The Next Best Thing (Capsule Review)

The Next Best Thing (Capsule Review)
The image is an animation capture. It’s a close-up of a person’s wrist which is wearing a purple smart watch. The interface shows a battery icon, the word “SAM,” and a face, which has a placid smile. The lowest part of the image includes a text overlay, with a question from SAM. “Question two: Do you normally feel comfortable in situations where you can follow your instincts?”
Image: Emily Holyoake

[Original publication: No Proscenium, 8/10/21]

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As part of Chronic Insanity’s Puncture the Screen festival, The Next Best Thing is an interactive, visual novel. Written by Emily Holyoake and illustrated by Ellen Schaffert, the format purports to “measure the audience’s personality to create personalised routes through a dystopian story…about finding your place in a confusing world.”

The narrative centers around Alex and the reader embodies her POV. After the sudden death of her father, Alex is currently ensconced in a technological community under a doctor’s care. She’s isolated from her close friends, who remain on a commune outside of the watchful perimeter of SAM, a “social analytical matrix.” This is the crux of reader interaction: SAM is an AI (presented as a smart watch) and, at various points in the story, offers a series of multiple choice questions to the reader. Answers to these provocations determine how the narrative unfolds.

While the experience’s premise isn’t revelatory, the novel fosters enough conflict to hold interest. On several occasions, I found myself wavering in my convictions, reevaluating my tactics, and making alternate choices. And yet, the ending arrived abruptly and the overall experience left me longing for an arc with emotional depth. Chronic Insanity’s goal of “utilising audience data to produce a uniquely customised performance each time, crafting a connection through the personalisation” is fantastic in theory. However, meaningful personalization relies on more than algorithms. In spite of its statistical measurements, The Next Best Thing lacks an unquantifiable data point: heart.