How to Give Your Audience Control and NOT Regret it
December 2, 2018
20 Ideas to Improve Your Interactive Storytelling – FAST!
February 2, 2020The Follow Up to Netflix’s Interactive Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
I was relieved to hear that making Bandersnatch completely screwed with the minds of its creators, producers and actors.
Apparently they were walking around with their heads in hands, way over schedule and budget… howling at the moon, through the looking-glass…!
Hahahah…. welcome to my world!
But hats off – they made something quite brilliant!
Bandersnatch Follow Up
Did you play Bandersnatch?
It was surprisingly good.
This is my follow up – my notes on the experience and what comes next. It’s also part of a “choose your own Bandersnatch article” adventure – you can choose the other article here.
Replay
The success of this very visible interactive movie was down to one thing – replayability!
The replay ending mechanic took much of the pain from what can be a very boring viewing experience (branching full motion interactive video) and turned it into a highly immersive experience.
Whatever was engineered behind the scenes at Netflix did the trick. Though surprisingly Bandersnatch doesn’t play on some older Netflix enabled devices. The engineers must have created a few too many fields in your user database… nudge nudge wink wink!
But we live in hope that Netflix are going to make this tech available to the next wave of interactive movie creators. i.e. You and Me!
Netflix Interactive Commissioners
And speaking of Netflix. Here’s the hitlist – the people whose heads are above the parapet, inviting pitches…
Vice president of product, Todd Yellin
Chief content officer, Ted Sarandos
Chief product officer, Greg Peters
Go get ‘em!
DATA Data data
Just don’t mention the GDPR!
Apparently Netflix have committed some cardinal kind of breach by retaining all your decision choices.
It’s ridiculous to imagine that they DIDN’T retain your decisions… are games limited in this way? Eh? Torch the GDPR! (A pet hate…)
DVD Extra’s
As I was researching this today I enjoyed finding some of the more obscure Bandersnatch Easter Eggs.
What Next?
My dream is that some bright spark hacker-masher-upper is going to rip all the movie segments, then rebuild and resequence them online (maybe using Unity or some other game engine – maybe even going back into Twine!)
This will be wrapped up in another layer of narrative that opens up a storyworld where there are numerous Bandersnatches – including the “Through the Looking-Glass” beast as described by Lewis Carroll, the unreleased 1984 game by Imagine software plus a whole new slew of Bandersnatch interactions and metaverse portals to new interactive storytelling ideas.
I live in hope…
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