AI, interaction to fuel content growth

Two viewers sit before different screens, each holding half the clues. One knows who is lying, the other knows how to escape. Unless they work together, the characters on screen may not survive.

This is not quite a film and not quite a game. It is the emerging world of interactive entertainment, where audiences no longer simply watch a story but step inside it, make choices and determine how it ends.

Chinese interactive content company AltStory, which has specialized in interactive storytelling since its founding in 2017, is betting artificial intelligence will help push the format from a niche experiment into a mass-market business by making its complex productions faster, cheaper and easier to create.

"Interactive content is on the brink of explosive growth," AltStory founder and CEO Kun Peng said. "When users move from being bystanders to becoming protagonists, interactive storytelling becomes one of the most compelling forms of narrative."

The company has launched Alt-Flow, an AI agent that helps writers transform novels and scripts into branching stories with alternative plots, relationships and endings.

The tool comes as studios and technology companies search for new ways to capture viewers accustomed to video games, short-form clips and real-time online participation. Traditional films ask audiences to sit back. Interactive films ask them to act.

At key moments, viewers can click on a choice, vote through livestream comments or cooperate with another participant. A decision may save a character, reveal a secret or send the story toward a completely different conclusion.

Netflix brought the format to wider attention with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in December 2018. Four days later, AltStory released one of China's earliest major experiments with interactive drama.

In the espionage thriller, two viewers receive different information and must share clues and make decisions together. Watching becomes a social negotiation, with neither participant able to see the whole story alone.

Yet interactive productions remain difficult and expensive to make.

Kun describes the industry's main obstacles as "three mountains": creation, production and distribution.

A conventional screenplay moves from beginning to end. An interactive script repeatedly divides into new branches, all of which must remain logically consistent and emotionally convincing.

Writers must think like both filmmakers and game designers. Every alternative route has to be written, filmed, edited and tested, even though individual viewers may see only a small portion of the work.

A two-player interactive production can require 400 to 600 minutes of footage, Kun said, equivalent to the running time of five or six conventional films.

Early interactive titles were distributed mainly through gaming platforms, limiting their reach among mainstream film and television audiences.

AltStory says AI can help flatten those mountains. AltFlow uses 64 AI sub-agents to analyze long novels and scripts, extract characters and relationships, identify narrative turning points and suggest places where viewers could intervene.

A routing system assigns different large language models to different creative tasks, while a specialized editor helps writers organize and revise branching plots.

"The value of AI is not just about reducing costs or improving efficiency," Kun said. "It reconstructs the entire production chain and gives creators the freedom to continuously revise and expand a story."

AltStory plans to offer AltFlow to global creators alongside an intellectual property library, computing resources, production funding and overseas distribution channels.

Kun said only a handful of Chinese teams were working on interactive storytelling when AltStory entered the market. Over the past two years, however, internet companies, studios, copyright owners and independent creators have increasingly moved into the sector.