Viewer Engagement with the Interactive Drama of Reservoir Hill

Canberra.
The final session at the ANZCA 2010 conference starts with Carolyn Michelle, whose interest is in the TVNZ programme Reservoir Hill, released weekly as an online interactive drama and advertised on TV and buses; the story was about a teenage girl moving to a new city who resembled another girl from that community who had gone missing. Each of the Webisodes lasted some 6-10 minutes.

Viewers were encouraged to text in with comments and advice to the main character, and extra bonus scenes were created from this; they were also incorporated in further episodes, and viewers' names were acknowledged. There was also a video blog by the character, as well as Facebook and Bebo pages. Initially, the show had an audience of some 20,000, but gradually this audience declined; it also won a Digital Emmy.

This is part of a wider industry drive to cultivate an online audience, exploring new narrative and business models, and in this case the show targetted a young female audience of viewers who were already active online. The bulk of the funding came from NZ On Air, the state funding agency, as well as from Telecom, the Land Transport Safety Authority, and anti-alcohol abuse organisations.

The study is interested in the assumptions that viewers bring to this drama, and whether such assumptions affect their enjoyment and interaction with the series. There are also methodological opportunities in researching this, given the online nature of the show. The researchers also had access to audience figures as well as interactivity transcripts created by the broadcaster, and conducted audience surveys (with some 125 responses) and interviews.

The largest audience segment was young, female, and under 17 (some 45%); another 31% of respondents were under 40, and 17% were male. The producers positioned Beth, the main character, as the author of the programme experience, and audience members as making direct contact with Beth (though online this was not even with the actress playing Beth, but with one of the production team acting as Beth). Nearly 60% texted Beth, some 30% became friends with her on Bebo.

Audience members really enjoyed this, and it was a hook for them in terms of their enjoyment; getting namechecked on screen or in Beth's videoblogs was also a key drawcard, as was the ability to influence the storyline. This made them feel more involved and connected with the series - but others also expressed dissatisfaction with this, and with the contrived nature of the interactive elements (they thought that suggestions were only taken up if they fit already predetermined storylines).

Additionally, there are constraints of access, cost, and parental controls (each especially given this was a relatively young, teenage audience); TVNZ's choice to change encoding standards half-way through the series in order to prevent user reuploading of episodes to YouTube was strongly criticised. There was also some nostalgia for traditional viewing experiences: for more television-style availability, production styles, and ease of engagement - many asked for episodes to be longer: preferably around 30 minutes, as on TV.

Also of interest were modes of engagement: whether people accepted the illusion of the storyline, and whether sponsors' messages (such as the anti-teenage drinking message) were accepted as relevant to the storyline or extraneous to it. For some viewers, aspects of the production quality (e.g. poor acting) also interfered, but some were happy to accept the series as a constructed media product and therefore didn't mind this too much.

Is this model sustainable, then? Ultimately, the show provided only a shallow form of interactivity which constrained opportunities for interaction in order to keep them manageable; there was no in-built opportunity for audiences to create their own extraneous texts in addition to the series itself, and everything was designed so that user contributions could be reincorporated into the storyline.

In terms of research, for the upcoming second series, researchers will also explore the use of focus groups, and attempt a holistic approach to studying viewer activities across multiple media platforms to get a fuller picture of how people engaged: did they sustain a consistent persona in interacting with the series, or engage at different levels of suspension of disbelief?

Technorati : ANZCA 2010, Reservoir Hill, audiences, interactive drama, participation, social media, television
Del.icio.us : ANZCA 2010, Reservoir Hill, audiences, interactive drama, participation, social media, television