Bandersnatch is just the start – the next big thing in interactive media is AI storytelling
The fifth Black Mirror season – made up of a single episode called “Bandersnatch” – represents the latest mainstream offering in interactive storytelling, writes Jenna Ng in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Released in December 2018 by Netflix in a choose-your-own-adventure format, Bandersnatch allows viewers to make decisions at various junctures – these choices then determine the story path down which the episode proceeds.
The result is what has been described as a network of “five endings and one trillion story combos”, including, apparently, some scenes that nobody can find. The Independent described this storytelling format as “groundbreaking” while The Guardian proclaimed that the “TV of tomorrow is now here”. On Twitter, fans gushed about its “amazing” storyline and how #Bandersnatch is “a genre-defining piece of art”.
But the format is actually not a particularly new idea: recent (and not so recent, as we will see) history is littered with precedents. Netflix itself presented similar interactive episodes in its 2017 children’s shows Puss in Books and Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile. While well-received, they remain in the sphere of children’s shows, with the format presented as a way of gamifying TV, arguably “to make kids TV shows even more addictive”.
