Stranger Still is a new interactive project from Jeff Green / Stranger Media. Drawing on experience from the earlier CD-ROM productions presented on this site, and others unpublished, Stranger Still will once again push the boundaries of emotional engagement in non-linear media. As the user you will find yourself part of a fascinating experiment in nighttime simulated socializing, where you will encounter an extraordinary collection of inner city individuals and by your spoken responses -- interpreted by speech recognition software -- determining the outcome of the night’s events.

 

The Webchat Demo

While Stranger Still is intended for speech recognition interaction, this demo of material from the production has been turned into a Flash file using the Mood Bar interface. Thus you can simultaneously get an idea of the nature of Mood Bar interaction and the kind of drama to be found in Stranger Still. The material presented here was recorded online with the director in Canada and the actors in North Carolina. It is in the form of a webchat, and in the final product the scene will be found on a computer screen in another character's house -- if that character leaves the room for a while, a webchat request pops up on his computer, and if the player clicks on it they find themselves in an online webchat with a stranger.

To play this demo click on the image above. You will need Flash on your browser. There may be a load-time delay as it's fairly large. You will also need to know how to use the Mood Bar. Take a look at this illustration:

The bar you will see in the demo will not have the benefit of the text descriptions. The bar appears to be an undifferentiated gradient with an infinite number of possible choices. This is of course not possible, and there is no telling how many possible directions there might be out of any Mood Bar decision gate. In fact, at one point in the demo it doesn't matter where you click, all the buttons lead to the same point (in other words, the character isn't really listening). Usually there are at least three different directions possible, corresponding to the three attitudinal choices shown above, though it will not be obvious how much of the bar is devoted to each one.

When playing a Flash file you can try it again right away by right-clicking on the window and selecting Rewind. Then right-click again and select Play. As a rough guide, there are more than 35 individual clips in this demo, more than a dozen possible "outcomes".

This scene stars the incredible Desiree Markella (check out her website at www.DesireeMarkella.com) and Jon Dawson (check out his band site at www.thirdofnever.net) recorded online from Jon's home in North Carolina.