Bandersnatch, where is the game? Ideas to improve.

It is impossible to work on Gamification and Game Design and avoid discussing Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. It's not because Bandersnatch brings an innovative format, far from it, it's because Netflix has placed a bet on interactive movies, and has chosen the game as the angular stone to move its plot. This denotes a trend towards discussing seriously the gaming culture from the perspective of the industry and game design, which is not new in the Black Mirror universe, but also it gives a serious distribution platform for a format that has relied on less massive means of distribution. A boost from Netflix is a bet towards standardizing the interactive movie format and opening the doors for other experiments.

First of all, I enjoyed watching the interactive movie and got my fair share of wow moments watching it, but I feel there are some aspect which could be improved and from which we could learn to advance the format forward. So, this is not a review about the overall quality of the movie, but about what we can learn from it. Bandersnatch is an experiment and I will treat it as such. And of course, spoilers alert!

What is Bandersnatch?

Let's not fall into calling it a Gamified movie. Of course, it could fall into its definition, but that would mean that someone decided to apply gamification techniques and methodologies in the conceptualization of the movie, which I doubt. Why? Because it's inspiration is the Choose your own adventure game and the interactive drama. Unless we would be naive enough to say that choose your own adventure books where gamified books, I believe the game mechanics involved in the "choose a path" format are too simple to actually believe there was serious though in terms of gamification. This doesn't take the merit away from the movie, but is important to avoid creating further confusion.

So, where it stands? Is it a game or a movie? The thing is, games have been borrowing for so long elements from the film industry that it could seem they are one and the same. But in terms of reception, there are differences. Let's see how the game industry evolved towards a more film-like format. Arcade games could have a narrative, but it was based on a comic vignettes format, and where short strips followed by large portion of action-based segments. This games had a story, but it was the agency the engine of the experience. The, PS1 appeared and longer games with more film-like features appeared. Remember the Final Fantasy VII cutscenes where you could leave your controller aside and watch the pre-rendered clips. We now had this 55 hour long stories with bits of films in key parts of the narrative. But the clip was a reward for progress in gameplay and were short.

Now let's jump forward to Metal Gear Solid 4, one of the first games where the players actually used the phrase "that is not a game, is a movie" as a form of criticism. The game had long cutscenes where you could leave your controller in the bed or couch for minutes at a time. The game took, for long periods of time, the agency away from the player, and players felt it almost as a passive media. Of course, there was more gameplay time than cutscenes, but this long cutscene format create a wave of criticism because it felt less as a game and more like a movie.

Then you have Quantic Dreams' interactive dramas. Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human are sold, not as games, but almost as interactive movies. Many players actually don't like this format for that very reason, but others love it. This is not a rare thing: Telltale Games had explored a bit with this format and Until Dawn brought this idea to the horror genre. They all had the same influence: the choose your own adventure game (CYOA). These games, which many have the multiple endings format, have a tree structure that resembles the classic CYOA book structures. Detroit even shows the tree structure to the player in the meta game! But why are they still in the line of the game vs movie discussion? Because interactive scenes still have agency. They are based on QTE (Quick Time Event) mechanics where failing to press the correct commands makes the characters fail their actions and the movie changes accordingly.

So, if these games still make the players wonder about their "gaminess", what can we say about classic CYOA books and Bandersnatch. Bandersnatch is closer in format to a movie, as the player's agency is small and quick. It brings the exploration element of a "choose your path" mechanic, but the main reception format is still predominantly passive. It has game elements, without turning itself into a game. Of course, as everything in reception theory, many will disagree and will think that this basic mechanic is enough to call Bandersnatch a game, but let's agree it's in the farther side of the game-movie spectrum.

What makes it closer to a game than any other CYOA?

Having said that, there is a more gamy feeling to this movie, even though its mechanics are less game-like than several CYOA books (in some you would have to read the book with some dice and would have to build a character first!). The reason is its underlying topic. The main characters is a game designer coding a game based on a CYOA game. This creates a cognitive conssonance with the mechanics of the movie from the very beginning, when the movie teaches you "how to play". The receptor/viewer is in a game-mood, and is ready to play the Black Mirror game. This is brilliant, as it helps to state the frame of mind you need to approach the experience. But, what is your game goal? Before answering this question, let's delve a bit more on the topic of the movie.

Badersnatch is about Meta

Meta narratives are old. Breaking the fourth wall is not something invented by Deathpool, and a narrative format that talks about itself can be found in The Quixote and before. They became really popular in the post-modern era and have great appeal if done right. There are no new topics in Bandersnatch, but this is probably the first Meta CTOA, which makes it special. In a very Black Mirror way, the relationship between viewer and characters begins as expected from the format, but becomes darker as time progresses. The viewer becomes conscious of its role as the puppet master, but then becomes challenged by the character itself. It is not just about exploring different narrative pathways, it becomes more personal, as it should be in the Black Mirror universe. In this way, the choose your path mechanic becomes, not only a way of giving agency to the viewer, but its means of communication with the movie world. The game mechanic itself serves the purpose of breaking the fourth wall, which gives the whole meta element a great level of identification, which makes it more "playful". This is the stronger point of the movie, but also, the weakest, as will see a little bit later.

Bandersnatch's choice architecture. Are they meaningful choices?

One of the most important elements in game design is the meaningful choices architecture. A game is played in the brain, and the tension of the choices you make is what creates meaningful play. This is really important in CYOA games, as the only moments of agency are about choosing paths that lead to different endings, some of them leading to a Game Over discatastrophic (bad ending) scenario. And Bandersnatch has its share of great meaningful choices, but also has some really flawed moments which could be improved in the future. First, let's understand how CYOA games create paths of choice.

As I stated earlier, CYOA games have a tree structure (a google search will yield several tree architectures that have been identified by the critics and writers of the genre). It works kind of like a rhizomatic labyrinth, where the players can't see the walls or the limits of the narrative space, so they have to press on until they find a death point, which usually results in death. CYOA games are discatastrophic, almost every ending leading to an awful result, to create this "game over" state and the need for replayability. Finding the way through this labyrinth of bad endings is the goal of the game, which means paying attention to every little detail to make the best choices possible. Now, most of the choices are built on incomplete information, so that players can't deduce their way to the ending, but are full of hints, so players can create expectation and feel like their choices mattered.

In video games this is harder to accomplish, as many choices are actual illusions of choice. A character asks a question and you have three choices of answer, but every choice leads to the same outcome. TellTale Games has actually created a system where the game tells you that a character will remember your answer to help the player identify the meaningful choices from the fake ones. In video games this happens because, to maximize player agency, you need to reduce the cutscene responses, and need to give the player a sense of control over its character and its responses, but this is something that CYOA books had no need for, as every choice was a moment of truth and the rest was, well, storytelling.

Here is were Bandersnatch didn't live to its enormous potential. Again, I liked the movie, but I feel it could be a masterpiece with some proper game design theory backing some of the movie-game decisions. So, let's see. The format of the movie should be closer to the books, where every choice should be carefully designed, but many were just for flair. You are not impersonating the character like in a video game, and the format is sufficiently self contained that it didn't need to create filler material just to give the sense of illusion of choice.

The first choices... learning the game

The movie has a tutorial which states the mechanism of gameplay, which is too simple to need further explanation. And then there is the first choice: select your cereal. As a way of showing the system in work, it is nice, and it probably is really interesting for someone with little experience with the genre. But the second choice (select the music to hear), is just a re-elaboration of this motive. An experience CTOA gamer will have some kind of expectation towards this choice: will choosing one or the other affect the storyline meaningfully? There is a hint where Collin asks Stefan which music does he listen to when designing, but this is a fake choice with little incidence in the actual narrative, to the best of my knowledge. And it repeats itself in the record store!

Granted, this is really important when Stefan is acknowledging he is losing control over small actions, like selecting cereal or the music to listen, which returns the value to the choice, but it could have had more incidence in the storyline. But there is a second problem with these choices: there is little context to make an informed decision. Those choices are random, which is not a great way to introduce the mechanic. You have no background information for whether to choose one or the other cereal. And this keeps happening with other decisions in the movie. Many are just gut decisions, as the one where Stefan has to choose whether to jump through a window or fight the psychiatrist. Even one of the most important choices in terms of storyline provides little background for one of the possibilities:

When the viewer has to select between the bifurcation symbol or "Netflix", all the context of the movie has been revolving around the symbol that drove the book's author insane, so the movie is nudging you to choose the symbol, the other is just a gut choice. Only when you replay the scene you explore the other path, as the choice is irrelevant anymore. And this is a major choice! It should be better designed, as the viewer can't really speculate around the consequences of its decisions. And that is my main issue with the movie: many times I felt like I was making decisions just to see what happened, I had no control over the narrative, which, could change abruptly depending on some choices...

What is the game goal?

Black Mirror is a heavily philosophical dystopian universe revolving around technology and psychology, which means that finding a good ending per se could not be a game goal for the seasoned viewer. I almost felt that it would be more rewarding to find the worst ending possible. Many state that the ending with the rabbit and the mom is the main one, but I can't feel why it should. It was not hard to find and it was not more satisfying than other endings (killing the father seemed more appropriate for the mood of the universe).

Now, when you enter a CTOA game, you need to read the story to find the adventure: the game goal unfolds as you progress, but there is always a leit motiv. In the Bandersnatch book it seemed to revolve around the demon PAX, which seems to be the first real motive the viewer can relate to (but I can't be certain, the movie does an awful job doing the book justice). But sadly enough, the demon motive is not well developed. Then comes the meta relationship between the character and the viewer (and the whole Matrix/Colin thing), but again, it is not the only motive and it feels lacking (I will develop this idea further). Then there is the relationship of the character with its father and mother. There is not a central topic to call a game goal, which makes you explore in a,"let's see what happens" way. There are of course tense choices like when Colin tells Stefan which one should jump from the balcony (I found it irrelevant, as both hinted to the same conclusion, but still found it tense), but again, I was not choosing with a clear purpose in mind: I was reacting to the movie. Maybe this was the purpose, but I feel it could have been better if there where clear narrative goals.

Branching Realities

I struggle with these aspect of the movie the most, because it created cognitive dissonance in my experience. There is no prior world that could evolve differently according to Stefan choices, it is actually multiple realities overlaped, in which the safe password could be PAX, TOY or PAC. There is no one storyline, but branching stories with little reference one to another: they live in different universes. In one, Stefan is, unknowingly, and actor of a Netflix movie, in another, he is part of the PAC experiment. CYOA games allow for this possibility of course and there is no rule against that, but I found that a bit distracting and, again, I felt I lost control over my choices. I had to choose from different universes without a hint towards what those universes meant. Now, I'm sure this might have worked for more explorer player types, if you want to Bartle this a bit, but this cognitive dissonance created, in my point of view, a missed opportunity for a clear statement, as you can find in the Black Mirror series episodes.

The problem with this branching realities is that they easily lose focus of the movie's exposition. There is nothing hinting to PAC before it becomes the dream and it unfold a narrative that can live without Collin, the psychiatrist or Bandersnatch itself. Many realities forget the main idea of the plot: the game designer struggling to get the game right. The TOY reality that leads to the train ending take the small element of the mother's dead and develops it by sacrificing the other interesting subplots. As a viewer, you need to make a concession: if you want to take advantage of the many sub-themes, you need to watch every reality.

And branching realities isn't really a topic in the movie! The is no in depth discussion of how CYOA games allow for this. There are hints, for example when Stefan talks about the conspiracy storyline in Bandersnatch, as it was a different storyline altogether, but it requires a lot of attention and focus on details to actually appreciate that. With some really interesting topics more at hand, I feel a single branching reality plot could allow for much more, if focused correctly.

The missed opportunity

Here I will be a bit more subjective, I must admit, because I kept thinking what would have made this movie more fulfilling for me, so feel free to disagree. I felt the movie main criticism is given by the movie itself in a very meta way. The first bad ending is a must-see-ending, when Stefan (or the viewer?) chooses to work in the building of the publisher and the game receives a 0 stars review. The criticism revolves around not giving enough content to each path for it to seem relevant: many choices, many endings, but each one feels short. It is a must-see-ending because it's behind a fake choice (I would love to know the percentage of people that chose to accept the publisher deal), so it is pretty improbable you missed it. It was built as a dominant choice that led to a bad ending (a mechanism actually used in many CTOA games to make you lose the game, which makes experienced players really suspicious of good stuff). And I felt like that, many underdeveloped narrative paths along the way.

Now, the whole exposition of the movie revolves around this kid trying to make justice to a great book by a controversial author. And the first bad ending gives a sense of game goal: try to get the game published with the most stars possible. Now, this develops into this weird author that had this idea of he being controlled by someone else, which is reinforced by Collin as well. And this climax when Stefan sense he's being controlled, breaking the fourth wall and building upon an ironic meta structure, where the viewer actually knows what is happening. Until this moment, the movie was actually hitting a good nerve for me: there was a solid idea from where to build a great experiment. I started anticipating a power struggle between the character and my choices, which actually develops further when the character doesn't do what the viewer chooses.

But here the movie unravels in the multiple disconnecting paths of the branching realities, many which just forget all the exposition and build their own micro narrative. I found an ending and just chose another path to see what happened, but the main motiv that got me hooked was poorly developed. For a Black Mirror movie, it shouldn't have been about the fantastic elements, the time travel and the mirrors, which break the whole technological dystopianism of the series: it should have been about the struggle of a designer building a CYOA game, but also struggling with being part of one. PAX could have been in the center of the whole narrative, and not just a demon that appeared if you typed his name as the password. The relationship between Stefan, Colin, Pax and the viewer could have represented the doom for all of them, including the viewer.

What I would have done... my own path

The tragedy for me in this discatastrophic movie would have been that, as a player, I am build to find the good ending, to try to help the character fulfill its goals. When presented the first time with the possibility of killing the father, my gamer instincts were to try and save him, to help the character avoid stupid choices. So I would have tapped into that feeling and build the tragedy from there.

Imagine that the character is ever trying to avoid being controlled by the viewer, so, when presented with some hard choices, it would rebel against the viewer and do the awful choice instead. The movie could have built over this power struggle, where the demise of the character could have been a consequence of the viewer trying to save him. The more the viewer intervened, the more the character would fall, but the better the Badnersnatch game got. A choice between the game and the character: the viewer could help the game become better by messing with the character, or save the character but make the game an utter failure. The viewer would know that the character would fight the decisions, so it could start forcing the narrative by making other characters do stuff, or by affecting the world.

In this sense, the other storylines, like the relationship with the mother and father, could be psychological queues to push the viewer into allowing the character to do awful stuff. It would have become more than a labyrinth, it would have been a psychological warfare between characters, producers and viewers. Maybe in a scene the movie presented two choices, but when you try and chose the better one, the cursor would automatically return to the bad one, so the viewer would have to find a way to beat the producers and ultimately be able to choose that decision, probably by making the character suffer. Viewers would become players as they tried to solve the movie problem to try to regain control of it, but by doing so, the characters would suffer and PAX would grow stronger: the need for control of the player would cause the dystopian ending, giving it a very Black Mirror feeling to the movie. At the end, the viewer should have been PAX.

Again, this would have been my creative choice, building upon meaningful choices where the viewer could make more informed choices, but where these choices would create the psychological tension that this universe is characterized for. How much would you allow the characters to suffer to regain control over the game? How many deaths and horror would you bring into the world to make Bandersnatch a gaming sensation? How much would you push the character into madness by trying to save him? This would have given me a clearer purpose in the game, a game goal which I could have played with. The elements were there, the exposition and the intention of the movie allowed for it, but I feel the bizarre beat the interesting at the end, and a great opportunity was lost. Obviously, this is easier said than done!

There is of course much more to say about this movie (the easter eggs, the timed choice resource, the replayability value vs the forced replay mechanic, the remembrance of the previous paths, and so on), but I wanted to focus in the choose your path mechanic, the main aspect behind CYOA games, because the mechanic is easy, but to pull it off correctly it requires a lot of careful thought and great storytelling abilities.

***

I hope this will not be a one shot experiment by Netflix. And they should definitely start working with game designers in their teams to create better stuff. A Quantic Dream / Netflix alliance could create amazing content, for example. There's much to be eager for!