Diverging Paths: Netflix’s interactive films for kids
Remember the feeling of after-school channel-surfing? You’d set yourself up in front of the TV with a snack, position your thumb on the arrow keys, and shift from station to station, avoiding commercial breaks until your brain fell into sleep-mode.
Those days are gone. Thanks to the ever-increasing number of online streaming platforms, kids can watch what they want, when they want, and without interruption. But besides offering ad-free, high-quality entertainment in a convenient format, streaming platforms also create new opportunities to play with the familiar narrative structures we’ve grown accustomed to. Showrunners are no longer forced to produce episodes for 30- or 60-minute time slots. Audiences can binge whole seasons of their favourite series over a weekend, removing the need for quick-grab plot tactics and recaps. And now, thanks to our smart TVs and Internet connections, storytellers can hand the wheel over to us, allowing us to choose the direction and meaning of the stories we watch.
I’m talking of course about “interactive films,” the new format from Netflix that blurs the lines between stage and audience, story and game. This new way of telling stories is changing how we think about stories, and in the process, it could change how we think about ourselves and the world.
Getting into the game: Netflix dips its toes
Despite the excitement these new possibilities offer, Netflix seems a bit nervous about jumping into their new pool. All of their forays into the new medium are hitched to pre-existing franchises, and most of them are made for kids. It’s a safe choice: kids are more forgiving if the experiment doesn’t go quite as planned. They’re also more likely to absorb new concepts of story without much fuss because they’re still forming their ideas of what stories are.
“Understanding how this new format works will help us keep tabs on its influence.”
That doesn’t mean we should relegate this new medium as “kids-stuff” and ignore it. In fact, doing so would be a big mistake. For one thing, Netflix’s two options for mature audiences, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend are both fun ways to spend the evening once the kids are in bed.
But more importantly, it’s important for us to keep up with the media our kids are absorbing - in terms of content and medium. Understanding how this new format works will help us keep tabs on its influence. If we’ve learned one thing from social media, it’s that the medium really is the message.
To learn more about this burgeoning genre, let’s look at three kids’ programs from three different genres: Todd Grimes’ Captain Underpants Epic Choice-o-Rama, (comedy), Jos Humphrey and Kenny Park’s Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal? (adventure), and Telltale Games’ Minecraft: Story Mode (fantasy). How do they fit into the franchises they’re a part of? How do they integrate interactivity into their plots? What effect does this participation have on the viewer’s experience and the story itself? Answering these questions will help us recognize the effect these story-games have on our kids’ understanding narrative - their main source for understanding life.
Backstories: a short history of each franchise
Our first subject, Captain Underpants Epic Choice-o-Rama, is the latest addition to cartoonist and author Dav Pilkey’s creation which began with the 1997 chapter-book The Adventures of Captain Underpants. After the book’s success, Pilkey continued using his characters for 11 more children’s novels. The last installment, Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-a-lot, was published in 2015. In the meantime, Pilkey’s publisher, Scholastic Inc., adapted his characters and concepts for activity books and three spin-off comics based on the main characters’ “creations” (I’ll get back to that in a moment). Pilkey also signed a licensing deal with DreamWorks Animation in 2011, which has since created a television show, a full-length animated film, and Choice-o-Rama.
Carmen Sandiego and Minecraft both began as video games, but the similarities between their franchise histories end there. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, the dinosaur of the group, was first released in 1985 by American video game developer Broderbund. The 11-game series changed many corporate hands before being requisitioned by the current holder, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Carmen has been adapted for a game show on PBS, a cartoon series, multiple game-book and chapter-book series, a graphic novel series, activity books, board and card games, an educational film shown at planetariums, two live-action film scripts, a concert series, web-based activities, toys, costumes, and a summer-long event at a zoo in Portland, Oregon. Needless to say, we know where in the world Carmen is now - because she’s everywhere.
Minecraft, on the other hand, only came on the scene in 2009 as an easily modified computer game designed by programmer Marcus Persson. When the game quickly gained popularity, Persson founded Mojang Studios, and adapted the game for mobile devices and video game consoles. After Microsoft bought the company, the franchise continued to expand. Besides Netflix’s interactive show, Minecraft products include Lego, clothing, bedsheets, lampshades, controllers, figurines, phone cases, and “pretty much anything else you can think of.”
Game play: narrative analysis
Captain Underpants: Epic Choice-o-Rama
The original concepts and developing franchises of these three fictional worlds strongly influence how each show uses this new interactive medium to tell its story. In Captain Underpants, the central characters, sixth-graders Harold Hutchins and George Beard, are best friends who create comic books together throughout the series. Their artistic endeavours are a key component to Pilkey’s original story, the overall narrative-arch of the franchise, and the entrance point director Todd Grimes chose for incorporating audience participation in Epic Choice-o-Rama.
The first scene shows Harold and George in their treehouse, deciding between two comic books they wrote together. When they can’t decide what to read, they look to you, and two options are presented in text-buttons.
The choice is pure fun - it doesn’t affect the plot - but combined with the eye-level perspective in the setting of the treehouse, your swing-vote includes you in George and Harold’s friendship. If you’re a newcomer to the franchise, this experience helps connect you to the central characters with little to no context. All but one of the story’s interactive options have you collaborating with the two boys. Keeping these choices creative rather than moral helps promote the values of “independent thinking and imaginative problem-solving” intrinsic to the Captain Underpants franchise.
As the story continues, this “creative collaborator” effect takes over the experience of the show, turning the viewer into a pseudo-director. The many deadends in the maze-like plot encourage you to rewind and change your choices to explore all the narrative’s options. While this element of the game/film reestablishes the story’s goals of encouraging independent thought and imagination, it also distances you from the plot and its characters. Over time, your interest in the results of each option ultimately overrides your interest in the characters and the story. The directors seem to be aware of this effect because they include two potential endings that satisfy George and Harold. By the end, the boys seem just as uncommitted to a particular outcome as you are, leaving you to wonder if there was a point to the story at all.
Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal?
Your choices in Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal?, on the other hand, are intentionally moral. As the title suggests, the story begins when Carmen has to choose whether or not to steal for her rivals, the leaders of V.I.L.E. (the crime school where she was trained) who have kidnapped her teammates to try to force her hand. These preexisting relationships are quickly described in the film’s dialogue but are familiar to anyone who’s watched Netflix’s animated series, Carmen Sandiego.
Another departure from Grimes’ approach in Choice-O-Rama is the viewer’s position in the story. Instead of joining Carmen and her friends in their adventure, your decisions are made from outside of the events of the plot. Much like in the original PC game, Carmen’s superior from the A.C.M.E. Detective Agency pauses the action to ask you to decide what to do. In a sense, this approach maintains a more traditional relationship with the audience. Your choices create an illusion of control, but your participation doesn’t negate your role as an observer. In this way, To Steal or Not to Steal? leans more toward the “story” side of these story-games.
But To Steal is not all nostalgia. Netflix has made some significant changes to the original concept of Carmen in both the interactive program and its sister-show, Carmen Sandiego. Traditionally, Carmen was the source of the problem, stealing precious artifacts and disappearing to exotic locations around the globe. Now, she’s the story’s hero. This introduces the moral aspect of the decisions you have to make in To Steal or Not to Steal? You decide how Carmen will behave. The more righteous your decisions, the better things go for Carmen and her friends.
While not all your options can be boiled down to “do what’s right” or “be selfish”, most of the choices that affect the outcome of the story are that kind of dilemma. Near the beginning of the story, for example, Carmen must choose whether or not to help her rival thief, Tigress, out of a pit. You choose for Carmen, and the decision you make is noted on the screen: “Tigress will remember that you helped her” appears if you choose to do so; “Tigress will remember that you left her” appears if you decide to leave her behind. Depending on the other decisions you make, the story potentially ends with Carmen needing Tigress’ help. Tigress only helps Carmen if she was offered the same courtesy earlier in the story. In this way, the film encourages kids to make ethically positive choices, showing that small sacrifices for the sake of others can create unexpected, positive outcomes, and that selfish actions can have the opposite effect.
The interactivity in To Steal or Not to Steal? ends up causing similar problems for the story’s effectiveness as it did in Choice-0-Rama. In one sense, making decisions for Carmen breaks the “fourth wall” between you and the action of the story. But in another sense, it distances you from her. Delegating choices to you, the viewer, transfers ownership of those decisions to you as well, rendering Carmen into a kind of puppet carrying out your will rather than establishing her as the story’s hero. Ironically, this is what the villains of the story plan to do to Carmen, leaving the adults in the room wondering, who’s the good guy here?
As you perform this puppet-master role, you end up viewing the program more as a game to win rather than relating to Carmen as the hero of the story. Consequently, the message about actions and consequences becomes more of a functional lesson than a prompt to do what’s right by others.
Minecraft: Story Mode
Minecraft: Story Mode solves the problem of immersion found in the other two programs by establishing your perspective within the story. It does this by leaning into the video game-like quality of the interactive experience rather than trying to ignore it. Before the story begins, the show allows you to choose whether to participate as Jess the girl or Jesse the boy. The choice establishes the actor voicing the character and how the character looks. As the story begins, you’re asked to decide how Jess/Jesse will respond to dialogue from other characters. What you say changes how the other characters react to you/Jess/Jesse. Participating in these seemingly small decisions establishes Jess/Jesse as your avatar within the story. Instead of simply watching the story unfold on the screen, you’re an active member of the cast, with the same control over the story’s outcome as the other characters.
There are other aspects of Story Mode that contribute to the strength of the viewer’s perspective. Unlike Choice-0-Rama or To Steal, you can’t change decisions once they’re made. This locks you into a linear plot. Unable to turn back, you must continue as Jess/Jesse through the rest of the journey.
Your decisions also build up over time, changing how other characters interact with Jess/Jesse and with each other. Early in the story, for example, a member of a rival team named Lukas unintentionally separates from his group. How you interact with Lukas affects how your friends interact with him and how he interacts with the group. If you ostracize Lukas, your friend Axel bullies him and Lukas retaliates. If you include him, Lukas acts as a member of the group, which benefits all of you later in the plot. This adds complexity to the viewer’s experience, fostering a deeper emotional connection to the avatar and the other characters in the narrative.
Although more of a success overall, Story Mode has its own flaws. Other nods to the original video game don’t serve the experience. The way the story integrates Minecraft’s building element is awkward and confusing to anyone new to the franchise. There are also a lot of “camera” shots that resemble motion from cutscenes in video game narratives. The sweeping widescreen views, while meant to give context, remove you from the otherwise intensely immersive experience, especially when coupled with the pixelated graphic aesthetic from the original game. These shots might work in a higher definition storyworld, but they seem out of place here.
Levelling up: skills needed and acquired in interactive programming
Kids need a lot of background skills and knowledge in order to properly engage and understand these programs. All of them are highly intertextual, not only as segments of their overarching franchises, but also as hybrids of a number of storytelling media. Children who watch television and films, read books (and comic books), and play video games will have a clear advantage over their friends with less access or experience with all three platforms.
Knowing the context of each show within its storyworld also gives kids a leg up from their peers who haven’t engaged with Captain Underpants, Minecraft, or Carmen Sandiego. Children familiar with these characters will recognize them before they click on the title in Netflix’s menu. Because of the new technology the programs have to introduce, they spend very little time introducing their characters, making them a difficult starting point for anyone jumping into these storyworlds for the first time.
When it comes to introducing the new narrative format to viewers, not all of Netflix’s interactive programs are equal. Choice-o-Rama is probably the best of the three dissected here. Along with its simple tutorial at the beginning of the show, its lighthearted, fun plot and low-stakes choices make the decision-making process fun. The plots of To Steal or Not to Steal? and Story Mode, on the other hand, can get pretty intense, with viewers' choices potentially resulting in the brainwashing, injury, and even death of the characters they’re controlling.
You might want to think about the temperament of your children before you get started, but don’t let their intensity scare you off from engaging with these shows. Choice-o-Rama’s focus on imaginative storytelling might seem easier and more fun, but the other two titles’ difficult choices offer a depth to their cause-and-effect lessons that you’d be hard-pressed to find in other media targeted toward this age group.
Game Over: Last thoughts
Netflix’s interactive stories are not movies, but they are also not videogames. They’re hybrids that offer a unique blend of both artforms - connected yet separate from them. Audience participation sets them apart from the experience of watching films, and the directorial control over their narratives distinguishes them from the engagement of videogames. How each of these programs uses the element of choice establishes yet another distinct way to tell a story. As parents, we shouldn’t be afraid to introduce this new medium to our kids. Instead, we should discern the merit of each story on its own and recognize the potential the format has to be fun and meaningful. Historically, this isn’t how we’ve reacted to new technology, but with every innovation comes an opportunity to change. Hopefully, we’ll make the right choice.
