Tim Wright is the writer of digital experiences including Online Caroline, Mount Kristos, and In Search of Oldton. His two new plays, Say What You Want To Hear, aired earlier this year on Radio 4.
Tim wrote two pieces for us about the project. You can read the first here. This is the second.
The second SWYWTH Afternoon Play "The Endgame" came and went on Radio 4 in March. After years of discussion, development, planning and production it was something of a shock - to me anyway - that it was over so quickly.
It's salutary to see (or rather hear) how quickly one's material can be eaten up by a broadcaster. But in the case of an "interactive" - or more precisely "participative" - piece, it's particularly problematic that so much industry and invention by all members of the team can be used up in such a short space of time.
Was the result worth the effort? I'm not sure. There's a lot of extra effort and expense that goes into creating something like SWYWTH. Not only did it take a while to develop, design and deploy a website for the project, there were also Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts to set up and moderate. There were photos, videos and extra audio elements to create. Scripts had to change at the last minute to accommodate new content coming from the audience. Actors had to get their heads around how their characters were being affected by web activity. A tight "just-in-time" recording schedule meant less time for editing, putting a lot of pressure on the directors and studio staff.
We did manage to achieve the central goal of swywthery; that is to incorporate as many people's secret thoughts into the drama. In the second play, for example, there were 45 audience 'swywths' read out in just 45 minutes. And script-wise it did feel as if the audience presence did indeed influence events and gently govern what characters chose to say and do. (I'm happy to say that the play was quite funny too - thanks
largely to the brilliant cast.)
It's questionable, however, whether the final output (2 x 45 minute radio plays and a contribution site that now lies dormant) ever could have delivered the kind of extra impact in terms of audience numbers, critical reception and/or explicit creative or technological innovations that would have justified the extra effort we all put in.
If I was doing this again I'd want to deliver a project with a much longer "tail" that allowed the audience to contribute secret thoughts online over a much longer period, with a much quicker and responsive turnaround from the moment of contribution to the publication of, say, a series of collectable "swywth" podcasts.
I'd want to find other ways too of using audience swywths elsewhere in the Radio 4 schedule - and encourage other writers to dip into the well of swywths in order to inspire other works: poems, plays, collaborative prose pieces.
All in all I'd want us to get better value out of the creative investment over a longer period of time. (And naturally I'd also have liked to have written better plays that didn't confuse the audience quite as much as they obviously did.)
Crucially when I come to think about writing another crossplatform drama (which I hope I will) I think I'd also encourage a bit more joined-up thinking within the BBC itself about how audiences might move seamlessly from a programme page to a website to a radio programme back to a website to a Facebook page to a Twitter feed and back to a radio
programme etc.
Managing the flow so that it's predictable and easy for a listener to know where to go when is one of the great skills in interactive writing - and I'm afraid we're all still early learners on that score. Even the listeners themselves are for the most part quite inexperienced "users" of this kind of interactive fiction (if they'll forgive me for saying so).
Which is why projects like SWYWTH are ultimately worthwhile. If nothing else they gently push at the boundaries of our understanding of an online world we're all going to have to get to grips with in the near future. And perhaps they point at how we will inevitably manifest our personalities and moderate our behaviour within these brave new social
networks.
