At the Crossroads of the Documentary and the Web - Text 4
In addition to having to put themselves in tune with the interface, online users, when discovering a webdoc, are sometimes submitted to a series of practices and codes resembling those of the addictive world of video games, and of “serious games” in particular, which seek to accompany a degree of knowledge sharing.[6] For example, Alphée des étoiles (2012) and Prison Valley (2010) employ differing strategies, but in each case ask online users to register (giving their name and creating an account) in order for the webdoc to proceed and to contribute to the construction of meaning. The former work makes the user take part in a lottery. Through a kind of electronic slot machine, users each time find themselves, according to their lifeline, associated with a genetic illness (an illness which strikes one as a result of bad luck in the alignment of one’s chromosomes). This determines the subsequent exploration of the multimedia materials brought together in the webdoc. Prison Valley, for its part, places the viewer in control of a journalistic investigation at the heart of the American penal system. If they do not accumulate good information as they proceed through the webdoc, users cannot continue their exploration. These examples demonstrate that in this area of the digital universe the term “immersion” does not refer to the sensory immersion of spectacular systems such as D-Box or AVX (systems sold in order to intensify the cinema experience[7]), but rather an individualized version of interactivity. These creations appear to function according to the principle of the signal’s reversibility: they are closer to a telephone conversation than they are to watching a television reportage. Here we are approaching a two-way model of communication, without completely reaching it. This has an impact on the involvement asked of the viewer by this kind of interactivity.
