Inside the Haiti Earthquake is an interactive web application created by PTV Productions for TVOntario as a companion piece for a documentary on the earthquake and its aftermath.
The site bills it as a "simulation," which it is not; rather, it is a branching video narrative. At start, you click to "play" as a survivor, journalist, or aid worker; you go through a sequence of video clips, most fairly short but some multiple minutes in length. Between clips, text and a series of options appear; usually there are two to three options, but sometimes you must simply click the single option.
The decision tree is far from bushy; while replaying and choosing different options will reveal some content you had not seen before, paths merge back, as you would expect, given the linear, refractory, and instantial nature of video content.
While the product is effective at imparting a sense of the issues faced by all three types of people in dealing with the earthquake's aftermath, and each path does impart clear subtext, as so often with game or game-like objects of this kind, the virtue of presenting the video in an "interactive" manner such as this is questionable. Replaying one of the roles is tedious, as even if you make different choices, much of the content you view is the same (and segments may not be skipped, even if viewed before); consequently, most players will, at most, experience each of the three roles once, and therefore miss much of the content -- always a problem with branching narratives. In this sense, therefore, presenting the video material in the form of a linear documentary -- from which these clips were presumably drawn -- would create a more effective narrative.
Still, given the tightly constraining nature of branching narratives, Inside the Haiti Earthquake is good for what it is; the video is effective, as you might expect from documentary film-makers, and if the gameplay is close to nugatory, at least the few decisions you make do create a sense of participation that mere viewing lacks.
Inside the Haiti Earthquake won the award for Transmedia at the 2011 Games for Change Awards.
