What Is Interactive Cinema

Interactive cinema is a hybrid media form at the intersection of film, television, and video games: the work is built from cinematic material — shooting, editing, acting — but part of its dramaturgy is handed to the viewer through choice, exploration, or control over the order of viewing. The terms “interactive cinema” and “interactive film” are used interchangeably; a related but narrower term is FMV (full-motion video) — live-action footage recorded digitally and embedded in an interactive system: a game, a console, a DVD, or a web application.

A working definition (from the master’s thesis)

In my master’s thesis “Interactive Cinema: History, Typology, Artistic Techniques” (Kharkiv State Academy of Culture, 2024), the interactive film is defined as a medium with seamless interactivity that permits passive exploration of the story and prioritises the cinematic experience over gamified interaction. The definition is deliberately broader than the game-centric one: it covers theatrical, television, and streaming forms, not only games with video inserts. Notably, Ukrainian Wikipedia currently defines the interactive film only as a type of video game — a film-studies definition needs to be wider. The identification criteria are developed further in my analysis model of interactive cinema. Ukrainian scholarship supports this broader reading: surveys in Ukrainian (for example, the KNUTKT article) treat interactive cinema as a field in its own right, at the crossing of film studies and new media rather than a subsection of game studies; comparative reviews of Western definitions (for example, Khotyn) locate the same boundary — cinematic experience versus game experience.

How interactive cinema differs from a video game

The boundary runs through experience, not technology. A video game centres on performance: skill, challenge, feedback on every action. An interactive film centres on the viewer’s presence: decisions are built into the flow of film language so that immersion survives — how the frame is composed matters more than how hard the challenge is. Analysing Bandersnatch, Late Shift, and Detroit: Become Human in my genre specificity study, I show that interactivity reshapes plot structure, character evolution, and stylistics — film language itself, not only mechanics. The full comparison is in the dedicated article “Interactive Film or Video Game: Where Is the Line”.

Related terms

• Interactive film — a work in which the viewer’s decisions change or assemble the film itself; the base term of this text.
• FMV (full-motion video) — digitally recorded live-action video used as the material of an interactive system; historically tied to games and CD-ROM.
• Branching film — a story with forks and alternative paths, as in Bandersnatch.
• Game-film — a game built mostly from live-action video or cinematic presentation; a boundary case of the spectrum.
• Storyliving — the participant does not merely choose but stands inside the scene (a term from the VR and theme-park discourse).

The history of interactive cinema reads conveniently as a change of carriers: the theatre hall → the home console → the disc → streaming. Each carrier launched its own wave of experiments, and each wave left a mark on film language — from hall voting to the branching video file.

1910s: cinema shooting galleries

The idea of a public steering the screen action predates television and even systematic sound film. In 1912 “cinema shooting galleries” were shown — including the film Life Targets: the audience “shot” at the screen, and the show depended on their reaction. These attractions fixed the principle — the screening can depend on the viewer — although the word “interactivity” did not exist yet.

1967: Kinoautomat

The first theatrical interactive film is considered to be Kinoautomat (1967) by Radúz Činčera — the Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. The audience voted with red and green buttons to decide what happened next; at key moments the story jokingly returned to its “safe” branch, so the viewer’s power became part of the text itself. After Expo 67 the project toured a few more countries, but no systematic continuation followed: live voting had neither a domestic carrier nor a branching infrastructure to live on. Accounts of the voting mechanism survive in press coverage and scholarship — the Screening the Past article and the Kino-Automat overview are the most convenient entry points.

1990s: CD-ROM, 3DO, and FMV

The CD-ROM offered enough room for digital video, and consoles such as the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer supplied the hardware base for FMV projects: works with live actors inside video inserts. I’m Your Man (1992) moved the Kinoautomat logic into the living room: the viewer decided in real time where the story would go. In my article on audiovisual strategies of interactive FMV projects for the 3DO I identify three archetypes of experience design — action reflexivity, interactive drama, and spatial immersion — and show how the Cinepak codec and CD-ROM constraints worked as productive, form-shaping factors behind the “digital patina”. The evolution of cut scenes from the 1980s onward is classified separately in my cut scenes study.

2000s: interactive DVDs

DVD moved branching into the home: disc capacity and non-linear access made interactive films possible without any computer, and the remote replaced the mouse. The format was short-lived — from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s — but it left behind a typology of narrative strategies (nodal branching, parallel, labyrinth, environment-based) and the experience of “the menu as dramaturgy”. Compared with FMV, it differed not only in technology but in cultural positioning — see the breakdown in my article “Interactive Cinema on DVD”.

2018+: Bandersnatch and the new FMV wave

At the end of 2018 Netflix released Black Mirror: Bandersnatch — the first mainstream interactive film of the streaming era: remote-controlled choices, several endings, and a meta-reflection on free choice. In parallel, FMV revived: Sam Barlow’s Her Story (2015) and Immortality (2022) build storytelling from an archive of live-action clips, while Late Shift (2016) returned real-time quick decisions to the screen. My own project FMV-01 continues this line — a hybrid Unity prototype where video cutscenes combine with still frames carrying hotspots, set in a cyberpunk noir.

A practical typology follows the technology of interaction — it determines where and how the viewer can act:

• Theatrical forms — the 1910s shooting galleries and the audience voting in Kinoautomat (1967): the public acts inside the screening space itself.
• FMV on CD-ROM and consoles — live-action video plus real-time choice or exploration (the 3DO and CD-ROM era; today’s FMV games).
• Interactive DVDs — branching on disc, remote-control interaction, the menu as dramaturgy.
• Streaming interactive films — Bandersnatch and similar: a branching video file with choices made by remote or on-screen.
• VR and “storyliving” — the viewer stands inside the scene; on the prospects of this line see my VR storytelling article.
• Game-films — games with the cinematic experience in the foreground (Detroit: Become Human); they occupy the opposite pole of the same spectrum.

Beyond the carrier, look at the narrative structure: nodal branching, parallel lines, labyrinth, and environment-based strategies — described in my DVD article and working across formats. The typology is best read not as a list of gadgets but as a map of ways to hand dramaturgy to the viewer: in Kinoautomat the audience’s power is part of the humour, in Bandersnatch it is the central narrative mechanic, in Her Story choice is reduced to searching an archive. And the key point: interactive cinema is not a separate genre but a spectrum of hybrid forms — genre conventions transform under the influence of interactivity rather than disappear (genre specificity).

In the article “Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Interactive Cinema” I systematise international discourse into five directions: institutional (who makes such works and where), historical (Kinoautomat, DVD, streaming), technological (carriers, codecs, interfaces), art-and-technology (film language under the pressure of interactivity), and cultural (the viewer as participant). The cross-cutting debates are the tension between immersion (“text as world”) and agency (“text as game”), the “illusion of choice”, and the ethics of media participation.

On the practical side, my analysis model brings story, interaction mechanisms, viewer experience, and audiovisual dramaturgy into one toolkit. My own current contribution is practice-based: the KVANT 1993 Archive prototype turns the directorial parameters of interactive storytelling — image density, fog, the pause of participation, montage, sound — into controllable variables that can be switched on and off within the same space. The question “what is interactive cinema” thus becomes measurable: which directorial decisions actually change the experience of participation. I also use this framework in teaching: the course “Interactive Cinema: Theory, Practice, and AI Methodologies” combines theory, case studies, and hands-on work with AI tools.