New genre of interactive video raises expectations, questions

You find yourself outside the mansion of the millionaire businessman who is about to announce his intention to run for president of the United States. Facing you, literally, are windows into this man’s life — his family, friends and employees, his bedrooms, living rooms and, thematically speaking, his closets, in which are probably stored numerous skeletons.

You choose a window and peek in. Then another. Soon you realize, of course, that all is not as it seems with this family. There are secrets and plots, and there will be a murder. Eventually, you have spent an entire (virtual) weekend watching the actions of this family, going from room to room and character to character.

Will you simply watch the events play out, knowing that the man about to run for president could be a liar and murderer? Do you have enough evidence to warn the police about what will happen? Can you stop the murder from happening? Or will you be discovered as you snoop around the private home of a respected citizen? And, the person you suspect in your first sitting may be completely innocent in the next.

This is the plot behind Voyeur, an interactive movie/game under production at POV Studios, a division of Philips Interactive Media of America (PIMA). “POV,” incidentally, is a film production term for a camera shot called “point of view,” in which the perspective is that of a particular character, not an objective third person.

POV is led by veteran interactive game producer David Riordan. Before taking the helm at POV, he was the president of Cinemaware, an independent CD-I producer, that specialized in titles with live actors and movie-type plots, including its most famous title, It Came From the Desert, a satire of 1950s “B” horror movies. Cinemaware closed in 1990.

Digital Media was given an exclusive opportunity to visit the Voyeur set, watching scenes for the interactive movie being taped, and talking to the director, designers, actors and writers who are searching for entertainment’s holy grail: the interactive movie.

Giving up on the killer app. The digital media industry has spent the last few years trying to determine what will drive consumers of digital media to purchase new equipment or pay for new services. After giving up on the idea of the “killer application,” that single title that would drive people like lemmings to their local consumer electronics store with checkbooks in hand, many are now focusing on the larger issue of what the new genres may look like.

The idea of an interactive movie has been floating about for a while, but there is some skepticism that these products will have (in Hollywood parlance) “legs.” Will they engage an audience enough that it will pay a premium for the experience? If a traditional movie is rarely watched even more than a handful of times, how often would someone want to participate in an interactive movie, when the surprise of what you might find with the next “click” of the remote is gone?

One skeptical studio executive postulated that since the beginning of time, there have been game players (with sticks, rocks, bones and now Nintendo) and there have been story tellers, and never the two did meet. Why should they now?

The believers, however, say that interactivity allows the audience to become more involved in the story — to be closer to the action than traditional television or movies. Many artists are now creating content specifically for audience participation and control.

“Interactivity rings my bell loudly,” commented Robert Culp, who is one of the stars of Voyeur, when asked why he would take on such a project. He says he believes strongly that the new interactive technology is as important an advance in entertainment as that of the telephone when compared to the telegraph. “There is an immediate sense of participation which one does not get with simple signals over a wire.” Robert Weaver, the director, sees interactivity as a way to “uncover subtleties of story and character through many levels and intricacies,” which would be impossible in traditional, linear media.

Four levels and two planes. This particular “movie” was created with four levels of interactivity. First, the viewer can choose not to interact, but simply watch the action take place as if it were a traditional movie. On the second level, the viewer can choose which scenes, rooms or characters to follow. Third, the viewer can participate in the action by blowing the whistle on the murderer, calling in the police, or being discovered as a voyeur and arrested. Finally, there are four different scenarios, which will be selected at random by the CD-I player.

Technologically, Voyeur is making use of a feature unique to CD-I as a consumer multimedia playback device. Built into the box is the capability to display two independent planes of video.

POV is using this feature to create computer-generated, 3D sets in the backplane, with actors in the foreground plane. This works much the same way as traditional animation, where the backdrop art is static and animation cels are done on top, so scenery doesn’t have to be reproduced with each frame; only the elements that move are reproduced.

Impressive results. With careful planning, the results are very impressive. In one scene, for example, a man enters carrying a laptop computer. (For the curious, it’s a Macintosh PowerBook.) He sits down at a computer-generated desk, sets his computer on top of it, and begins to write. Real and synthetic images are mixed and able to interact with each other.

Riordan and his staff created 13 different rooms for the 50 to 60 scenes that will comprise the final product. Using 3D Studio from Autodesk, the sets were created, lighting was designed and camera angles and lenses were chosen. Then, using the information from the computer, the set was recreated in front of a blue screen in a film studio, with all of the set elements, like desks and chairs, replaced by blue painted boxes.

(Blue screen is a technique whereby anything in a camera shot that is a particular color of blue, or sometimes green, will be replaced by an image or graphic. It is commonly used in news broadcasts for the weatherman, who is standing in front of a blank wall, onto which the weather maps or satellite images are superimposed for the viewer. Occasionally, you will be able to catch the weather map appearing in the tie or shirt of the anchor, if he or she has not carefully chosen a wardrobe without that particular shade.)

By using computer-generated sets, Riordan was able to isolate the live action portions of the scene, while still providing rich scenic elements with which the cast can interact. Since the motion is isolated, the CD-I player is able to process more frames of video per second.

The signal from the video camera (the position of which was determined when the set was created) is superimposed, or composited, over the computer-generated set and each element is perfectly matched with its computer equivalent.

New terrain for movie makers. Director of photography for Voyeur, Mackenzie Waggaman, had it unusually easy on the set — all of his decisions were made on the computer. 3D Studio was even able to calculate candle power and wattage for the lighting elements. “This is new terrain,” he says. “We are taking old skills and reapplying them with a new twist.”

In effect, all of the camera and lighting work is done in virtual reality. The final computer set, called a reference plate, is then displayed with the video images for the director and technical crew to use while generating the live-action video.

The sets were created with the technical limitations of the CD-I player in mind. For example, when using this type of video animation, action can take place within only 30 percent of the screen, or the player cannot process the frames fast enough. While this sounds like a small amount of space, the designers at POV have taken this as a design challenge: How can you create an interface or, more appropriately, a scenic design that looks natural while only allowing action to take place in a limited area?

To this end, they have used the scenic elements themselves, including the window frames and dressing through which the user is watching the action, to define the space.

Then comes the hard part. The director and the actors, who are working with only blue cubes for a set, have to create the action for the scene, while working in the parameters of the computer set and the limits of CD-I.

The set is literally surrounded by television monitors with the composited images, and a control room houses four or five people with a battery of equipment to watch out for things like images coming through the blue screen, or body parts getting cut off by the matte background (which, of course, the actors cannot see).

It is the actors and the director who are often out of their element on this set. The cast, and the director, are experienced film and television actors. Since the camera is locked into position, and it would be far too costly and time consuming to set up multiple shots for each scene, working under these conditions is far closer to the theater than film.

Voyeur director Weaver finds these limitations both “frustrating and liberating. Most of the normal tools for the director and actor are gone: you can’t do cuts or coverage. You can’t use outtakes; you can’t move the camera. Each shot is a master.” But to Weaver, that is the challenge.

In addition to blocking the action within the confines of the set, both real and electronic, Weaver must also be able to work with the cast to make sure that the particular scene they are working on is correctly played in terms of both character and the particular story line in which that scene happens to appear. For example, a number of scenes begin with the same actions and dialogue, but end differently depending upon which of the four scenarios is followed.

“Character and story development expand exponentially” when working with multiple story lines, according to Weaver. “We are constantly checking ourselves against the logic of the game, under different circumstances, story lines and games.”

Writing a chess game. Voyeur could not be written like an ordinary screenplay. The creative staff gathered and developed the characters first, establishing all of the relationships and potential motives for murder. Everyone on the creative staff had to be satisfied with the characters and relationships before a single scene was written.

Lena Pousette, one of the co-authors of the movie, likens writing the script to a chess game. After the nine main characters were developed, the writers set out to create a master plan, under which “everything had to be true in all possible scenarios. Then it could be slanted into the four different directions” that make up the different story lines. (The CD-I box will load one of the four scenarios at random.)

Dog collars and red herrings. Since the amount of video that could be included on the disk was limited, the writers needed to focus very carefully on the important moments, or “beats,” of a scene. In addition, they wanted to add “production values” to the script, which in Hollywood generally means racy scenes or sensual situations.

This movie, which is self-rated as “R,” has some lingerie-clad women, a scene that involves a dog collar (and no dog), and some other suggestive or provocative situations. In addition, the producers decided to shoot two versions of the script: with and without four-letter words. They will decide later, with Philips’s blessing, which version to go with. There is no nudity.

Sometimes the steamy bits are red herrings, which draw the viewer away from where important clues may be revealed — remember, the viewer chooses which rooms to peek into.

Striking a deal with SAG. POV has been able to strike a deal with the Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG), which enabled high-visibility actors to work in the medium. All of Voyeur’s actors are working under the “Industrial Production Contract” which pays actors up front, but includes no residual or performance payments after the filming is done. Riordan believes that this is the current precedent for all interactive productions, at least “for the moment.”

The total production cost of Voyeur is more than $600,000 dollars. Will it make its money back? Riordan appears unconcerned. “That’s Philips’s job, not mine.” Until Philips can sell boxes, production companies like POV are still black holes for cash. Multimedia is “not about hardware, but about marketing,” believes Riordan. “Who can be the first to educate the public and convince the public that this is worth it?” Of course, for Philips to make that argument, it needs the software titles that POV and others are producing.

But if this industry is to figure out what types of interactive products people want, it is going to have to go through a period — perhaps a long period — of experimentation and investment. Says Riordan, “Thank God there are companies like Philips who are backing this kind of work.”

“Philips is determined to build a library for this platform, but it is up [a] creek until it can get the individual to see this in action,” says Culp. “How do you describe ‘interactivity’ to someone who has never experienced it?”

Perhaps Philips’s national advertising campaign will serve to educate and intrigue enough people to check it out, and perhaps Voyeur and other titles like it will make CD-I the “must have” Christmas purchase in 1993. But until then, CD-I remains an expensive toy with some great technology behind it, and limited appeal. In the meantime, Philips will continue to sing the praises, and fund much of the development, of CD-I. And Riordan and his colleagues at POV will continue to make interactive movies.

SAND BOX IS NEW, ALL-DIGITAL STUDIO FOR FILMS AND TITLES

Where Point of View’s direction has always been toward the “interactive,” traditional film and video companies often come at digital video from a production and effects angle. Technology has progressed sufficiently that some of Hollywood’s leading behind-the-scenes talent has decided to take a bit of the limelight for itself. Three independent computer graphics and special effects artists in the entertainment industry, plus a former business planner for Buena Vista Pictures, have founded Sand Box Productions, an all-digital production facility that will help produce motion pictures, commercials and music videos, as well as interactive multimedia titles.

Scott Billups is at the helm of Sand Box. A 25-year veteran of the entertainment industry, with more than 200 TV commercials, 75 industrial films, six feature documentaries and numerous other film sequences under his belt, Billups is also the founder and sole employee of Billups Communications. Work done from his computer-based production studio in Los Angeles has yielded special effects for many motion pictures as well as the original computer visualizations for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film, Jurassic Park.

Billups, along with Kenneth and Lawrence Littleton, the creators of digital special effects in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Toys and Robocop 2, among others, and a former senior business planner for Buena Vista Pictures, are the core management team of Sand Box.

The premiere boutique. The team has hired four specialists in graphic arts, multimedia, video and marketing, and is in the process of developing a stable of freelance artists committed to Sand Box, including Brad deGraf. DeGraf, while part of the now-defunct deGraf/Wahrman creative team, produced the first “live” computer-generated character and the first computer-generated motion platform ride.

Together, they hope they have what it takes to create “Hollywood’s premier boutique studio.”

HOLLYWOOD IS CHANGING FOREVER

Sand Box is founded on the premise that digital technology is changing the way Hollywood works forever, and that those who don’t join the ranks of the technologically savvy will be displaced by those who do.

“Just as musicians were displaced by the MIDI interface in the 1980s, graphic designers, TV imagers and post-production personnel today have become endangered species in the wake of the digital revolution,” says Billups. “Conventional productions will be displaced by digital film and video that permit low-cost, high-resolution and high-speed productions.”

An 80 percent reduction. Billups and his team claim that their digital studio setup — a $4 million configuration of Macintoshes and Silicon Graphics 3D workstations, connected to the most advanced digital film processors and digital cameras in the world, along with a good deal of proprietary technology — could reduce movie-making production costs by almost 80 percent.

According to the company’s vision of the changing entertainment industry, movies could be filmed in one room, in a couple of days or weeks, instead of months and years, with just a handful of people on staff, including the actors who would follow the script in a linear fashion. They believe all background scenes will be either computer-generated or filmed digitally prior to “shooting” the scene with the talent — no more remote location shoots and lost opportunities because of bad weather. The live action would ultimately be composited into these digital environments, or backgrounds, and the film would be printed and released in the traditional fashion.

DOES ANYONE CARE, OUTSIDE THE SAND BOX?

This technology exists today; the big question is whether anyone in the entertainment community cares, besides the people at Sand Box. The answer appears to be a resounding yes. Billups says the acting community is responding positively, motivated by the challenge of using its imagination. (This is questionable, however, considering the wide range of talent that the “acting community” represents today. Many actors are, and will continue to be, intimidated by the kind of “imagination” that will be called into play by these new technologies.)

Traditional film studios are interested, he says, in the technology and even more interested in creative individuals who understand how to use it. To date, the startup has amassed “solid production commitments totaling well over $20 million,” according to Billups.

The new ancillary markets. Already the company has inked deals to do the production work for three major motion picture projects. It has acquired digital rights for excerpts from each of the films, so that it can use the licensed footage to create products for what Billups identifies as the new entertainment ancillary markets: multimedia applications on CD, video games and arcade games. Sand Box is in negotiations to produce two additional films.

The first Sand Box production is a Philippe Mora film called Twilight of the Gods, about how U.S. industrialists such as Henry Ford helped Adolf Hitler rise to power. Billups expects that the production crew on the film will be reduced by 30 percent over the traditional size of a film crew on a motion picture of this scale.

Digital extras. In addition to a smaller crew on the set, the technology behind Sand Box is eliminating the need for thousands of extras who would have been required for the film if it were produced traditionally. Extras, under union regulations, receive about $20 an hour and must be fed while on a location. Those costs, in addition to wardrobe expenses for a period film of this type, can blow a director’s budget out of proportion.

“We are recreating the Third Reich [digitally], which is an enormous task,” says Billups, who is scanning in Albert Speer’s actual architectural renderings to create an exact digital replica of Hitler’s world for the film. Billups even has created digital texture maps from scanning the original marble samples Speer used to design Hitler’s office, for example. “We have to make a scene with 100,000 spectators for the Nuremberg rallies. We will do it all through compositing techniques and synthetic actors, and from the audience’s point of view it will look like the real thing.”

SAND BOX PROMISES MORE THAN A MOVIE

For Sand Box, Twilight of the Gods will be the first product from the entertainment side of its business to cross into the company’s interactive publishing business. The film, which incorporates never-seen-before footage of Hitler from Eva Braun’s home movies, provides the right content to produce an interactive educational title. Sand Box plans to release its first interactive CDs in 1994, first for the Macintosh and then for the PC.

Arnie worked hard. This movie, along with future film projects that wish to profit from the new ancillary markets, will have to be shot with a different sense of priority if Sand Box is to cross over successfully into the arcade, video and interactive CD markets.

Fortunately for Sand Box, the team seems to understand this. “You have to architect the production process from the beginning,” Billups says. “Can you represent Arnold Schwarzenegger in 8-bit or do you have to show him in 16-bit? He worked hard for his muscle definition.”

According to Billups, it’s “mind-boggling” how much the acting community already understands about digital and interactive technologies. It’s the studios and the bureaucrats, he says, that don’t get it. “The studios just go out and buy whatever is hot and don’t find the talent to operate it,” he says. “They get the person who was in charge of the analog equipment to operate it. I could make movies till I die using the equipment collecting dust down in the basements of most of the major studios.”

The end of the specialist. However, this lack of understanding on the side of the big studios certainly bodes well for Sand Box and other small studios that are comfortable with digital technology. “It’s a new playing field,” he says. “It’s the end of the professional specialist, and the age of the professional generalist. If I was going to give advice to anybody who wants to be in this business it would be: If you have to ask how to configure a system you probably don’t know [enough] to use it.”

Billups emphasizes that this is not a death sentence for artists interested in the field but new to technology. He advocates collaboration on the part of creators and technologists. In fact, Billups, who sees himself as a creator first and a computer specialist second, firmly believes that new media technologies and digital production will only move into the mainstream after more artists become involved.

SHOOT IT ONCE, USE IT THRICE (OR SO)

Sand Box’s second film is a Tom Walsh Productions feature called Electric Forest. It is a “hip-hop ’90s version of The Wizard of Oz,” according to Billups. All of the backgrounds for the film will be either computer-generated or digital video environments and the live action will be composited with it. According to Billups, Sand Box’s digital studio will create 100 percent of the backgrounds, except for the opening scene, which will be shot in New York’s Central Park. Sand Box is banking on Electric Forest’s future appeal as a video game and as an interactive multimedia title.

Reversal of fortune. In some cases, success in these other markets leads to the potential success of a bad film. Robocop 3 is the perfect example, according to Billups. “You go into an arcade and Robocop 3 is a big seller,” he says. “There are two different versions of the game from different manufacturers in one arcade. Now to date, the movie hasn’t been released, because — well, the truth is, it needs some more work, and it would cost more to [fix it for] release than it did to make it.”

Robocop 3 was shot with the intention of turning it into an arcade game, so it was easy to repackage. Now the games are doing so well that the studio that owns the rights to the film actually plans to reshoot some of the less-than-stellar scenes in the picture, in an attempt to improve it. It then plans to release it.

“The movie now has to live up to its success as an ancillary product,” he says. “We will see this paradigm more and more.”

WHO GETS TO PLAY IN THE SAND BOX?

Sand Box is backed by a group of entertainment and high-technology investors who, at this point, Billups wishes to remain anonymous. In addition, Sand Box is collaborating with Propaganda Films, a motion picture and music video production company in Hollywood. Sand Box provides technical support in return for a steady production stream and creative support from Propaganda. “The thing that’s so cool about Propaganda,” says Billups, “is that they have a stable of young, upcoming directors.”

Sand Box will need this new blood, since the company’s entire premise shatters traditional production concepts and defies strict union regulations governing who does what in the film industry today.

“New directors understand this paradigm. They have valid points of view and don’t often get the chance to present them in the industry as it exists today,” says Billups. “We are talking about a few people being able to make a big picture and produce movies that have the potential to go into an ancillary market such as the video arcade market or narrowcasting TV, which will be ad-driven. It makes more sense for an advertiser to spend his money in a niche. The broadcast environment is dying.”

SEA CHANGE, OR ANOTHER CHOICE?

For those of us who have lived through the promises of the paperless office for the past 15 years, and the threat that books will no longer exist in bound form, this all seems a bit hopeful.

There will always be actors and actresses — talented and not-so-talented people that audiences love to watch —who aren’t interested in performing to blank walls that a computer will later turn into a digital set. There will always be film directors who believe they can only achieve their desired reality by shooting on location; and, there will always be audiences who believe they can tell the difference between virtual and actual after they’ve paid their money at the box office. The unanswered question is what will the ratio be? Will actors, directors and audiences prefer the high-tech approach, or will they reject it?

Not a niche house. Even if they give the thumbs down, however, Sand Box is not doomed to be a niche production house. The company has all the key components to become a major player in the entertainment industry: creativity, content, capital and technical know-how.

Perhaps the only crucial element that the studio lacks is awareness of just how phobic the outside world is to technology. Unless the company truly can save 80 percent in production costs, as Billups claims — without sacrificing a bit of quality — it will not be easy to market Sand Box’s revolutionary proposals against traditional studios with proven techniques.

If, however, the team at Sand Box really can produce compelling motion pictures and commercials as quickly and as inexpensively as it claims, and can then license the content for supplementary markets, it is likely to become a force to reckon with in Hollywood, and a new role model for production houses of the 21st century.

THE FIRST TRUE ‘VIDEO’ GAME RAISES SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

Now of course there’s ancillary and there’s ancillary, and what you mean by a “supplementary” market depends entirely upon which market you started out in. After all the noise that’s been made by the Big and Powerful about full-motion video changing everything up to and including the spots on a leopard, there’s a delightful irony to the fact that the new Sega Genesis CD 16-bit video game system is the first to rack up a shelf of full-motion interactive video titles.

The titles in question hail from a company called Digital Pictures, based in Menlo Park, CA, with just about as lengthy a history in interactive consumer video as you can get. Digital Pictures isn’t really concerned about what the studios do with digital video, as long as it gets what it wants from them (and it is). It has bigger fish to fry: adolescent male hunger for the latest and greatest.

President and CEO Tom Zito, as well as other team members, were part of the secret NEMO team at Hasbro in 1986, whose charter was to develop “a live-action, low-cost interactive videogame hardware/software system” that could take advantage of the already huge installed base of VCRs.

They did it in two years, but Hasbro got cold feet for a number of fairly good reasons (including the price of memory and trying to get distribution for a new consumer electronics concept) and cancelled the project.

A SWEET DEAL FOR THE NEMO FOLKS

But when CD technologies started gaining popularity, Zito started to reassemble the team and cut a rather sweet deal with his former employer. DP is now the exclusive licensee of all the NEMO products developed at Hasbro, as well as all the technology (in the process of being patented) Zito and his team developed at Hasbro.

In addition, he’s also arranged for DP to be exclusive licensor of the Hasbro technologies, so others can license the technology from his firm.

DP rejiggered many of its former NEMO titles — full-length films developed under the excellent product line name, U-Direct — as well as its Make My Video interactive music video line. DP has applied for patents for its ability to switch between video tracks instantaneously, a feature that’s the core of the Make My Video line.

What’s out there. Night Trap and Sewer Shark (both from the NEMO project) are the first two full-length, full-motion interactive film titles in the DP line for Sega CD. In four weeks, Zito says more than 100,000 units of the two games have sold for some $6 million. Night Trap, written by Esquire magazine editor Terry MCDonell, was written as an interactive movie, but plays much more like a standard “catch the vampires” game. Sewer Shark is a duck-and-shoot in a futuristic labyrinth of sewers.

For the Make My Video line, also a Hasbro concept, DP is releasing four titles with videos from popular artists Kris Kross (baby rappers in backwards pants), Marky Mark (the black-sheep brother of Donnie from New Kids on the Block, INXS (a well-known Aussie rock band) and C&C Music Factory.

All DP’s titles are distributed by Sega and/or Sony’s Imagesoft distribution arm.

LOOKS OKAY, BUT WILL IT PLAY?

Do not confuse DP’s products with “movies on CD.” This is not high-quality video, not even anywhere near VCR quality. It’s full-motion, but not full-screen. The video is indeed stored on the CD-ROM drive, and it’s being decompressed by the Motorola 68000 chip in the CD add-on to the Genesis system, but it’s very grainy. It is, however, clearly video, and that is a feat. It can also be played full screen, though that’s not advisable, quality-wise.

Zito is first to admit that DP’s video doesn’t look great, but says it’s “beyond anything available today.” The compression DP uses is proprietary, but Zito says what’s more impressive technically is what they’ve been able to do with color reduction algorithms, since the Sega Genesis can only display 32 colors at a time.

Despite quality constraints, Zito believes that producers will be increasingly attracted to titles like his, especially in the Make My Video line, because it turns music videos from “cost centers to profit centers” for big companies such as Time Warner.

Another factor Zito is banking on is that movie studios drool over the kinds of sales figures racked up every year by Nintendo and Sega. “Movie guys find the numbers staggering,” he says. “PacMan outgrossed StarWars. Super Mario Brothers outgrossed everything but ET. Once people who are used to spending money making movies see what we’re doing, they’ll want to develop these instead.”

And for titles like Make My Video, he’s probably right. There’s something compelling and fun about using this title to put together your own video with your favorite rock stars, especially when there’s some “gaming” aspects involved — the VJ comes back on after you’re done and tells you whether you made the grade, based on some editing instructions given at the beginning.

What’s likely to get as much attention, at least in the short term, is DP’s new “Virtual VCR” technology for Sega CD, what Zito calls “a way to put real video on a CD,” using DP’s compression and color reduction technologies. It’s a non-Philips version of the aborted CD+G standard that allowed a CD-I player hooked up to a TV to show rudimentary graphics while playing CD-quality audio from a compact disc, and allows relatively instaneous access to different areas on the disc, much like skipping around on a music CD is easier than scanning a cassette tape.

At January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Zito says the company will announce and ship its first three Virtual VCR titles, including a new Prince video collage, which includes one full hour of video; a “Looney Tunes” CD; and a disc full of old “March of Time” newsreels.

NOTHING TURNS OUT THE WAY WE THINK IT WILL

Virtual VCRs are one thing, but before jumping into the interactive movie market, we must raise some serious doubts about the viability of the use of real video in games.

Games, and indeed anything that people interact with, rely on a high replay and reuse factor. Although a fascination with gaming itself keeps kids coming back to stores for more and more video game titles, they — and their parents — won’t pay $59 (standard rate for a 16-bit video game title for Nintendo or Sega) too many times for something that bores them after four or five plays.

How many times, after all, can you watch and listen to an actor say, in a voice pregnant with meaning, “Oh no, who’s at the door?” even if it’s part of the game action? At some point you’ll going to say, “Yeah, yeah, shut up already, and shoot the guy.”

Zito disagrees; he thinks the question is irrelevant, that games like Night Trap are just “PacMan with people — you go through a maze and get things into little holes and avoid monsters” — but we feel fairly certain that after the novelty of talking video wears off, players are likely to prefer a symbolic figure to a literal one.

However, it would be nice to be wrong. It would be very depressing to find that an idea that’s tickled the fancy of so many creative people for so many years — the so-called “interactive movie” — might have been ill-conceived. This new and growing genre, so obviously appealing to Hollywood’s creative community, will be where the action is, and will certainly be the most interesting to watch. It’s almost certain that what “catches on” will be very different from what we’re thinking today.

David Baron, Janice Maloney, Denise Caruso