Interactive Film or Video Game: Where Is the Line

The “is it a film or a game” debate restarts whenever a work with live-action video offers the viewer agency over events. On r/fmv people ask whether Netflix interactive shows like Bandersnatch count as FMV; on r/truegaming the discussion hunts for the line between films and games. Each thread drags in its own frame: some measure by technology, some by platform, some by the marketing label “interactive movie”.

The participants are not wrong — they mean different things by “the line”: the carrier, the presence of choice, or how much hands-on work the piece demands. Without a shared frame the debate repeats with every release, from 1990s FMV games to streaming films and the current FMV wave. Below is the three-criteria frame I use in my own research; the base definitions are in my pillar article on interactive cinema.

Experience: viewer or player

The primary criterion — in my master’s thesis “Interactive Cinema: History, Typology, Artistic Techniques” the line is drawn through the recipient’s experience. The viewer is in a position of presence: the world unfolds in front of them, decisions are woven into the flow, and watching can stay passive. The player is in a position of performance: the work demands skill, punishes error, and actions directly shape the outcome. An interactive film, as I define it, permits passive exploration of the story; a game without player action simply does not move.

Mechanics: choice, QTE, exploration, skill

The presence of choice is not a criterion: a DVD menu and a TV remote also offer choices, and film does not become a game. The type of mechanic matters. Branching (picking a path) is the interaction closest to cinema. QTEs and timed actions are a boundary case — they already demand skill. Exploration (searching a clip archive, studying a frame) is attention work, not reflex work. Full game systems — movement, resources, combat or platforming — mark a game no matter how much video was shot for it.

Priority: narrative and film language versus gameplay

The third criterion is what a work sacrifices in a conflict. If the design trims freedom of action for the sake of editing rhythm and the integrity of the frame, the piece holds on to film language. If frame and rhythm bend to the convenience of controls, it is a game aspiring to cinema. In my analysis model of interactive cinema this corresponds to the layer of interrelations among interactive, audiovisual, and dramatic elements: the analysis registers which element leads and which adapts.

Four frequently debated works plus my prototype, placed on the film-to-game scale:

Bandersnatch — a branching film

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (Netflix, 2018) is an interactive film in the pure sense. The carrier is a video file on a streaming service; the interaction is choosing a branch by remote or on-screen; no skill is involved; it cannot be lost — there is no wrong result, only different branches and endings. This is where the “interactive movie” label matches the form.

Late Shift — a hybrid leaning cinematic

Late Shift (2016) is a live-action FMV piece shot with a branching script and real-time quick decisions; it was also screened in cinemas where the audience voted on the story — a direct descendant of Kinoautomat. But a mistake here kills the protagonist and rewinds the scene, and the design invites replays — game behaviour. Within my frame it is a hybrid shifted toward film.

Detroit: Become Human — a game

Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream, PS4, 2018) is often called “interactive cinema” — the most instructive case: the name registers the film language (staging, editing, camera work, acting), not the form. The mechanics are fully game systems: scene exploration, timed actions, branching event flows, character statuses. It is a game — more precisely a game-film: my conference paper on game-films argues why such works deserve analysis on their own formal terms rather than as “failed cinema”.

Her Story and Immortality — exploration hybrids

Sam Barlow’s Her Story (2015) and Immortality (2022) build storytelling from an archive of live-action clips. Skill is reduced to searching and watching closely — the viewer “edits” the film from fragments, and that is where the interactivity lives. In the typology from my DVD article such structures are close to environment-based ones: the work is a database, and the participant chooses the order of viewing.

The conclusion of my genre specificity analysis: interactive cinema is not a genre and not the binary “film or game”, but a spectrum of hybrid forms. The position on the scale is set by the three criteria above:

Film → branching film (Bandersnatch) → FMV hybrid (Late Shift, FMV-01) → exploration hybrid (Her Story) → game-film (Detroit) → video game.

The scale beats the binary: it explains why debates about the “true nature” of one work never converge — the participants are simply pointing at different points of the spectrum. In my FMV prototype FMV-01 the position is deliberate: video cutscenes plus still-frame hotspots — a hybrid where film language leads and the mechanics serve the rhythm of participation.