PlayBranch: A Platform that Enables Users to Inherit Play From Recorded Gameplay Videos

Posted gameplay videos form an asynchronous archive of play, and communities and practices grow around it as viewers spread ways of playing and build on one another’s recorded play. Yet HCI research has largely focused on letting viewers intervene in a streamer’s play during a live broadcast (Audience Participation Games), and far less on interaction that begins from a posted video, where a viewer takes over and continues the play it shows. To open this space, we propose “inheritance,” realized in our web platform “PlayBranch.” By recording and restoring game states alongside the video, it lets a viewer take over and continue the play at any point and repost it for others to inherit, so that play branches into chains. To investigate how inheritance is experienced, we conducted a five-day in-the-wild study with eight participants (two groups of four) and identified three patterns: viewing becomes active preparation for play, inherited play develops through varied relationships with others’ gameplay, and inheritance chains form collaborative playgrounds among users. We discuss what inheritance makes possible and how to design for it, comparing it with playing, watching, and participating.