Control programme
How Black Mirror helped build Netflix’s interactive storytelling engine with dark film/game Bandersnatch
How Bandersnatch built Netflix’s interactive storytelling engine
Around these parts, letting someone take control of a story is hardly a revelatory prospect. Videogames have long understood what it means to have a player take charge of what’s on screen; films and TV series, meanwhile, have remained things you sit back and watch unfold. Fire up Bandersnatch, the first episode of the new season of sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror, and the opposite is true. Powered by Netflix’s own custom-made engine, Bandersnatch tells the tale of a developer making his first game, based on a choose-your-ownadventure book. Or, rather, you tell it – by using your remote, mouse or controller to select between choices and progress the story along various paths. It’s perhaps the first high-profile success of its kind, and with strong performances, slick execution and winking metafiction has enraptured a mainstream audience. But Charlie Brooker’s initial reaction to Netflix’s suggestion of an interactive Black Mirror episode was, “No fucking way”. Why? “Probably because I’d played so many games,” he says. “I was writing for PC Zone when CD-ROMs came along and everyone went, ‘Oh my god, we can do movies that you play like games!’” He recalls Night Trap, and Under A Killing Moon: “They were sort of fun, but there was lots of waiting around, pauses, the video quality wasn’t great. So I was quite cynical about the qualities of these things. And also, when you’re writing a linear story, you define the characters by what they do. And if you’re ceding that control to the player, well then, where’s your character gone?”
And, as Annabel Jones points out, Netflix’s presentation showed a overly simple software. “They didn’t have the technical ability to do anything other than binary choices that didn’t lead anywhere. it would be very hard to build anything of any significance, or have any character development. So we nodded, and were admiring, and then left and went, “No fucking way are we going to do that”.
And then, to Brooker’s irritation, he came up with an idea that suited an interactive format perfectly – a metafictional riff on a game dev being consumed by his own explorations of free will and consequence. Scriptwriting began in earnest. “We realised it didn’t fit on a whiteboard, so we got another whiteboard,” he says. “Then that didn’t work, so we got flowchart software.”
It still wasn’t sophisticated enough for their needs. “Netflix was encouraging us to test the limits of what is feasible with the platform,” he explains. “So I ended up having to write the script outline in [open-source IF software] Twine.” Bandersnatch would act as a proof of concept, with the new engine, Branch Manager, created in conjunction with the episode. Brooker took it upon himself to program with Twine.“Luckily Charlie’s got a very large brain, and took to the coding very quickly,” producer Russell McLean says. “The script just kept getting bigger. It went from 100 pages, to 140 pages, to 170 pages.” Brooker began to write recaps into the script (the final episode often rewinds for you to try different choices), so it was “less boring to read,” he says. “We called them ‘previously ons’. But because it had to track what you’d done, I had to learn how to get it to do that.”
An unconventional, confusing shoot followed – the size of the script meant that a full readthrough before was impossible – in which continuity was a constant concern. But the edit proved most technically challenging. When the first version of Branch Manager arrived from Netflix, it was time to put the pieces together: fortunately, first assistant editor John Weeks, who had past experience making games, was on hand. “He went through and made a list of ‘This is great, but these are the things it would be helpful if it did’, and they’d come back with the next version a week later with all these things in it.” Weeks, too, was the person Brooker turned to when his script would crash – a first for the writers.
“The process became symbiotic, Bandersnatch helping Netflix’s engineers to push the technical limits”
“Because we had sequence names and numbers and letters for every visual sequences,” Jones says, “John would say things like, ’Well, you’ve gone to AAO2, and then it went to LG3, and then it went back to PVQ, so that’s why we’ve ended up at TV5’. And I’m going, ‘Charlie, what did he say? What just happened?’ So everyone was working in their own different specialism.” She whispers, halfjokingly: “It was a fucking nightmare!”
Eventually, the process became symbiotic, Bandersnatch’s ambition helping Netflix’s engineers to push the technical limits. At one point, there was concern about how much time there needed to be between presented choices to allow for the possible video sequences to buffer –”a minimum of a minute” at first, McLean says. They managed to pull it down to 30 seconds – “There are a couple of moments where it’s ten, but we’re cheating a bit as they’re slightly fake choices,” McLean notes.
The aim was always to make something that felt more like a film than a game, but that used the interactive aspect to involving – even chilling – effect. “The story you’re telling has to fit,” Brooker says, when we ask whether he sees this kind of interactive television becoming standard. “The trickiest thing is, who is your central character? And is it the viewer, basically? That’s the thing that I bump up against as the biggest sort of nut to crack. Because if not, you have to do something that limits or makes sense of the choices.
“It’s never going to replace wanting to watch, in the same way that computer games haven’t replaced books,” he continues. “It just exists in parallel. You’re always going to want stories that you’re just told. But this is a proof of concept that seems to work slickly, and is available on Netflix. Hopefully other programme makers and filmmakers will look at what we’ve done with this and go, ‘I didn’t like that bit, but I did like that bit’. And also, hopefully, there’ll be lots of viewers who will now go, ‘Oh, I enjoyed that. The concept of controlling something on my screen, that appeals to me. I’ve heard about these videogame things – maybe I’ll try one of them.’”