Mutable Cinema
Just a quick pointer to Mutable Cinema, which bills itself as “an Interactive New Media Movie Experience.” Essentially, it’s an interactive movie, which allows viewers to navigate the narrative in order to create their own personal viewing experience. An audience watches as a player “edits” the film in real-time, choosing story lines and camera angles from a preexisting database. Because these decisions are being made in real time, the player is often forced to choose quickly, scrambling to keep pace with the story.
As Karina points out, within the context of a larger debate between Roger Ebert and the gaming community about whether gaming narratives qualify as “art,” the narrative structure of much interactive cinema seems to be related to gaming narratives, which was certainly the case with Mystery at Mansfield Manor, an interactive movie I reviewed about a year ago. But I don’t think that the gaming narrative structure is the only–or even the most interesting–possibility for interactive cinema. As I suggested in my Mansfield review, the gaming structure left me feeling like a passive subject forced to “play out” or figure out a preexisting narrative conclusion rather than using interactive cinema to think about issues such as performance, narrative, and participation, as the Mutable Cinema creators invite us to do.
While the online demo of Mutable Cinema, a short called “The Blind Date” offers only a limited illustration of parallel story lines available, the language of the “player” as performer, the emphasis on recombination, and the role of the player in responding to an audience all suggest something closer to the idea of a DJ, mixing and cutting between various scenes. This metaphor isn’t perfect, and I haven’t seen the movie in an installation setting, but Mutable Cinema seems to be striving towards something new, something that would require performing the game in a public setting to truly make it work.
In terms of the debate about whether games can be art or not, I’m not sure I’m all that interested, although I hope it’s clear from this post that I don’t see why they can’t be. I’m not a gamer (unless Pac-Man counts), but the dismissive attitudes towards games seems to echo past dismissiveness towards TV as a medium, arguments that most of us now regard as inherently flawed. Two of Ebert’s criteria for dismissing games as art entail the “content” of games (most games, Ebert argues, are point-and-shoot or treasure hunting games), but that kind of content can be found in countless movies as well (it’s essentially like judging the entire medium of film on the basis of the Rambo movies). Ebert’s other argument is somewhat more interesting in that he argues that “player control over the outcome” turns games into competition, thus limiting narrative possibilities. As Karina implies, interactive movies can muddle things to some extent as players explore the story world, but I think that Ebert also places too much emphasis on player performance as the defining aspect of a game rather than looking at the possibilities of games and interactive narratives for producing new kinds of stories and new ways of thinking about the world, narratives that emphasize the process of storytelling, perhaps, rather than the product.
According to the Filmmaker Magazine blog, the Mutable Cinema project will be showing at the Second International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Art in Perth, Australia, this September, so if any of my Australian readers happen to be in the neighborhood, I’d love to hear more about it.
