On the 28th of December 2018, Netflix announced an interactive film under the ‘Black Mirror’ branding, written by Charlie Brooker, and available on a number of interactive platforms, from smart phones and smart TVs to laptops. As the ‘Black Mirror’ name suggests, it tends to be a dark and cynical view of the effect of technology on people and society, but episodes in the series have also been very prophetic about the ways that technology can be mis-used, and their long-term effects/consequences can be misunderstood. ( https://www.indy100.com/article/china-scorecards-citizen-2020-behaviour-black-mirror-charlie-brooker-nosedive-8546816 ) 


At the time, mainstream media tended to call it ‘new technology’, which isn’t quite correct – there have been a number of academic research and commercial explorations of the ‘interactive film/tv’ space for decades. When asked about this, Charlie Brooker told BBC Sounds that he remembered the Laserdisc arcade game ‘Dragon’s Lair’ from 1983, and the FMV (Full Motion Video) computer games from the 1990s. (the Sony PlayStation 1 interactive movie ‘X-Files’ was published in 1998 and had sold over a million copies by 2013). He said that Netflix had suggested the interactive film medium to him based on their previous experience with children’s cartoons: Minecraft: Story Mode being one example amongst the titles currently available. Charlie also said that he didn’t think that interactive media would replace traditional linear story-telling, which echoes the way that CD-ROMs were widely predicted to replace books, but ultimately didn’t. He described ‘Bandersnatch’ as ‘...a very simplified game..., not new, but finessed...’, and the seamless transition through binary choices was handled well by the Netflix implementation, with no ‘fades to black’ or ‘buffering’ pauses.  


The history of interactive media probably starts with live story-telling, where people would vary the story to reflect the biases of the audience. In print, the ‘choose your own adventure’ book is an example of interactivity without the ‘digital technology’ assumption that people today often assume to be essential. One of the first interactive films was presented at the Czech Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, Canada, and allowed choices to be made by the audience at significant moments in the film.  In the 1970s, a ‘performance film’ event was featured at the NaSTA TV conference in Hull, England, where the performers had two film projectors with ‘42nd Street’ on them, and they used a sliding shutter to move from one projector to the other, repeating and reversing sections of the film in real-time, prompted by the audience’s requests. In the 1990s, Glorianna Davenport, researching media at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, USA, developed the concept of having ‘default’ choices in case the viewer did not make a choice, and this was one of the features of ‘Bandersnatch’. In 1998, there had been enough activity in academic research for Janet H. Murray to write a book called ‘Hamlet on the Holodeck’, again based on work at the MIT Media Lab, where she reviewed ‘the future of narrative in cyberspace’ and described interactive media as an emerging technology. In the 2000s, several interactive TV projects were produced under the EU R&D Framework programme. You can see one example of the current state-of-the-art at http://www.advancedstories.net - there are many other projects in progress around the world.  


BBC Sounds asked Charlie Brooker if Bandersnatch was ‘drama or a game?’, and he replied that it was ‘an experiment’. With over 50 years of history, interactive drama has developed from academic research to trending on social media. What happens next? Imagine a silent film fan from the early part of the 20th Century trying to comprehend a singalong showing of ‘Mamma Mia 2’ in the early 21st Century...  


Timeline 

1967  Czech Film   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinoautomat  

1983 Dragon’s Lair https://www.polygon.com/videos/2017/10/27/16537352/stranger-things-season-2-dragons-lair-history 

1998 PS1 X-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files_Game

1998 Hamlet on the Holodeck https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/hamlet-on-the-holodeck-twenty-years-later 

2000  EU Framework programme  https://www.eurescom.eu/services/management-of-european-rd-projects/past-projects/nm2.html 

2018 Netflix Black Mirror https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/70264888 

2020 Points https://www.indy100.com/article/china-scorecards-citizen-2020-behaviour-black-mirror-charlie-brooker-nosedive-8546816