Aimee Kwon, Shai Ginsburg
Type: Lab
Netflix’s new playable film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, has drawn renewed attention to the potential for mainstreaming interactive fiction. Taking place as it does among the dystopian, tech-wary episodic sequences of Black Mirror, the work is simultaneously an experiment to gauge audience acceptance and a commentary on the potential future of user-aware, data-gathering playable experiences as an accepted part of “watching”–and being watched. However, placing Bandersnatch into conversation with the history of games and interactive fiction is mostly a testament to how far we haven’t come: the combination of 80s nostalgia, trite “bad” endings, forced metafiction, and an elevation of the game designer as auteur is fundamentally disappointing. Participants learned from the responses of non-gamers and a broader community to Bandersnatch’s experiment, and where might interactive film go from here?