Photo: Genvid Entertainment
If “games are a series of interesting decisions,” according to veteran designer Sid Meier, then interactive fiction is the purest expression of this idea. The genre exists across both analog and digital media, from choose-your-own-adventure books to video games like Immortality that let you manipulate a narrative through branching pathways. Now we have Silent Hill: Ascension, the latest entry in the acclaimed horror video-game franchise that offers a twist on this established form. Its creators are billing Ascension as an “interactive streaming series,” a move that has caused bewilderment among longtime Silent Hill fans. Their chief question appears to be this: “WTF is Silent Hill: Ascension?”
We’ll find out when Silent Hill: Ascension premieres at 9 p.m. ET on Halloween. For now, it’s perhaps best described as a CGI TV show in which you’re able to steer the plot at key moments. Think the interactive, nonlinear fiction of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, albeit with one big difference. In Bandersnatch, it was just you, and anyone else who happened to be in view of your screen, doling out, and reckoning with, said decisions. In Silent Hill: Ascension, it is you and possibly millions of other players who are collectively influencing the onscreen action. Once a decision has been made by the community, which could include such major events as killing off a main character, it is locked — it becomes franchise canon. In this way, says Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid Technologies, the studio developing the series, the interactive streaming series shares crucial DNA with another show: American Idol. Except there’s a further key difference. “We’ve been voting people off [American Idol] for 20 years, but that’s not a scripted show,” he says. “This is a fully scripted, triple-A-quality, 4K resolution series done completely in Unreal Engine. There’s never been anything like this.”
A team of 16 writers and narrative designers have wrestled with Silent Hill: Ascension’s divaricating story, or “simulation,” as Navok calls it, whose events, per the franchise, center on a supernatural cult (and, presumably, a handful of freaky, Freudian monsters). Navok has calculated that this narrative can play out a thousand different ways over the course of its marathon six-month run time. Because these story forks have already been accounted for, Genvid and its partner studios, which includes J. J. Abrams’s Bad Robot, know how the narrative could play out, but, importantly, not how it actually will. What they will have to do is animate and render scenes, at a ferocious clip, working four weeks in advance of decisions actually being made, according to Genvid.
Navok doesn’t just refer to Silent Hill: Ascension as an “interactive streaming series.” It’s also a MILE, or “massive interactive live event,” as theorized in an essay he co-wrote with the venture capitalist and media analyst Matthew Ball, who serves as an adviser to Genvid. In that essay, the pair pointed toward a lesser-known influence on Ascension: 2014’s Twitch Plays Pokémon, a “proto-MILE” experiment in which Twitch viewers determined how a game of Pokémon Red should unfold by voting on every decision. Navok and Ball’s hope is that Ascension will live up to the “massive” part of the MILE moniker. How? By bridging what Ball calls gaming’s “audience gap” and delivering an experience whose viewing figures begin to close in on TV and movies. They aim to do this by courting casual players and those who reside in South America, India, and other developing regions. Silent Hill: Ascension’s choice-based inputs do not require a high level of skill to participate, nor does its video stream require an expensive, high-end home console to run. (The PlayStation 5 still costs $500 three years after its release.)
All this sounds noble and interesting (and, of course, potentially lucrative), but Silent Hill: Ascension’s success will live or die on two elements: the quality of the show itself and the experience of actually participating. On the former (and this is not exactly an endorsement than an indication of a base level in standards), Navok says Genvid has scrapped the AI it used for animation and writing in the early stages of production. One glitchy scene spat out a character getting up, taking something from a fridge, sitting down, and repeating the whole thing five nightmarish times. One of Navok’s colleagues described it as “Lynchian.” His response: “No, it’s fucking stupid. This is not good or interesting. We can’t ship it.”
The latter component, how you actually participate, is where things get a little stickier. You need to download an app for your phone or head over to the Silent Hill: Ascension website, where you can make decisions (with the help of contextual video) prior to the content actually being aired in a daily livestream (in-app and on the site). At the end of each week, a full episode is broadcast presenting the culmination of these stacked decisions. There’s a few wrinkles to this setup: The streaming interface resembles Twitch, replete with live chat that you can spam with stickers and messages to your heart’s desire. Weirder is that not everyone’s decisions carry the same weight. You accrue a virtual clout called “Influence” by either solving daily puzzles or purchasing it, which then determines how much “sway” you have. You can even rally other participants around a particular decision. It sounds like Genvid is marrying social-media-lite elements with Silent Hill’s psychosexual melodrama, which could yet produce its own unintentionally tortuous ordeal.
Or not, of course. We’ll have to wait and see what Silent Hill: Ascension actually delivers, but there’s a lot to commend here — not least the considerable risk Genvid and franchise publisher Konami is taking with the, as yet, unproven interactive-streaming format. It’s difficult to think of another company in the conservative world of major-publisher IP management writing a check for tens of millions of dollars for a project as frankly bizarre as this. Come its conclusion in six months’ time, we may perhaps laud this as the future of entertainment, one that lives up to Ball’s lofty characterization of a “story that is collectively told, collectively experienced.” If that’s to be the case, Genvid will need to have channeled its inner Meier. Each decision, a handful every day, needs to be “interesting” at the very least — a task one imagines is easier said than done.
