Mediumless Space

What I like about digital space is that it’s mediumless, or at least the lines between mediums are blurred. Anything can be embedded into anything else, and most tools work relatively well across contexts. You can use the same tool for instance to extract a paragraph from a text, cut a video, or take a screenshot, as each of these cases simply involve pulling out a snippet of data along one or more axes.

I’ve seen people embed 3d models in videos (in sucha way that you can pause and rotate it to see from different angles), or keyframe-animate an essay to give it extra personality as you read along. You are bounded really, not by your tools but by your own imagination.

I was thinking the other day that it’d be fun to make a literal “video” game. Something that still feels like a video but is also, well, a game! I remember seeing those interactive youtube videos and choose-your-own-adventures back when all that existed — but I want to make something that goes beyond putting simple hyperlinks on videos and do something that takes more advantage of the flexible ecosystem of tools at our fingertips today.

One idea I had was a video that is actually multiple videos layered on top of each other and you the player aren’t really a character but rather act as “time” — at any point in the video you can select any individual piece of it and wind back time. And then depending on the interactions of different elements, this could lead to different end results. This could be an interesting puzzle format but could be pretty complex to come up with scenarios for.

Another thought (and ultimately the one I ended up going with) is to create a kind of murder mystery game in video format.