Last night we had a movie night where we watched the Minecraft documentary. Nagle and I decided to try something at the last minute.
We gave everyone a laser pointer and set up a board to the right of the main movie screen. When anyone lasered it, the current vote count would go up and when it met the threshold (4 votes), we would pause the movie and have a short discussion. We had about 3 or 4 pauses during the movie, and they felt good because there was buy-in from the group to hear what someone else wanted to say.
Of course what we found out was that we didn't know what anyone wanted to talk about when they voted, but I don't think it mattered much for this group we had. Maybe if there were more strangers it would have felt different. The Minecraft documentary also wasn't the densest movie, so it doesn't seem like it required much in the way of conversation.
Related, I found myself wanting to say things that maybe didn't require a whole discussion, but I still wanted to communicate with the group about. I think a text chat next to the screen would be a nice thing to try.
Bret also mentioned having pauses for discussion after each section of a movie (if the movie is broken into sections), or being able to laser specific parts of the movie and annotate them while you're watching. Paula mentioned being able to follow hyperlinks from the movie to explore on your own or in a small group and bring back into the group's attention.
I think what we're looking for is this concrete feeling of watching, exploring, and discussing that feels really fluid and nice in very small groups. Paula and Nagle had this with the Engelbart demo, and Nagle and I had this watching the first 15 minutes of the Minecraft documentary before movie night. The question is how to get the kind of feeling in larger groups.
I think going forward that we'll have more experimental screenings in the afternoon when everyone is around.
