Discovering Janet Murray is now on Twitter I also discovered this very clever interactive video ad she linked to. At first it looks like a pretty simplistic choose-your-own-adventure style thing, but then the guy in the hat complains at your choice and reaches out of the video frame to grab some whiteout from the ad next to it to edit my choice. I hadn’t even noticed the ad until he did that, but that certainly got my attention. Have you seen other examples of videos on YouTube spilling out of their frame?

This is a lovely example of a fictional character crossing between diegetic levels, or jumping out of the story world. Not only does he talk directly to the viewer, rather than staying “unaware” of the fact that he’s a fictional character in a fictional world, he even reaches out of the box his video is jammed into. Beautiful. Makes me want to return to my PhD project about second person address and the relationship between readers and characters in interactive art and narrative.