The first project I want to look at could be classified as a social experiment, therefore non-fiction. Twitch Plays Pokemon was a livestream that took place on the 13th of February 2014 until the 1st of March 2014 on Twitch. It was a crowdsourced effort to play and complete the video game Pokemon Red by sending game commands through the Twitch channel’s chat sidebar. Over 1.16 million people participated and the channel got more than 55 million hits during this run.

Twitch Plays Pokemon

To me, this is a very cool niche display of interactive livestreaming. Obviously this was very difficult to pull off – a lot of complex programming was required to do it. However, this demonstrates the potential of an audiences input. Giving the viewers the opportunity to collectively play a game is pretty crazy. While we won’t be able to pull something like this off, I think it is an interesting project that shows that the sky is the limit when lots of viewers are tuned into something online; the ability to communicate instantaneously with thousands or even millions of others creates endless possibilities.

I thought for a work of fiction I’d turn to the class discussions to see what people had posted in previous weeks. I remembered our table discussing Take This Lollipop: A short interactive film that dares you to connect your Facebook (also of course promising your details are confidential). I decided to try it before writing this blog post and the result was fairly impactful. It takes your personal details and photos and shows how almost anybody can access them, depending on your privacy settings. The part that stuck out to me was the interactive side – it flips the switch and does the interactive work, taking your information and using it in the film. It’s an interesting project that has got me thinking about the different ways people can interact with content. The ability to connect an account and take information for consensual use could be something to think about down the track, even possibly for our third assignment.