Hexolabs is stretching the limits of YouTube.

When you think YouTube, you think "Video." Some people go to YouTube for funny pet antics, some go to it for news, some go to it for vlogs, some go to it for copyrighted content...but it's mainly video stuff that drives people to the site, apart from the ubiquitous "song + photo slideshow" offerings. Interaction to this point on YouTube has largely taken the form of communication between people -- through comments, messages, and video responses -- rather than direct interaction between people and the videos themselves. Hexolabs, an India-based mobile company, doesn't seem to think that YouTube needs to be such a passive experience. They have utilized YouTube's annotation feature set to produce one of YouTube's first interactive games. Who would have guessed that YouTube might ever become a GAMING platform?

Hexolabs' game is called "A Car's Life." It follows the animated adventures of a car travelling through a simple black and white world. To advance to each successive level, the player/viewer must click on the annotation link that crops up on each video; if you fail to click the button in time, you get to watch the car suffer a terrible demise. The button is really merely a link to the next video in the series -- you can certainly watch the videos out of order. In fact, you can "win" the game without even playing if you want. Because the link to the next level disappears very quickly, you may well find yourself tempted to cheat -- the link is fully clickable if the video is paused. Once I knew where the link was going to appear on each level, I personally didn't find it too hard to win the game the "right way." All in all, I enjoyed the experience, mostly because it forced me to change the way I view YouTube. It's amazing how a feature like annotation can create a whole new world of possibilities. As a game, "A Car's Life" is obviously very simple and more of an experiment than a polished product, but for a YouTube game in 2008 it's fantastic. If you enjoy the visuals of the game, you might want to give some Vectrex games from the 80s a try -- for some reason, I kept thinking of "Armor Attack" while I was playing around with Hexolabs' creation. I know what I'll be playing for the rest of the day...

I'm sure we haven't seen the last of gaming on YouTube. It will be interesting, though, to see if game development is something that will be encouraged or discouraged by the corporate overlords. One could argue that gaming on YouTube makes the site less pure as a video destination -- "A Car's Life" is cool because there aren't many YouTube games right now, but if you want to play online games there are tons of sites out there that'll let you do that to your heart's content. Personally, I welcome the chance to do something a little different on YouTube from time to time.