Choose your own algorithm
It feels like greater engagement, but there’s an agenda.
Used to be, in the olden days, entertainment was an interactive experience. There were fêtes, carnivals, circuses, fencing, theatre complete with rotten tomatoes and, for the more bloodloving among us, public executions. Then came TV and changed the game completely. Now in the Netflix age, you barely have to think, let alone interact. Algorithms recommend what you should watch, autoplay cues up the next episode, leaving you responsible for nothing but your passive gaze and the minimal requirement of not dozing off. You’re not even required to remember anything you’ve watched — we don’t have enough memory capacity to retain much of the deluge of content that’s available. I bet we’d watch the same show over and over again if the various streaming devices didn’t keep a record of what’s already been viewed.
The executives at Netflix, however, are forecasting a backlash to all this passivity, and rightly so when kids in their millions are turning to video games for a little more interaction.
At the end of 2017 the streaming giant piloted a selection of interactive kids shows, Puss in Boots and Buddy Thunderstruck, peppered with prompts asking young viewers to pick a narrative direction: should Puss kiss Dulcinea or shake her hand? Should Buddy and Darnell have a Wet Willie contest or work out and “get jacked”?
With the recent success of the dystopian series Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, Netflix has decided to invest more money in the gamification of TV. Bandersnatch tells the story of a video-game designer who tries to adapt a choose-your-own-adventure novel that drives its author insane. Netflix executives say there are many such stories being developed.
Writing in Wired Magazine, Peter Rubin suggests these executives may have cunning motives for supporting the development of “choose your own adventure” shows. Aside from allowing the streaming channel to compete with video games for the attention span of the next generation of adult viewers, who’ve spent all their free time playing games like Fortnite and strategising with their friends, Netflix also stands to gain from monitoring our choices.
“While they might not seem it, our narrative choices add up to a nearbiometric signature too,” writes Rubin. “Do we seek chaos? Play it safe? How long does it take us to select an option about breakfast cereal vs one where we can urge a character to commit suicide? Netflix already pores over every byte of viewer behaviour data. Now the buttons we choose, the prompts we pick, the tastes they suggest could become part of that great graph that defines how the company sees us. Television in the age of psychographics.”