These days every documentary has an interactive element, whether it’s a website, links to social networks or online games and exclusive offers.

One of the events of the year has been RTVE’s launch of Somos Documentales (we are documentaries), although they are not the only ones because there is a growing number of these platforms, from newspapers to TV channels and production companies.

At Polar Star Films, aware of the rise of these formats, in 2013 we created an interactive related to our documentary Google and the World Brain Meet the World Brain. Users, who could access the platform via Facebook, interact with a humanoid robot that asks them apparently inoffensive questions related to its desire to create “a planetary memory for humanity.” However, as the game progresses this altruistic motivation suddenly makes an about face. Meet the World Brain becomes a tool through which we become more aware of the limits of online privacy.

This new format, which adds value to the documentary and has the virtue of existing independently of the genre, allows users to interact with the film’s content at different levels, something that is vital for the genre’s potential and evolution. More and more people in Spain see this as an innovative and promising way of narrating a documentary. As a result, in 2011 RTVE created LAB, a platform with an integrated multidisciplinary team with the aim of researching new narratives and languages for storytelling. RTVE has backed Somos Documentales, a new online space that will become the biggest shop window for Spanish documentaries in the world with more than 5,000 titles (such as the tapes of No-Do, newsreels and documentaries from the Franco era) and will interweave this content with that of the LAB. On the international stage, leading exponents of interactives are the National Film Board of Canada, which has spent 70 years researching how produce digital cinema, and newspapers such as The Guardian and the New York Times Op-Docs.

If you’d like to know more about this new format, we invite you to visit any of the websites that we recommend and, above all, to experience it at first hand by playing with our application Meet the World Brain.