now playing: "Met Before"

You may have noticed some time ago that the tagline of Transcending Pixels is "recognizing casual games and interactive media that defy entertainment" (emphasis added). You'll also notice that the phrase "interactive media," originally written as a general catch-all for anything that most people wouldn't call necessarily a traditional game (with scores and sprites and shooting), hasn't exactly gotten a lot of the spotlight, if only because I haven't found many non-gaming still-narratively-interactive projects to begin with, much less any good ones. The alt-pop duo Chairlift's music video Met Before is exactly the kind of transcended interactive media I've been looking for all along.

The video introduces the concept of narrative choice immediately before the song starts, as the professor in a small lecture hall mentions parallel universes ever so briefly before closing and leaving the Chairlift vocalist alone to her thoughts in her seat. In the YouTube VEVO version of the vid, this introductory segment is cute, but is devoid of at least 95% of its meaning as the viewer is simply just that, a viewer and not a player aware of the multiple parallel universes available at any turn in the road.

Using your arrow-keypad whenever directed (and you only have a few seconds to make a decision usually before the video autoselects for you so as to keep the song playing), you craft your own narrative accompaniment to the tune of a sweet electronic-percussion melody. And it's not your ordinary narrative branching either--thanks to the relative ambiguity of the song's lyrics themselves, any number of possible music video storylines are opened up to you hidden within the branches. They may all start the same for the first one or two segments of video, but wherever the camera finally shuts off, you may find yourself in an entirely different universe than what you had found before on a previous replay.

By the time I'd found seven or eight possible endings (definitely not all of the alternatives available) I'd decided to just buy that song already on the iTunes and check out more of their stuff on the YouTube.

So there you have it, ladies and gents. Marketing, when designed by a genius, really does work, but THAT said, it is only thanks to the fact that Chairlift and the other actors, as well as the behind-the-scenes artists and technicians, were more interested in exploring the narrative depth of their story than they were trying to "sell" me anything. The song did that for me alone. And perhaps the fact that they're a bit underground still naturally convinces me that they're more genuine in doing art for love rather than money. Still, I get the feeling that I'm actually discovering a story and playing the game of it, so to speak, rather than being fed a VEVO promotion. 

Did I mention their music is really catchy? With such appropriately memorable lyrics like "all of the bones in your body are in way too few pieces for me, time to do something about it if you know what I mean".... Now, "Sidewalk Safari", that would be quite the trippy video experience.

Maybe it's the novelty that gets me on this--honestly, Met Before's lyrics are perfectly adapated to the multiple-choice environment more than any other song I've heard. But perhaps Chairlift's successful(!) example of music marketing can further encourage interactive solutions to advertising problems. It's gamification all over again, baby.