Bandersnatch: A Road to Interactive Storytelling
The trifecta of entertainment, artificial intelligence, and gaming, Bandersnatch was full of surprises from the get-go. Little did Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones know it was steep down the rabbit hole. The life-imitates-art approach helped them make a remarkable achievement in portraying the dark side of the tech world through interactive possibilities of a game-like movie, a first for Netflix. The 170-page nontraditional script had multiple endings. Within 24 hours of its release, Black Mirror fans took to Reddit to discuss the various endings to the complex narrative format of Bandersnatch. It was declared a success when 94 percent of people watching responded actively to the format.
Brooker— the writer of the script— used the software called Twine to develop multiple storylines, and Netflix developed a “branch managing mechanism” for the ease of editing the multiple permutations of the clips to provide an uninterrupted, immersive, and live-action interactive experience to the viewers. To maintain the sequence of the storylines, it was essential to consider the four-dimensional logic of the narrative. If any piece of the story was changed, the stories for all the other plots had to be altered. Brooke compared this aspect to Jenga, wherein one edit impacted the film's structure. To tackle the issue, a central puzzle had to be laid down for the viewers to choose between making a phone call or not— around which all the potential plots are based.
Shooting the same scenes again and again but with different narratives was baffling to the cast and crew. It was Marilyn Kirby, the script supervisor, who kept track of the segments of shoots and informed the actors as well as the crew of the changes in storylines. It was essential to keep the story interactive for the correct visual flow from the moment of choice. This was done through the selected transition points to make the format more understandable.
Bandersnatch was the first of its kind to use data mining to track and analyze the response of the viewers— in real time. An expert in the General Data Protection Regulations research and requests, Michael Veale— a professor at the University of London— knew how to make the questions hyper-specific to get the data he wanted. He then used the data to infer which endings viewers reached for, from most to least. The release of the selected viewership data after three weeks of the release determined that the viewers had missed out on an “Easter egg ending.” The train ending was the hardest of the five to reach. Netflix also released the breakdown of the critical choice points of the story but not the entire data set. Fans later created the flowchart of the different storylines to determine all the potential endings.
Interactive entertainment approaches the new facets of storytelling to discover a unique art form to delight and challenge the viewer to transport into an immersive world at their command. Netflix and Black Mirror made a sound strategic move to test the viability of the still-developing art form through an established viewership.
Bandersnatch is a ground-zero project— despite its complex plotline. With the increasing demand for AI in intersection with gaming, we can expect more game-like movies with even more complex interactive storytelling.
