#Interact19 Documentary FortMcMoney

[joekourieh]

Interactive Experience: “Fort McMoney”

I was immediately attracted to this project upon finding out it revolved around Fort McMurray, Alberta, since I have a Canadian friend who worked there some years back as one of the innumerable contract laborers of the oil sands industry. For that reason, I knew going into it that I was not a truly impartial reviewer of the game’s real draw and level of entertainment. I had a bias toward wanting to see how they handled the content, and wondered if said content was intriguing enough to attract and captivate those who knew nothing of Fort McMurray. It seems to have done that, since it had release events in several countries. However, being that its big claim to fame was a Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Interactive Production Produced for Digital Media, it’s difficult to judge whether “Fort McMoney,” for all its originality and character, was a Canadian phenomenon or something more wide-reaching. Regardless, the mechanics of this interactive documentary are interesting. From what I can tell from my several hours spent playing, the designers seem to overestimate the complexity of their format. The very first thing that a new player experiences is a sprawling breakdown of all the different aspects of the game. With the combination of exploration, interaction, collection, influence, and social media sharing all shoved in the player’s face within seconds of opening the site, the developers run the risk of overwhelming those who log on looking for something even remotely similar to previous documentary experiences – especially those, as I mentioned, who have no prior knowledge of the subject matter. It would be better to follow the lead of many of today’s most complex video games, and roll out individual features gradually as the player progresses, so they can actually process the more advanced features once they’re familiar with the more basic.“Fort McMoney” tries exceptionally hard to be original, and in that way I think it opens the door to a range of different innovations in informative documentary film. As I see it, any one of the different mechanics listed above would enhance a traditional documentary substantially, especially considering that this flashy project was developed for the relatively low price of just over half a million pounds (when converted from Canadian dollars). My personal favorite feature that’s integral to the interactive nature of “Fort McMoney” is the choose-your-own-adventure-style interviews with locals, putting the player in the seat of the journalist. However, at the same time this feature frustrates me as a former journalist, since it is limited in its scope of possibilities, constricted by the number of questions you are allowed to ask during the interview and, of course, the specific questions that the film crew recorded. For this reason, an interactive documentary is inherently a double-edged sword – it gives the player the chance to ostensibly guide the interview practically, but offers no real freedom in guiding it emotionally. Perhaps this feature would work better in a single long interview rather than a myriad of small ones, with a more deliberate sense of “flow” to the interview rather than a flurry of different topics discussed fired off randomly. Furthermore, the interviews of “Fort McMoney” are generally clunky, with brief blackouts between each question. In order to gain full immersion, they need to be looped better in order to keep them life-like, rather than feeling like a bunch of clips stitched together. On the big scale, the multi-episode initiative of the project ends up coming off clunky as well, since the “episodes���, from what I can tell, end up as different paths dropped into the same story world. Though a player immersed in the world from episode one might be able to differentiate these (possibly even eagerly anticipate them, if the developers are doing their job well), new players will become as lost in this vague mix of updates as they are in the immediate deluge of available game mechanics. In the future, purveyors of interactive media of any kind need to keep all players, new and old, informed clearly of what content is available to them. This seems to be a side-effect of interactivity in traditional media styles: as content is added, the portal into that content becomes convoluted. As a long-time gamer, I recognize that complex content offerings are terrific, but without a streamlined and easily digestible delivery of that content, many casual users will feel turned off.“Fort McMoney” was an odd experience. Fun, informative, and powerful, no doubt, but also frustrating. The key for anyone looking to truly analyze it on the whole is to take a step back and think about whether you would have enjoyed a nice long, regular old documentary about the same subject, without all the bells and whistles. If you can answer that, you can answer the question of whether this project is a sign of things to come, or just an interesting experiment. Perhaps there is some yet-to-be-discovered middle ground between the two.