Interactive Youtube videos

Okay so day one in the Twittersphere and it’s already proved quite useful. @skillwill, who is my old school boy from London, twittered about something called an interactive game on youtube. I followed the link and was quite surprised to find myself being able to play a game on Youtube.

Admittedly I knew nothing about the ability to make these interactive Youtube games and began googling them, expecting to find that they were a new phenomenon, only to find that they have in fact been around since at least May of last year, the earliest one I’ve found (without a whole lot of looking) is from May 14th 2008. I then started to realize there were a whole bunch of them out there from adventure games to video games, even the old favorite bar game, its like there is some whole subculture of Youtube gaming going on that I knew nothing about! But really it seems that this phenomenon has only recently bubbled to the surface as there are plenty of blog posts out there from as recently as a few weeks ago claiming a brand new game to be the first interactive Youtube game.

So the magic behind this is the video annotations Youtube offers. I guess this functionality originally came out last May, actually it looks like about 5 seconds before the first interactive game came out. And I haven’t had time to research fully but I came across this post saying that as of only a few weeks ago they have made it easier to add annotations, which implies that the functionality itself hasn’t advanced any and therefore wouldn’t explain a sudden influx of interactive games.

Once you look into the games themselves and you get over the wow factor you’ll probably conclude, like I did, that they’re kind of lame. But hey, when has something lame ever stopped us from using it to kill the odd boring hour online?