Silent Hill: Ascension's proposed voting system makes it feel like a bizarre mass social experiment
IGN shared an inside look at Silent Hill: Ascension, an experimental series that was announced last year. We've known you'll be able to choose the fates of its unlucky protagonists for a while. However, the full scope of these interviews has me feeling like I've stumbled across one of those unethical social experiments conducted in the '80s—and I can't decide if that's good or bad.
Silent Hill: Ascension is a collaboration between Genvid Technologies, Bad Robot Games, and Behaviour Interactive. Genvid Tech's Chief Creative Officer Stephan Bugaj describes it as «the next evolution of interactive television.» He compares it to both Telltale games and Bandersnatch, a 'choose your own adventure' episode of Black Mirror, though there's one important twist:
«All of the [viewers] will interact with our series simultaneously… everyone sees the same thing, everyone participates in the same decisions, and when those decisions are made, that's canon for everyone.»
Bugaj also clarifies that the decisions will remain open from anywhere between a day and a week. Viewers who miss the episode will still be able to contribute, as long as they cast their ballot in time. It is, indeed, a fascinating twist on the formula—like bringing 'Twitch Chat Plays Pokemon' to a more controlled level. Also with less running around in circles, I assume.
I grow, however, more unsettled the more I dwell on Silent Hill: Ascension. My understanding of the series—backed up by Sharon Ingles, the lead writer and principal on the game—is that it's concerned with the more psychological aspects of horror. In their words, it's a «meditation on our human experience of trauma, guilt and fear».
«These are really flawed, broken people, these are people who've been
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