Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

Sam Barlow on th the failure of video storytelling platform Quibi

Unless the time travel inherent in the printed page allows for some late-game turnaround, I think we can agree that the launch of Quibi – the new video entertainment platform – has not been a success. If you aren’t in the loop, Quibi is the brainchild of power player Jeffrey Katzenberg and used a cool two billion dollars to reach for the future of video storytelling. Its core idea is to serve up stories in seven-toten-minute chunks (“quick bites”, or “quibis”) exclusively to phones.

As someone whose biggest success was a phone game that told its story with 270 tiny bites of video, I was bullish on this one. Having now tried out the new service, less so. Why did Quibi fail? I don’t blame the pandemic (yes, this isn’t the world Quibi was designed for, but it’s a world that is hungry for entertainment) but the platform’s failure to understand the leap it was promising. A leap that videogames took a long time ago.

The popular stories of the 20th Century lived in specific containers – the dead-tree book, the theatrical movie and the network TV show. These containers allowed humanity to broadcast stories on an unprecedented scale and were shaped by function. For example, the theatrical movie: its length respects the human bladder and the need for a movie theatre to fit enough screenings to turn a profit. The other constraint of the theatrical movie is that it has to be fixed. In order to be distributed it needs to be finished, copied onto multiple prints and shipped to cinemas. This finished version has been edited and tested to hit the broadest possible audience. But things are changing! The shift to digital has loosened things up. The lines between TV and movies are blurring. Episode lengths are more fluid. It’s all just content. Quibi is aware that, these days, content is everywhere. We’re digesting bits and pieces, infinite-scrolling and multi-tabbing through various social media feeds, videos and articles. A traditional TV show makes less sense for an audience that is used to this on-demand world.

We get this, over here in Videogame Land. Videogames are on-demand entertainment. We long ago evolved away from fixed, bounded experiences. Even where we still have ‘levels’, we usually stick them on a world map and let players chart a path. Videogames can allow players to self-pace the action (yeah, I’m gonna hold off triggering Ganon for another ten minutes and explore that woodland over yonder.) A session of a videogame fits your schedule – and sometimes drives it.

But Quibi still has its head in Hollywood and an approach familiar to those who work at the frontier of digital storytelling from the gaming side – they’ve called on established writers from existing media and asked them to adapt their work to the new form. It’s the same logic that gave us the ‘filmed plays’ of the talkie era. Bob Screenwriter takes a 100page script and chops it into pieces – into, say, ten quibis. He removes it from the existing container and squishes it into a set of smaller ones. Never mind that it ill fits – in a show called, let’s say, ‘Space Rocket Dog’, the dog doesn’t even get into the rocket until episode three. The bigger point is that the real leap would be not just to retool the container but to embrace the end of the container. You’re on a phone, a device so interactive it’s taking the attention away from all the other devices. What do smaller bites do here? They increase the frequency the audience gets to input. Chopping into chunks makes things jugglable. If you turn your story into Lego bricks, you should give the audience the pleasure of building with them.

Let’s make an analogy with pie. What does a chic deconstructed lemon meringue pie do for the gourmand, to a mouth that has tasted 100 lemon meringue pies? It forces the eater to focus on and become involved in the process as they combine and remix the components (the tart lemon, the soft, crisp meringue, the crumbly base!) and taste, really taste the dessert again. When we throw out the container, we bring the audience closer to the creative process. They’re back to sitting around the fire and being an active part of the storytelling process, as they were before broadcast media became dominant. This is why videogames and social media are winning the attention war: they reciprocate the audience’s involvement and mould themselves around their players. They are more personal. Quibi didn’t deconstruct the lemon meringue pie – it just chopped it up into smaller portions. Its failure was to retool the container rather than embrace its death.

If you turn your story into Lego bricks, you should give the audience the pleasure of building with them