriarty points out, “This strategy to avoid exfoliation of content has been employed by nearly every branching narrative produced in the last half century.”

One Man and His House (which is now often known simply as Kinoautomat) appeared at a few other fairs and had an apparently successful run in Prague in 1971 before being banned by the Communist government. The idea never quite caught on (and Činčera was prevented from licensing his innovation to Hollywood), but the decades since have brought periodic miniwaves of interactive films, often when some new technology allows for a new way to implement them—LaserDisc, DVD, and now streaming. Generally speaking, what is most striking about Činčera’s successors is how little they add to his example: we see the same interruptions for multiple-choice consultations with the viewer (now usually left to choose alone, rather than as part of an audience), the same immediate undermining of those choices, the same awkward mix of passivity and intervention.

What innovations have been made are often for the worse. The memorably terrible psychosexual thriller Tender Loving Care, for instance, released as an interactive DVD in 1998 (and later as a computer game), replaces the narrative choices with a series of psychological tests, administered to the viewer by a psychiatrist (played by a stricken-looking John Hurt). Depending on your responses, the film shifts—adding more nudity, perhaps, or ending more or less violently. This replaces futility with confusion, as it is never clear what effect any response did or did not have on what you are watching. (And the idea of watching it multiple times to hunt for differences is appalling.)

Around the same time, CD-ROMs and compressed digital video made it possible for filmed footage—called “full-motion video” (FMV)—to be incorporated into video games, and game designers began pursuing the same dream from the other side. FMV came with its own problems, though: game designers had little experience as filmmakers and, generally, small budgets; limited storage space meant the footage had to be displayed at very low resolutions; and, above all, prerecorded video has none of the flexibility of computer graphics.

Some games simply recreated the branching-path structure of the Kinoautomat, with perhaps some limited 3D exploration or interaction in between to make them a bit more gamelike—Erica (2019) is one recent example. The few games that tried to fully integrate live-action footage became, paradoxically, stiff and lifeless: FMV simply doesn’t allow for the moment-by-moment responsiveness that truly playing (as opposed to periodically deciding) requires. The 1992 shooter Sewer Shark, for instance, was one of the very first games to use FMV for most of its graphics, and is also my earliest memory of being genuinely disappointed by a game. The best answer has generally been to keep the two forms quarantined: FMV has been used most successfully as noninteractive interludes within otherwise traditional games (as in the Wing Commander and Command & Conquer series in the 1990s or, more recently and more ambitiously, Alan Wake II).

The allure of the interactive movie has lasted for over half a century, and yet the idea has never quite escaped the bounds of novelty, or the sinking feeling that what’s technologically possible is not necessarily artistically worthwhile. Choose Love is just one episode in what seems like a long, doomed romance between incompatible forms. But there is now one exception: the work of Sam Barlow.

Barlow’s 2015 Her Story consists almost entirely of video footage: a database of several hundred excerpts from a series of videotaped police interrogations of a woman named Hannah, whose husband has gone missing (and is, soon enough, found dead). None of these segments is more than a few minutes long, and in all of them we can only ever see and hear Hannah—the questions she is answering must be inferred. The goal is simple: by watching and rewatching, you piece together what happened. Did Hannah kill her husband? And if so, why?

It is presented as a video game, but as a game it is minimalist in the extreme—arguably less interactive than most works presented as interactive movies. The immediate challenge is simply the database itself, which is intentionally clunky and restrictive. You access clips by searching a word or phrase that Hannah might have said (again, only her words are available, not those of the police lurking just off camera), but just the first five matches, chronologically, are provided. To view segments from subsequent interrogations, you need to think of search terms that wouldn’t be used until later—names, places, uncommon words (or maybe just lucky guesses). And that’s it. There’s a somewhat hidden mechanism for tracking what portion of the total clips you’ve found, and from where in the chronology, but watching all of them isn’t necessary, and the game doesn’t encourage you to do so. There’s no score, no test of what you’ve figured out. You stop playing when you’ve satisfied yourself that the mystery has been solved.

As a movie, it is not just minimalist but crude. The footage never varies from its imitation of interrogation recordings—the camera is fixed and low-fidelity, the room bright and drab and empty, apart from Hannah and the table she sits at. Playing Hannah, Viva Seifert (who has worked primarily as a musician, not an actress) is effective at a difficult task: getting across important information while still seeming like a real person in a genuine, stressful situation, and with no help from editing or costars. But it is not a showpiece: no one would come to Her Story solely for the performance. The story, likewise, is extremely clever in its structure but would not be an attraction on its own; if one read it all written out, its twists would probably seem a little silly. If the clips were all strung together in chronological order, like a conventional film, it would be more than a little tedious.

No individual ingredient is extraordinary, but together they are. Playing Her Story is a hypnotic, fascinating experience. The database’s restrictions encourage an unusual attentiveness to Hannah’s speech—you hang on her every word, however mundane, looking for searchable terms as well as more direct clues to what happened. This requires a very specific, unusual form of narrative construction: each small scene must work whether the player comes to it early or late; it must be able to function as a tantalizing hint or a revelation, depending on what the player already knows. Her Story is one of the few games that succeed in making you feel like you yourself are investigating a mystery, rather than being led along a predetermined path to the solution.

The fact that the story emerges indirectly, piecemeal, and out of order means that it assumes its true shape only in your mind; it is not a linear narrative but an object of understanding, modified and added to over time. The story is not something you can change, nor is it something you can merely watch. (In some sense this is closer to the way we learn about people in the real world—from fragments and inferences, caught on the fly.) By turning footage into evidence, it finds a way “to make the act of watching more expressive,” as Barlow put it in an interview—an ongoing process of sifting and interpreting. The simplicity of the materials adds to the authority of the proof: this is not a movie periodically interrupted by interactivity, or a video game with cinematic interludes, but something new.

Barlow had spent the previous decade working on larger, more mainstream games, most prominently as the lead designer and writer of two entries in the long-running horror series Silent Hill. For Her Story he set out on his own, working alone for most of its development. It was an immediate success, selling over 100,000 copies within a couple of months and winning awards for things like “innovation” and “best narrative.” He followed it in 2019 with Telling Lies, a higher-budget, more ambitious version of the same idea: another “desktop thriller,” as Barlow called them, with another recalcitrant database of video clips, but no longer limited to one character and one source.

It is both slicker than its predecessor and more cumbersome. Instead of Her Story’s interrogation tapes, it offers a trove of surveillance footage—mostly from intercepted video chats but also from security cameras, cell phone videos, and webcams—centered on a group of environmental activists being infiltrated by an FBI agent. This time the cast features established Hollywood actors, including Logan Marshall-Green (most prominently seen in Prometheus), Angela Sarafyan (Westworld), and Alexandra Shipp (Barbie). The plot is longer and more complicated, and the game is more varied in tone than the sometimes claustrophobic Her Story. It makes room for quiet moments with no obvious relevance to the central mystery, but also for red herrings, such as a very unconvincing blackmail subplot. Whereas Her Story gives you Hannah’s answers without the interrogator’s questions, the two-person video chats that make up most of the footage in Telling Lies can be found in their entirety, though only one side at a time—you have to search for the other half and piece the conversation together in your mind. This adds a new twist to the database puzzle—attempting to deduce phrases from one side of a dialogue by listening to the other is surprisingly satisfying—but it also means you spend a lot of time watching actors silently pretend to listen.

Still, at its best the game achieves a queasy, complicated intimacy that builds on the fascination of Her Story. The scenes depicting the romance between Marshall-Green’s and Shipp’s characters, especially, create the feeling not just of watching something you shouldn’t but of seeking out and dissecting these private moments—an active, predatory voyeurism. This is intensified by an unusual element Barlow added to the graphics and sound design. Like Her Story, Telling Lies presents you with the interface of a simulated computer, complete with fake desktop and windows. In Telling Lies, though, the computer is not simply “yours” but that of a specific character, whose identity is not made clear until well into the game. As you play, you can always see a faint reflection of her face looking back at you—or rather looking intently at the screen, just as you are. In the background you can hear the ambient noise of the dark apartment she’s sitting in: traffic passing by, someone flushing a toilet in another room, or even, in the game’s most startling moment, her cat jumping onto the keyboard. The whole game feels a little haunted as a result, and in an odd, involuted way: not by the spectral face that accompanies you, but by you, the invisible entity peering out its eyes.

This is a feeling that Barlow returns to in his most recent game, Immortality, which is by far his most ambitious, and by far his best. Barlow had avoided calling his previous works “interactive movies”—perhaps because, as he put it, “FMV games were obviously a failed experiment”—but the label was irresistible, not least because it was clearly correct. For Immortality, Barlow embraced it. While “Her Story was about deconstructing the detective story” and “Telling Lies was about deconstructing the political thriller,” he declared, Immortality was an attempt “to deconstruct movies and moviemaking.”

It presents you with a vast trove of footage from, ostensibly, the making of three films: Ambrosio, a late-1960s gothic romance set in an eighteenth-century convent (somewhere between Black Narcissus and The Devils); Minsky, an early-1970s erotic detective story set in the New York art world (very Klute-ish, with a dash of Eyes of Laura Mars); and Two of Everything, a late-1990s thriller about a pop star and her stand-in (a mix of Body Double and The Bodyguard, maybe). It includes unedited takes, complete with slates and on-set chatter, along with rehearsals, auditions, read-throughs, and other behind-the-scenes footage, and a few talk show appearances and cast parties. All three films star a young actress named Marissa Marcel (who remains young in all three), and none was ever completed or released. That is the mystery we are invited to explore: What went wrong in the making of these films? And, as the game’s marketing insistently asks, what happened to Marissa Marcel?

The footage still comes in fragments, out of order. But the method of discovering new clips has changed: instead of searching for words, you now pause the footage at any point and select an object in the frame; the game then cuts to another moment in another piece of footage, with a similar object in a similar place—the kind of cut known in film as a “graphic match.” Select someone’s face, and you’ll get the same person in another scene, perhaps with the same expression; select an apple and you’ll get another apple, or at least another piece of fruit; select two people kissing and you’ll get another kiss. The cuts are sometimes playful, slantwise: selecting a painting might get you another painting, or the person depicted in the painting, or perhaps a window or a TV screen; in one bit of rehearsal footage, I selected the empty space where a cat should have been but wasn’t, and was brought to a scene with an actual cat.

The whole game is based around this expansive, surprisingly flexible system for cutting between scenes—an enormous network of images, through which the story can be explored. It feels, in fact, like a cinematic fulfillment of the decades-old vision of hypertext fiction: a “network fiction,” a “story space” rather than simply a story. If traditional linear narrative is like “standing on the dock watching the sea,” two hypertext practitioners, Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, put it back in the early 1990s, then this is “sailing the islands.”

One result of this system is that the puzzle-solving aspect of the previous games recedes. You’re no longer trying to guess some specific unspoken element of the scenes, no longer hunting for new scenes in quite the same way. You move between them in a smoother, less directed fashion—it feels serendipitous, not challenging. The film scholar Kristin Thompson—who, along with her partner, the late David Bordwell, coined the term “graphic match”—has written that, as used by directors like Yasujiro Ozu, such links aren’t really meant to be interpreted: they are there instead “for pure pleasure.” It is that pleasure that animates Immortality, even at its darkest (and it does get dark). Its fragments tumble out in a giddy, baffling throng, like scenes from a dream. (“Perhaps,” the great film editor Walter Murch once speculated, “we accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams.”)

And yet there is a story to be pieced together, and a very complicated one. You reconstruct it in layers, over the course of about five to ten hours (longer than either of Barlow’s previous two games). First there is the question of the movies themselves. They are often remarkably convincing simulacra of films of their time, but what actually happens in Ambrosio or Minsky or Two of Everything is left for us to puzzle out from a mix of unedited takes, table reads, and rehearsals. Then there are the events of their making and the personalities involved—the rivalries, friendships, affairs, power struggles, and, as it turns out, deaths. We get glimpses of these from the chatter before and after takes, from stray comments in rehearsals, from a glance caught on camera at a party, from a strange gap in the production schedule.

Patterns emerge: all three films involve disguise and sexualized violence in one form or another, and all three sets are riven by sexual tensions and pressures. The director of Ambrosio, who casts Marcel, when she is just seventeen, as a deceitful seductress, is a leering manipulator (clearly based on accounts of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Franco Zeffirelli, and Otto Preminger). The director of Minsky is in a sexual relationship with Marcel (now twenty)—the affair seems both passionate and pragmatic, though it is not always clear who is using whom. Barlow has said that Marcel was inspired by midcentury stars like Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda, and she is played by an actress named Manon Gage, in her first major role, with a kind of complex transparency. Gage shows us how Marcel’s performances change, shows us her combination of passion and vulnerability, intelligence and naiveté. You can always see Marcel thinking, though not always what she is thinking. You can see her learning fast, from dubious teachers.

Her yearning for artistic transcendence is apparent and moving—and the films, crucially, are not parodic, not made to seem especially terrible. (Minsky might even be good.) But an uneasiness underlies it all, a rancid aftertaste of misogyny and exploitation. A view of cinema is being presented as the fragments accumulate: that it inevitably involves violations of trust; that it is inseparable from lust and brutality; that it, and art in general, is nonetheless worth any sacrifice. Presented, but not quite endorsed.

Then, at some point, a new layer emerges. (If anyone reading this is thinking of trying the game, please stop reading now.) Playing Immortality necessarily involves a great deal of rewinding and fast-forwarding as you explore the clips. The interface imitates an analog editing bay: you can spin the footage faster or slower, scrub to a specific moment. And if you rewind certain parts of certain scenes, at just the right speed, they change. Strange new figures appear, doing strange things: replacing some actors, berating or abusing others, who often seem unaware of their presence; speaking directly into the camera; dancing, laughing, staring.

The first time this happens—which will be different for different players—is genuinely startling, and even as you get used to it these moments retain an uncanny charge. The figures are never really named, though the most prominent, played by Charlotta Mohlin, is referred to in the credits as “The One.” When she appears, she replaces Marcel. She seems at times to be Marcel’s subconscious, expressing her anger, her loneliness, her ambition. Whereas Marcel smiles her way through a lecherous audition, the One pulls the terrified director onstage and makes him perform for her. At other times she seems more like a puppeteer, pulling Marcel’s strings, or a demon possessing her, an alien wearing her as a disguise.

The One’s scenes come to form the unnerving heart of the game. Though her short, slicked-back, bleached hair marks her as out of place whenever she appears, it is Mohlin’s extraordinary performance that makes clear she isn’t human. At times she seems detached, almost reptilian. At others, emotions move too quickly and powerfully across her face, flickering through her as if on fast-forward. She weeps, implores, mocks, threatens. She searches for “how to be free,” as she puts it, “of all flesh and become something more.” In her, Marcel’s yearning for transcendence becomes something more malevolent—an Art Monster in a very literal sense, parasitic, predatory, and yet still poignant.

There are limits, perhaps, to how far this kind of conceit can be pushed, and there are moments late in the game that stray a little beyond them. A silliness slips in around the edges when the One’s true nature is made too plain. (At one point she claims to have been present at, and involved in, the Crucifixion.) But it is the mysteries that linger, not the answers. One of the great advantages of Immortality’s structure is the way it lets its secrets hide in plain sight, always holding open the possibility that there’s more to be seen—and, indeed, there often is. The critic Jacob Geller made a beautiful video essay about a hidden scene in the game, in which the One breaks down while lip-synching to a version of the Velvet Underground song “Candy Says,” declaring it the “single best gaming moment” of the year; it’s also a moment that you can reach the supposed end of the game without ever finding.

Even when you have, in fact, seen everything Immortality contains, its atmosphere lingers, as does its shifting, conflicted picture of artistic creation. It is hard to make a piece of software feel genuinely eerie. It’s hard, as well, to make something that is both game and film, and succeeds as both. But apparently it can be done.