On October 17 the German
television station ARD broadcasted the interactive TV drama Terror - Ihr Urteil
(Terror - Your judgment). It was a social experiment in in which viewers could
vote on the outcome.
The drama is positioned as
an ethical and constitutional dilemma. A plane hijacked by terrorists, is
heading to a football stadium to crash there. In the plane 164 people sit and
in the stadium 70,000 football supporters are present. In crisis talks it must
be decided whether the plane should be shot down before it reaches the football
stadium. An Air Force major chooses to bring down the plane with 164
persons and thus sacrificing the lives of
a small group of innocent civilians over against 70,000 football supporters. In
a lawsuit by the State vs. the Air Force major a verdict is asked from the
court. Viewers are invited to act as a jury, asking whether the major was
right? Although the voting by phone and by computer did not go smoothly the
majority of viewers in Germany voted in favour of the Major of acting
correctly. Nevertheless, under German law he was convicted, as he had destroyed
the lives of innocent passengers.
The drama contains
references to terrorist acts and threats from the immediate past. In 9/11, the
question was raised whether a fighter jet should be in the air to shoot down a
hijacked plane that was heading for the Pentagon. Also, the reference to the
attack on Stade de France in2015 is visible, while also a reference is made to
the crashed plane flown by the depressed Lufthansa pilot in France.
The TV drama Terror -
ihr Urteil is probably one of the few interactive TVdrama programs. Interactive
is a big term as there was little drama activity, existing of the invitation to
the viewer to be part of the jury. However the TV drama is a new step in the
history of interactive drama.
This type of drama goes
back to 1934 when in a US theater Ayn Rand gave the audience the part of the
jury in a murder drama in the play Night of January 16th; the public could
pronounce the guilty or not guilty verdict. Night of January 16th was staged in
different versions and also made into a movie in 1941; later also radio and television
version were made.
In 1967, at the Expo in
Montreal a Czech film collective presented the Kinoautomat
with the movie One Man and his jury. The film is about residents of an
apartment, who do not get on together
well. A woman who took a shower, comes out to see who is at the door of the
apartment and unfortunately closes the door of her apartment. Then she calls for
help on her neighbor. Will she help, as the caller for help is just wrapped in
a towel? Throughout the film the audience makes choices on a box with two
buttons, option 1 or option 2, but in the end always the question is asked: will
the neighbor help: yes or no. During the expo all group voted yes, except once
– so the rumor has it - when the voting was done by a large group of nuns.
This movie was made in the Czech Republic during the communistic regime and
underlying this experiment was the satirical thesis of the film director that
you can vote what you want, but the result remains always the same.
After the theater and
movie experiments, Philips announced in the early nineties, the CD-i as the interactive
medium, with which a user could make choices about a good or bad outcome. But
CD-I lived to short in order to attract such a drama production for the medium.
So far there have not been any signals yet on the internet of an interactive
drama. However, the principle of making interactive choices has really taken
off in the game world.
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