It looks like Google and YouTube are getting into the games industry (not a big surprise since they’re almost everywhere else at present). They filed a patent for a

Web-based system for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos

Wow, now that’s a mouthful. But what does it really mean?

Systems and methods are provided for adding and displaying interactive annotations for existing online hosted videos. A graphical annotation interface allows the creation of annotations and association of the annotations with a video. Annotations may be of different types and have different functionality, such as altering the appearance and/or behavior of an existing video, e.g. by supplementing it with text, allowing linking to other videos or web pages, or pausing playback of the video. Authentication of a user desiring to perform annotation of a video may be performed in various manners, such as by checking a uniform resource locator (URL) against an existing list, checking a user identifier against an access list, and the like. As a result of authentication, a user is accorded the appropriate annotation abilities, such as full annotation, no annotation, or annotation restricted to a particular temporal or spatial portion of the video.

It seems like they will use annotations in videos to create something perhaps like a choose your own adventure series of games:

A method of providing an interactive game based on a digital video, the method comprising:storing a source video in a video database;storing annotations in an annotations database in association with the source video, at least a first one of the annotations referencing a time within a target video, wherein a selection of the first annotation causes playback of the target video at the time location within the video referenced by the first annotation; andresponsive to receiving a request from a client device for the source video, transmitting the source video and its associated annotations to the client device.

So it sounds like clicking on an annotation will move the video forward to a particular time, sort of similar to the DVD-based games we have seen in the past.

Even more information on how it might work, which sounds like I described above:

A video may have associated with it one or more annotations, which modify the appearance and/or behavior of a video as it was originally submitted to an online video hosting site. Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video. Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video. Selecting such annotations causes playback of the target video to begin at the associated time. Such annotations can be used to construct interactive games using videos, such as a game in which clicking on different portions of a video leads to different outcomes.

Aha! That last sentence definitely smacks of the old choose your own adventure series of books and such.

I couldn’t manage to nab any of the images from the patent but you can pretty much envision how it might work. Clickable areas on the screen that skip the video to a particular time or help guide the action on screen. An interesting idea no doubt and a great way to expand fairly non-interactive offerings from the world’s largest video sharing site (and second largest search engine).