26 Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on the ironically convergent path of choice games
The dream of “interactive cinema” has been around for more than half a century. In 1967, the Czech film Kinoautomat was screened at Expo 67 in Montreal, and the action was stopped nine times so that an onstage moderator could ask the audience to vote on what should happen next. The notorious home-invasion sexploitation FMV game Night Trap (1992) led directly to videogame age ratings, and more recently there have been more sophisticated footage-based games such as
Her Story (2015), and the occasional highprofile experiment such as Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic, a 2017 TV thriller starring Sharon Stone that could be watched in linear sequence or consumed non-linearly through an app. But if you put something on Netflix, it becomes mainstream. Has the age of the interactive movie finally arrived?
Bandersnatch, a nihilistic Black Mirror joint, is billed as an “interactive Netflix film”, but it’s also in thrall to videogames, and in some ways is itself a game about games. (If your PS4 functions as your portal to Netflix, the film uses images of DualShock controllers during the tutorial.) The word ‘Bandersnatch’, taken from Lewis Carroll’s poem The Hunting Of The Snark, was the title of a much-trumpeted but never-released ‘megagame’ from Imagine Software in the 1980s, and the film’s hero is an aspiring ZX Spectrum programmer in that era.
As we would expect from a Charlie Brooker-branded story, there are many game in-jokes. A star programmer releases a game called Metl Hedd, starring a mech that looks very like a bad drawing of a Metal Gear. And the hero is inspired by a fictional version of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, featuring numbered paragraphs with choices at the end and multiply branching storylines.
But Bandersnatch is not a Choose Your Own Adventure movie, despite the periodic binary choice points with a stress-inducing countdown timer. And it couldn’t be. To film the hundreds of scenes in a Choose Your Own Adventure book would be fantastically expensive, leading to a budget fatter than the most bloated blockbuster. The arithmetic is simple: if you aspire to truly independent, multiply branching storylines, then after only 14 binary choices, you need to have written 2^14 or 16,384 scenes. It can’t be done.
So Bandersnatch attempts to make a virtue of this limitation. Plot strands recombine (as they do even in the Choose Your Own Adventure books), and the viewer is forced into certain decisions and funnelled down a small set of narrow paths to one of five different endings. Yes, you can choose to have Frosties or Rice Krispies for breakfast, or to listen to the Thompson Twins or Now That’s What I Call Music 2, but once you are being asked whether you want to throw away some drugs or flush them, to throw tea over your computer or destroy your computer, it’s clear your agency has been compromised.
And this becomes the theme of the story itself. “There’s a cosmic flowchart that dictates where you can and where you can’t go,” announces the star programmer Colin, while the hero increasingly suspects he is being monitored and controlled by some unseen force – which, of course, is you, the viewer. Brainwashing conspiracy narratives, in this universe, turn out to be true.
Well, fictional characters have been suspecting they might be fictional characters in theatre and novels for centuries. And a story about the limitations of choice might be the only story you can really tell if you want to give the audience choices. Half a century ago in Kinoautomat, too, whatever the audience voted for the hero to do – to let a woman in a towel into his home, to ignore a policeman, to punch a porter – the protagonist would end up in an apartment that was on fire. It was read as a satire on the meaninglessness of political choice under communist rule, and – as we can also read Bandersnatch – on the meaninglessness of consumer choice everywhere.
So it seems that the promise of giving an audience choices, combined with the practical-mathematical impossibility of ensuring that every choice really can make a difference, drives the creators of such works themselves down converging paths to a single kind of story about how we have no choice at all. And neither do they. The unfeasibility of creating truly interactive movies leads to a genre in which all interactive movies are about the limits of our ability to change the world meaningfully. It is therefore a profoundly conservative and despairing genre.
“A story about the limitations of choice might be the only story you can tell if you want to give the audience choices”