Silent Hill: Ascension
A pioneering interactive television series that let a global audience collectively shape a live Silent Hill horror story.
Horror with a hundred thousand authors
Silent Hill: Ascension was built on an ambitious premise: a full-length, serialized horror story, with new content every day over several months, where the audience collectively decided what happened next. Tens of thousands of viewers voting in real time, their aggregate choice shaping the narrative as it unfolded.
Genvid Entertainment called the format a MILE: a Massively Interactive Live Event. As Senior Narrative Designer, my job was to make that work as drama. I co-authored more than a hundred interactive decision spaces across the series, moments where the audience's vote would meaningfully change what happened. Each required designing not just the options, but the downstream consequences: what does the story look like after the 65% choice? After the 14% nobody expected to win? How do those branches converge, or not?
Balancing complexity and consequences
The choice architecture for Silent Hill: Ascension was built around character-centric dilemmas. Taking inspiration from Telltale-style games, every choicepoint was conceived around the impact on character relationships, and how those relationships would change depending on which option won.
The challenge came from factoring in the elements of audience participation and timing. This wasn't like a video game, where choices were made in the moment; we could not assume the global audience was watching each piece of content live, so each decision point had to stay open for a period of time to allow people to catch up and have an opportunity to weigh in. Many choices were open for 24 hours. Bigger choices stayed open for three days. The most important, fate-altering choices stayed open for an entire week, to allow the audience to think about and debate the consequences.
But this created a puzzle. The narrative design team had to create massively important decision points that would have huge, canon-altering consequences that could stay undecided for an entire week, while the rest of the story continued forward. So while the finished experience contained around a hundred individual choice points, we cycled through many thousands of options to make sure they worked.
WINNER: Primetime Emmy Award – Outstanding Innovation in Emerging Media Programming
WINNER: 2024 Webby Award – AI, Metaverse & Virtual, Best Features
WINNER: 2024 Webby People's Voice Award – AI, Metaverse & Virtual, Best Features