I built Treezy, a platform that blends interactive fiction with live-action video to create immersive interactive movies. Imagine making choices not just with buttons but also multimodal interactions like Video Calling and Text Messaging. I am exploring how this mobile-focused, mobile-only format could enhance storytelling. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how these interactions could fit within the IF landscape.
Looking forward to your feedback!
Best,
Laksh
Welcome back!
Unfortunately I’m not a big fan of your suggestions.
I’ve seen interactive movies decades ago. They are superseded and obsoleted by games with good graphics.
The video calling and text messaging caused by a games is a no-go for me.
Mobil-only: No, thanks!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I appreciate your perspective, especially considering the history of interactive movies. I agree that games with advanced graphics offer a different kind of experience. My aim with Treezy is to create something distinct—an immersive narrative experience that leverages the personal, interactive nature of mobile devices, rather than trying to compete with traditional gaming.
I understand that not everyone might be into the idea of video calling or mobile-only formats, but I’m curious: What elements of interactive fiction do you find most compelling? Your insights could really help us refine the concept.
I think the most interesting part of IF is the imagination for me. Like reading a book. Second is the challenge (to understand a murder, to solve a puzzle, to unfold the story or a secret, etc.)
How do you differentiate this from mobile “interface fiction” games like Her Story and FMV (full motion video) games in general?
All I can find about “Her Story” is a game based on (imaginary) police video files. Is this interactive fiction?? Or do you mean a different game?
Correct, it’s not IF. I don’t remember the name of the type of game that simulates real life interfaces like phone apps, AIM, etc.
Yeah, Her Story is at least IF-adjacent; the gameplay exclusively consists of entering text into a search box to uncover different excerpts from the police interview, while the meta-puzzle involves making sense of all the different pieces by putting them in chronological order and figuring out what’s going on. It’s very much of a piece with a lot of early-aughts games that had similar thematic concerns and gameplay approaches, and unsurprisingly its author, Sam Barlow, was part of the scene during that time period.
I would agree it’s IF-adjacent, but I feel like things that require video files, UI, and graphics to understand the narrative are adjacent at most
Her Story is also IF-adjacent in that it was written by XYZZY-winning author Sam Barlow. It represents his interest in bringing some of IF’s design elements to a wider gaming audience.
In particular, while Her Story (and Telling Lies) are graphical FMV games, they use a text-input (keyword) control system.
The author of Aisle so we know that there are IF roots to his style of Interactive Video (IV?) which includes Telling Lies and Immortality.
Bandersnatch is another example of interactive video. I think there was an attempt at YouTube choice-adventures like Markiplier in Space using the “suggested video” links at the end as the choices that determine the next branch.
Does IV need to be a term? Interactive Video Fiction - no, IVF is not a good acronym for a game!
Interactive FMV? IFMV?
How about AMFV, for Audience-driven Movies with Full Video?
Great question! Treezy shares similarities with FMV games like Her Story in using video to drive narrative, but I aim to push the boundaries further by integrating more interactive, real-time elements like FaceTime calls within the story. My focus is on creating a seamless blend of narrative control and real-life interactions that feel personal and immediate.
This is optimized for mobile in the ways people naturally use their phones—whether that’s through video, calls, or other native features. I’m curious to know if you think this approach adds value or if it feels too similar to existing FMV games.
Gimme a like to this post, if you are interested in beta testing.
Welcome!
To repeat a bit of common advice on this forum, it is a truth universally acknowledged that no new IF-creation system has ever achieved a sizable userbase without some kind of singularly outstanding “admirable game” that makes people say, “I want to make something like that, so I’ll try this system.” To put this another way, presenting an actual game that does something cool with your system will almost always prompt much more (and much more useful) commentary than just advertising a new system with theoretically cool features.
Actually, I’d go so far as to say that the lessons and feedback from developing and releasing complete games are far more important to creating successful new types of interaction than is the simple act of figuring out how to technically accomplish that interaction. The idea of being able to text-message a character in a game is an interesting gimmick by itself, but ultimately not that hard to implement. The really interesting part is who you are messaging, and in what contexts this communication mode helps or hurts the player’s immersion - which you’ll never truly know until real players start interacting with real games.
(Inform 6 had Curses, Dialog had The Impossible Bottle, and so on.)
Bandersnatch was pretty good - though really dark, and I couldn’t sleep after trying it. Also note when I played it was about a year before I had even heard of IF. So I had no clue what was good…
Simulacra is a horror game series that simulates text messaging, video calls, searching for hidden codes in files… That’s the closest example I can think of.
I wonder if you mean that the players would be able to write their text messages freely and the game would interpret those. That would be difficult to implement even with modern LLMs. I’ve seen some games that use GPTs to generate conversations and they are quite clunky. Plus the players often try to break these games by being as offensive or random as possible and then show the results online.
Thank you! Yes! I do have the very first movie shot with real characters. Here is the screenshot of the debut title and other screenshots from the movie playback.
I am not sure if I can post the link to get beta access here but please go to treezy dot com and submit a request with a note of this thread.
…you mean one-handed, with their pants around their ankles?
