Two things happened lately to make bring me back to a keyboard. First up the Curiosity game/app/experiment ended. For those that don't know it was an iPhone app where you tapped away at the cube coverings of a very large cube. Once all the little cubes were gone another large cube appeared underneath. The idea was that you tapped away layer after layer of this cube to find out what was inside. The trick was that it collaborative and the whole world tapped at the same cube. People wrote messages out of removed cubes, drew dicks and competed to be the one to reveal the grand secret.
The second was the eagerly awaited return of Arrested Development. As far as cult TV shows go Arrested Development is highly regarded but seemed intent on being different enough to get itself cancelled in it's original run. You don't produce very intelligent comedy laced with jokes about politics, incest and Iraq without knowing that you aren't going to be a big hit in the States. DVD sales and it's persistent popularity on the internet brought it back via Netflix who have dumped a whole fourth series on at once leaving viewers to choose whether to binge or reign back. Most chose binge.
What's interesting about both of these things is they clearly prize community entertainment. Curiosity's roots as entertainment is perhaps dubious but it set itself up as a game. You entered input with the hope of winning the prize, the secret in the center of the cube. But the real joy of Curiosity was the community aspect of it. Finding people carving out drawings and messages into the cube, going to Twitter and talking about what you've seen, looking at ideas of how to play on that blank canvas. And then you had as a layer was about to fall your Twitter feed would light up with people alerting others to it. Suddenly no matter where you were you could load up the app and participate in this event. What would the next layer look like? It didn't matter that there were websites documenting this stuff, you didn't want to miss the group excitement of finding out together.
Arrested Development approached it in a different way. Netflix hyped the hell out of the return and everyone got swept up in it. Launch parties, cosplay, banana stands in the US all marketed it but it was the inevitable post mortem which brought people together. Because most watched the episodes all at once they took to the internet in the days afterwards and participated in an epic debate on the series as a whole and it's quality. Half of the enjoyment of the series was viewing, the rest was being crowded around the modern water cooler and being part of the groundswell movement. Whether it's writing blogs or sitting on Reddit and trawling through the memes, it's an inherent part of the experience.
My problem is that I missed both of these. I didn't start on Arrested Development until a few days after it launched, a lifetime on the internet and the debate is now largely done. The window within which to consume media and then be part of the discourse has shrunk to the point where unless you are a day one adopter then you miss out on a large part of modern entertainment consumption. Curiosity is an even worse case when I drifted away and now that experience is gone forever. I'll never be able to capture that essence again.
Which leads me to wonder where the solo experience is headed. Xbox One debuted it's view of the future of TV, an ever connected place where you can tweet during shows and be polled to ask your view. If you watch a repeat will that experience be there? Doubt it. Games are headed the same way. Fez is a puzzle game which had a huge community effort to solve the harder puzzles of the game. The majority of the fun was being part of that group effort. If I bought it now though I'd find empty forums and completed walkthroughs.
And you miss so much if you just plug into this idea of event entertainment. The joy of finding media for yourself rather than just heading to the next thing because there's a hashtag for it. Approaching things because you are at a time in your life when you need it, sharing things you love with friends instead of all heading to where the BBC told you to be. Or even coming to your own decision on a show/game because it's very easy to get swept away in mass condemnation or praise. The idea that modern entertainment has to connect you with others detracts from the very notion of entertainment being able to have a personal bond with the viewer. I fear for a future where rather than write for the one viewer we have pieces which write because they know it will go viral and make a fortune. Fear is the wrong word, it implies I don't know if it'll come. It's coming, it's already here in some respects and I think it's taking away our ability to choose what to watch. After all, who Tweets about a four year old show?
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