To explore how online media can be utilised to explore new ways of social interaction, Jackson and I decided to create a scenario in which viewers could tune into a livestream and have a direct influence on the content itself. To us, this would provide a clear example of how online platforms can be used to create something that is unpredictable and organic, and demonstrate how new progressions in media have made things possible that previously were not.
Our concept was to simply allow viewers of our livestream to influence our decisions in a game. The game we opted for was an online version of the popular card game “Cards Against Humanity”, in which players pick a card containing a word or phrase that they think best answers the question brought forward each round. For our practical exercise, we allowed participants in the chat to comment which card they wanted us to use, and whatever card was the most popular was chosen.
The concept of having an audience play a part in the progression of a game isn’t a new idea, and was done on a much larger scale back in 2014 with the phenomenon “Twitch Plays Pokemon”. Over 1.16 million players took part in this experiment, which involved using a computer script to translate the comments on the livestream into commands for the game, thus allowing viewers to control the player in the game with their comments. It currently hold the Guiness World Record for the most participants in a single-player online video game.
The reason that Pokemon was chosen for this experiment was because of the limited controls and simple turn gameplay, which is also something we had to keep in mind for our own project. Due to the latency between us and our viewers, we had to ensure that whatever game we chose was generous with time constraints and preferably turn based. This was to ensure that the chat could respond to what they saw in time for us to implement their instructions into the game. This kind of audience interaction is definitely the future of online content, and has been steadily becoming more and more prevalent in modern media. Allowing the chat to actively take part in the entertainment rather than purely viewing it is an extremely effective way of guaranteeing engagement, as it gives viewers a sense of value as they interact with their streamers of choice.
Without the advancements in online media production and the increasing popularity of live streamed content, this kind of interactivity would not have been possible, and is a far cry from what was feasible before web 2.0.