Netflix executives know that people streaming their shows and movies aren’t giving them their undivided attention. Many of them are also on their phones.
“It’s something we’re looking at very seriously,” said Alain Tascan, Netflix president of games. “I’m in front of the TV, I’m using my phone. This is a reality, good or bad. We know. We’re not here to judge, but we’re here to say, OK, can we do something special about it?”
Netflix’s latest effort to solve this dilemma is Unhinged, a new interactive game from in-house developer Night School Studio featuring voice work from Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink and Troy Baker. Although Night School previously worked on a video game tie-in to Season 7 of “Black Mirror,” Unhinged is an original, stand-alone experience. The game will be released on June 30 and uses a viewer’s phone as a controller, like many of Netflix’s other titles. But it also functions as the lead character’s phone, receiving calls, texts and acting as a flashlight, just like a real device.
“If you’re ever looking at your phone, it’s because we want you to,” said Sean Krankel, Netflix’s head of narrative games and co-founder of Night School Studio.
The existential heartbeat of entertainment today is the battle for attention. Would-be viewers can be lost in mere seconds to the endless scroll of apps like TikTok. Matt Damon, whose Artists Equity venture with Ben Affleck recently teamed with Netflix, has spoken about how the expectations for at-home viewers’ attention spans are lower. Damon claims that there are discussions at Netflix about reiterating plot points “three or four times in the dialogue” to factor in distracted phone users. The writer Will Tavlin reported that screenwriters working for the streaming giant “told me a common note from company executives is ‘have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.’”
When asked about these comments, a Netflix spokesperson said they were not accurate and pointed to a Hollywood Reporter article in which the chairman of Netflix film, Dan Lin, said that the company is “just focused on making great movies” and that there is “no formula or procedure” like the one Damon spoke of. Video games, despite being an interactive medium, aren’t safe from attention deficits either. The analyst and Xbox chief strategy officer Matt Ball published a report in February in which he noted that video games are “losing in the war for attention” against competitors such as TikTok, online sports betting and even OnlyFans.
Night School created Unhinged, which can be finished like a TV show episode in under an hour, to be immediately accessible to anyone who doesn’t play games or might be intimidated by the 20-hour or more commitment many games ask of their players. Ava (Kravitz) and her friend living in the building across from her, Claire (Sink), decide not to evacuate in a storm; their buildings soon lose power. The pair then plan to get out of the city, until Ava discovers an unwelcome visitor in her apartment. It’s a home invasion story that escalates in unsettling ways almost immediately.
Players navigate Ava through a dark building by using the phone’s touch screen, but she can also make and receive phone calls to her contact list. The phone has a battery and service bars to be mindful of. After a hard tumble, Ava’s screen cracks, which is reflected on the player’s real-life screen.
“The phone is your only lifeline,” the game’s director, Sam Warner, said. “I think that that dependency on the phone becomes pretty evident.” The player’s phone functions as both a flashlight through the dark building and the only connection to Claire, who acts as Ava’s confidant, informant and cheerleader as she tries to escape. “I think that that’s a different relationship than what a lot of games try to do with a controller,” Warner said.
These game developers are intimately aware of the codependent nature of modern-day phone use. Krankel admits his relationship to his own phone is not very good, adding that he looks at it “reflexively and regularly” throughout the day. “It’s too many hours of the day, and I wish I could focus,” he said.
“We still want to make things that we love, and that we think people will love, and we probably have shorter attention spans now,” he added.
Tascan said Netflix is only beginning to test how it might incorporate phone use into TV time. It is also trying to find a path to success in the video game space. A 2022 report found that roughly one percent of Netflix subscribers were playing its games, and the company shut down one of its game studios three years after acquisition. “Right now, all our games on TV are using the phone as a controller,” he said. “But down the road, what if we start doing more social things with the phone as well for people that are not in the same room?”
Still, even Unhinged won’t be muting notifications from your real phone for you. Night School considered blocking distractions automatically, but didn’t “because people would get frustrated,” Krankel said. Furthermore, he said, the team loved the extra tension of intruding messages or calls when players might not want them. “This game is designed to play like that, to sort of stress you out intentionally,” he said.
How much players want to use their phone in-game, or answer real-world distractions, is up to them. “I do think of my phone as like a portal to, like, a hell world,” Warner said. “But it does make a great controller.”
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