To expand upon our previous assignment, I continued to look into other ways people have implemented live audiences into online experiences. Our last test involved incorporating a live audience into a game of cards against humanity, giving them the chance to influence our decisions as we played. Something that achieves this is a much more effective way however is the “Jackbox Party Pack”, a collection of party games that emphasise audience participation, and does so in a meaningful way.

The games included in the pack have found popularity amongst many Youtubers, as it gives them an efficient way to allow their audiences to participate in their content. Most of the games involve improvisational humour in response to a prompt, which is then voted upon by the audience. All of this is done anonymously, which means that when the audience votes, they do not know who is responsible for what answer. This to me is a great example of how an audience can be incorporated into online content, as they have a measurable effect of the outcome of the match by voting on the winners of each round. Whilst I don’t necessarily want out next project to be “competitive” I do want to achieve a similar kind of measurability of the audiences participation, and give viewers more control over what they want to see.

Another thing I found appealing about the Jackbox collection was the incorporation of an app. The game is actually played on an app, which connects to the game console or PC. This means that players and audience members can all work in tandem with each other, instead of using a turn based system. This was something that limited us during our last experiment, and I feel it would have been more effective if there were two dedicated screens for both the audience and the streamer.

I think this method of interactivity is something we will investigate in Assignment 2, and I believe it would be interesting to give an audience more control and choice over how they wish to contribute to the entertainment.