Twitch wants to create and stream "choose your own adventure" style TV shows

[Shawn Knight]

The interactive nature of Twitch is a big part of what makes it tick. Aside from simply watching others play games, people like to get involved and have their feedback taken seriously. That certainly happens at times as spectators that turn to commenters no doubt influence the room they are in and even the gameplay they are watching… but what if they could influence things on a far deeper level?

That seems to be the idea that Twitch COO Kevin Lin is flirting with.

Lin apparently isn’t content with simply creating and streaming original content – he wants the content to be receptive to feedback on a semi real-time scale.

In an interview with Re/code, Lin said he wants to develop a “choose your own adventure” type of TV show that is written and produced as a season plays out. If viewers don’t like something in the first episode, for example, he wants the writers to be able to change the storyline to reflect the discontent in subsequent episodes.

Lin said they want to find progressive studios that are willing to work with them and take a gamble on such programming, something called social television. If they found the right partner, Lin said, they’d definitely do it.

Surely Lin is aware that you can’t please everyone all of the time so they’d need to pick and choose their battles carefully or else risk changing a show entirely with each episode.

Image courtesy Elijah Nouvelage, Reuters

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/69211-twitch-wants-create-stream-choose-own-adventure-style.html

 

[psycros]

We already have something along these lines - its called a video game. Whoever thinks that "democratizing" a show's storyline is a good idea doesn't understand the medium of TV. Voting on the outcome of a show is only going to result in the hottest male and female characters getting naked and producing a child named Boaty McBoatface.

 

[Mugsy]

I was expecting something different based on the title.

I'm old enough to remember the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and playing Infocom text adventures. Infocom used to argue that no graphics could match "the graphics of your mind".

As technology has advanced, it is now truly possible to make a "video version" of those old Infocom games, picking up & dropping every possible combination of items and having it reflected in the appearance of your on-screen character, roaming entire worlds and creating content on-the-fly just wasn't possible in the old 8bit days, but it definitely is now.

Why Activision hasn't tried to revive/update the old Infocom games is a mystery to me.