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I remember clearly the first series of books that I couldn’t stop reading: Choose Your Own Adventure Books. I would stay up at night well past my bedtime and long after I was supposed to be asleep trying to discover all of the different pathways through the nonlinear story. The prompts to “Turn to Page 5 if I wanted Earl to help his friends” appealed to my need to be active while reading. I guided the story, and my decisions determined the protagonist’s fate. These books bred a reader who continues to lean towards books when all else fails.

I flashed back to those late-night reading marathons yesterday when I was going through my daily Internet reading. I stumbled across an article that talked about a new video annotation feature set offered by YouTube: Call-Out Bubbles and Links Within Videos. It was the latter, adding a linked hotspot to a video, that made me think about my forgotten love for Choose Your Own Adventure books.

What’s the connection?

Imagine you are watching a video on YouTube. For visualization’s sake, pretend the video is a short movie about a boy chasing his dog. As you watch the boy run after his dog, you see a hazy box appear and then disappear around the dog’s head, something that obviously is not a part of the video’s tone. Accustomed to just zoning out as videos play, you make a mental note of the unusual shape and resume watching the movie. The end approaches, you sense the climax as the boy draws closer to the dog, and the screen goes black in Sopranos-esque, unresolved finality.

Two sentences fade into view from as you scratch your head in bewilderment.

Continue the chase.
Go home.

The sentences linger and then the light grey tones of misplaced elements reappear. The hazy box is back. Actually, the hazy boxes are back because there are two; one that wraps around the first sentence and another that envelops the second. The sentences remain on the screen, begging you to “continue the chase” or “go home.”

Fighting decades of what it means to watch a movie and a couple of years of watching online movies, you throw caution into the wind and click on the video. Moving the mouse towards the viewing area, you click on the video and not words that surround the page. You mutter in a soft voice, “What am I doing. This is nonsense. Watching a video is a passive experience; I see what the director wants me to see. I don’t interact, I can’t click on the screen.”

The video responds as you choose to continue the chase. Whoa. A new video loads, one that is from the perspective of the dog that is a continuation from last visual of the previous movie. Whoa.

The millenial version of digital, Choose Your Own Adventure storytelling is born.

Whoa.

Reference:

Numberstumper. (2006, June 14). By Balloon To The Sahara on Flickr – Photo Sharing!. Retrieved June 7, 2008, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/numberstumper/167209015/.

[tags]YouTube Annotations, Video, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure[/tags]