I found this article very intreging. Before taking this class, when I thought of interactive video, I mostly thought about either abstract art pieces where user's movements affect what's going on on screen or a choose your own adventure type of DVD. This article went into some of the issues surrounding "Interactive Narrative", telling a story that the observer can interact with.
One topic was transgressive metalepsis, when a viewer is suddenly taken out of the narative of a story and is made aware of it's reality (like when a character in a film turns to the camera and talks to the audience or when background music meant to drum up emotions is noted by the characters in the film). This is mostly used for comic effect in movies, such as Ferris Bueller talking to the camera telling the audience of his scheme to skip school or Austin Powers making a smirk at the camera when one of his arch nemesis says something humorus. But when this effect happens in interactive pieces, the narative can get lost and the meaning of the work no longer becomes the story, but rather the technical details. By taking the user out of the story, even for a moment, to make them choose which way the story goes, the piece becomes less of a story and more of a novelty. Even with this fact, I still feel the urge to make branching narative pieces...
The article also talked about an example of interactive theater called Tamara by John Krizanc. The original piece was live actors acting out a play in different rooms of a house and audience members could wander into the different rooms and observe the play. When Krizanc was approached with the idea of making his piece into a CD-rom where users could choose different endings, he was appalled that his whole story would be lost because someone would choose for the main character to live instead of die. This got me thinking of an interesting concept. What if there was an interactive DVD (kind of like a choose your own adventure), but where all of the paths led to the same ending (mimicing the idea of fate).