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Choose Your Own Adventure Gaming Coming to YouTube?

by JP Mangalindan on January 2, 2009 at 03:01 PM

YouTube filed a patent application back in February that only recently surfaced, giving us an intriguing glimpse at what might be in store for users. Possibly inspired by Facebook's own recent success with social networking games like 'Bejeweled,' it seems the online video streaming giant is planning YouTube-based games of their own, employing video annotation and time marker features already available to users.

According to the patent filing, YouTube will develop the annotations and time markers features further, allowing pauses in playback, displayed text at certain locations and during certain times, or displayed links during certain portions of a video leading to another portion of that video, or an entirely different clip altogether. "Such annotations can be used to construct interactive games... such as a game in which clicking on different portions of a video leads to different outcomes," the patent states.

Based on that description alone, "Choose Your Own Adventure"-type games seem inevitable, but we'd bet anything creative developers will use these new features, whenever they're made available, to create some pretty fun games.

Don't believe us? Check out a few simple, yet entertaining user-created YouTube content using annotations and time markers to an entertaining effect, like the Win/Fail quiz show, a recreation of the cheese-tastic 1994 3DO game, 'Plumbers Don't Wear Ties' (beware: massive amounts of cleavage), or our favorite, 'Bboy Joker,' an interactive stop-motion breakdance competition, between Batman and the Joker, below. [From: bnet]

Tags: bejeweled, choose your own adventure, ChooseYourOwnAdventure, facebook, top, videogames, youtube

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