Media Ecology Case Studies

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Bandersnatch: 

Black Mirror's 'choose your own adventure' story provides many hidden endings and fun surprises.

  • The fifth Black Mirror season - made up of a single episode called Bandersnatch - represents the latest mainstream offering in interactive storytelling.
  • Released in December 2018 by Netflix in a choose-your-own-adventure format, Bandersnatch allows viewers to make decisions at various junctures, theses choices then determine the story path down which the episode proceeds
  • The result of a network of "five endings and one trillion story combos", including some scenes that nobody can find
  • "The TV of tomorrow is now here" 

  • However this format isn't actually a new idea. Netflix presented similar interactive episodes in its 2017 children's shows 'Puss in Books" and "Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile"
  • This is a way "to make TV shows even more addictive"

  • What Bandersnatch really shows is how Netflix's algorithms are able to deliver an unprecedentedly seamless experience of processing and presenting branching story paths for individual viewing experiences on a platform streaming to more than 100 million subscribers worldwide
  • This interactive storytelling will make its biggest breakthrough in the next decade - not by presenting interfaces of choices for viewers, but in how computational algorithms will be automated to such a degree of sophistication that they will be able to process and produce audiovisual media with which to tell our stories, in all the ways with which we as humans use stories to make sense of our lives
  • There is already of algorithmic narrative power to demonstrate this potential. In 2016, IBM produced the first film trailer created entirely by artificial intelligence. Through pattern-finding and other functions, the algorithm selected music and scenes fed into the IBM Watson computer from the film to piece together a credible trailer


  • Interactivity, challenging notions of audience (the audience dictates narrative progression)
  • Blurring of reality and hyperreality (sci-fi/horror) - video games, TV, novels converge
  • Blurring of history - past, present and future converge
  • There is a meta commentary that explores notions of free will

  • Netflix as an institution is almost trialing if we are ready yet for interactive film and TV as the future (modernity)
  • Netflix has developed software to enable streaming on multiple global platforms simultaneously
  • Interactivity could actually lead to more immersion and more narrative responsibility (binge watching is already changing the way we use audio-visual entertainment)
  • Personal and public spheres - Bandersnatch is semi-autobiographical linking to Brooker;s early background

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