One of the most creative uses of YouTube Annotations has been for one of the uncoolest clients in London: the Metropolitan Police. Choose A Different Ending was part of their Drop The Weapons anti knife crime campaign.
Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, it’s a second person narrative – you see through the protagonist’s eyes and choose between two knife-related options at the end of each chapter: the first ends with TAKE THE KNIFE / DON’T TAKE THE KNIFE.
While a 2nd person POV can limit a hypernarrative story’s ability to engage players emotionally, it’s perfect for this. It’s positioned somewhere between a public service video and a first person shooter (a first person stabber?).
But whereas an FPS engages young men by letting them experiment with mass murder in a virtual moral vacuum, this game manages to keep you playing until you make all the most sensible, responsible choices. It becomes a puzzle – tempting you to see how much you can get away with, and then constantly running you into different unexpected ways that carrying a knife will get you in trouble. And the reward for being a good boy? Music videos
Have a play – let me know what you think about its strengths & shortcomings.
It was pubished in July 2009, and created by short film director Simon Ellis, Mad Cow Films and Jeremy Tribe & Prabs Wignarajajat, creatives at AMV BBDO.
It’s 11.45pm on Sunday November 1st, and I’m sitting in the dark by a quiet log fire in my father in law’s rambling old country house, bluetoothing a video about ghosts from my phone to my laptop.
My diary today says that I am supposed to write the first blog post here, and that it’s to be called WE ARE CHAPTERPLAY.
I think the idea is that I tell you about whoweare, why we’ve been brought into existence and what we’re doing with interactive filmmaking, transmedia storytelling and collaborative art. But it seems to me now that doing this would ruin all the fun of figuring it out.
So instead I’ll start posting new pieces of the answer here every day – I wanted to start on November 1st, before the site is even launched, because today is the first day of NaBloPoMo, blog posting month, the collaborative challenge to post something every day in November.
And anyway, the only people reading this right now – when the site hasn’t even launched – are you few who have been nosey enough to look up the chapterplay.tv URL from the email addresses we’ve quietly started to use – and been curious enough to subscribe. In other words: players
You’ll find the video I’m about to edit at my mobile videoblog, twittervlog.tv. It’s the second entry in a month long game of videoblogging consequences I’ve devised as part of NaVloPoMo (the vlogging equivalent). Each day in November, a different person will post a 90 second video inspired by the previous day’s entry.
And it’s also vaguely hinting towards another little game – a ghost story – that we have planned for the long winter nights to come. When ghost stories are supposed to be told. In the dark, by log fires, in rambling old country houses.
