Choose your own adventure books were a staple in the ‘90s, and thanks to writer Diana Snyder Ritter, there’s a new tech-savvy way to recreate that magic. Mr. Right is the new AR rom-com experience that lets you figure out your own Mr. Right in a funny and creative storyline.
"The premise is this girl gets this very attractive human-looking robot and he doesn't have a personality, and your job as the user is to give this guy a personality,” Ritter says. “Originally I had the idea of a girl who gets invited to her ex-boyfriend's wedding, and then schemes to bring this very attractive, human-looking robot as her date.”
After pitching the idea to Paul Feig’s Powderkeg Media, Verizon joined the conversation. “They were like, ‘Is there a way to make it interactive and to incorporate some of the 5G lab experiences?’ So then we put our heads together and thought, ‘You know what? Absolutely. This could elevate the project even more.’”
When you play the game, you can tell just how intentional they were in bringing this 5G experience to life. As the main character, each decision you make influences the experience that you have in the game — and the guy you end up with.
The five personality traits are Woke, Talented, Nice Guy, Bro, and Dud, and thanks to all of the different combinations (like Woke-Nice Guy, or Talented-Dud), there are 17 different endings. But the focus of the game isn’t on the guy — it’s on the woman.
“Most things in the interactive space are very sci-fi-based, very male-driven, so that's kind of also something we keyed into in this project,” she says. “[We wanted to] make it very female-based and a rom-com, which is something that really hasn't been done before.”
As self-proclaimed rom-com junkies, we approve!
Image via Powderkeg/Verizon
But you don't have to be a romance fan to enjoy playing Mr. Right — there are so many different details about the game that are fascinating to interact with.
“I think it definitely has married storytelling and gaming,” Ritter says. “You're using augmented reality, you're taking your phone and you can see Sam Asghari, who plays Rob, wherever you are. So you can create pictures that seem very real for all of his social media platforms within the game."
Ritter explains, “We shot it at 5G labs [and] did all just motion capture technology. And then like wherever you are, you have the option to kind of stick him [somewhere] and make these different photos to go on his social media within the game.”
But Mr. Right isn’t just a game either — it’s an experience. Because of the way causality works within the storyline, there are different incentives behind the scenes (which is why if you’re inactive as a player, you get the Dud boyfriend). That means that a friend group can play the same game and wind up with completely different endings.
“One of the things we wanted to do was make it an experience that you wanted to play again and again and again,” Ritter says. “So making people talk about it and then want to play it again to get different endings, that was really one of our goals.”
Mr. Right is an excellent example of the way that technology will continue to influence our art and our storytelling in the future.
“The technology really worked seamlessly to be incorporated into the narrative,” Ritter says. “It feels very smooth [when] one minute you're watching a traditional scene, then you're making a choice, then you're doing a video call, then you're doing text messaging, then you're doing augmented reality. We're really challenging the user to go from one medium to the next within this experience.”
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This interview was conducted by Sophie Meharenna.
