The black mirror (video game)
In “Bandersnatch,” Brooker sometimes lets the viewer go back if a decision ends in Stefan’s death or artistic failure, much as you could always flip backward in a choose-your-own-adventure book, or reload from a save point in a video game. Everything is, after all, programmed even with advanced technology at work, there’s always going to be a limit to how much you can mimic real life through scripting and algorithms. Games like BioShock have poked at the fallacy of that concept.
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That’s the magic of video gaming, of course-the sense that you’re in control, that every right (or wrong) move is attributable to your thinking. Or are these choices so meaningless? With every click of a button, the story begins to snowball in weird and confusing directions, and the panicked sense of making the wrong pick every time increases the stakes. The latter offers Stefan a chance to create the game in-house, while the former stresses independence it’s the first significant choice of many the viewer will make, picking between options that flash on the screen (if you don’t choose within 10 seconds, the show randomly chooses for you).īut there are insignificant picks the viewer can make, too, such as which breakfast cereal Stefan eats, or what music he listens to, or how he talks with his father, Peter (Craig Parkinson), and his therapist (Alice Lowe). He visits a cool gaming company and meets his idol, Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), and the business-minded manager Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry). The story itself is a simple bit of meta-narrative: Stefan is an aspiring programmer, who is building a game called Bandersnatch based on a fictional choose-your-own-adventure novel by a psychotic, now-dead cult author. You could make choices, solve problems in different ways, and even arrive at different endings, much like you can in “Bandersnatch.” “Bandersnatch” is set in 1984, at the height of computerized text adventures such as The Hobbit and Zork, which first introduced gamers to worlds that didn’t entirely proceed on rails. Some of Black Mirror’s best episodes, such as “Fifteen Million Merits” and “ Playtest,” explored the horrifying limits of futuristic gaming.
THE BLACK MIRROR (VIDEO GAME) PC
Read: The universe of ‘Black Mirror’ coalescesīrooker started his career as a game critic and writer, working for PC Zone magazine in the 1990s. In “Bandersnatch,” the viewer is in control, nudging the main character, Stefan (Fionn Whitehead), to make various life choices, though the reality of the programming means there are only so many options. And it allows Black Mirror’s creator and writer, Charlie Brooker, to explore the blinkered sense of freedom that comes from gaming-video gaming, especially.
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It allows Netflix to harness its online platform in ways that classic broadcast television never could, letting subscribers choose plot options using their remote control and load every permutation of the story onto their site. It’s a piece of interactive television that feels like an obvious new direction both for Netflix and for Black Mirror. That is Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch,” a feature-length special that behaves like a choose-your-own-adventure book, proposing various branching story options that lead the audience down different paths, many of them grim. Given the onslaught of “more,” it stands to reason that eventually one television episode would offer the viewer thousands of choices all by itself. Its never-ending feed is packed with new shows, revived classics, licensed hits from other countries, and big acquisitions such as Black Mirror, a cult hit from the U.K.’s Channel 4 that tells warped Twilight Zone tales for an internet age.
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This piece contains spoilers for the Black Mirror special “Bandersnatch.”įor most of its existence, Netflix’s streaming television service has largely existed to pump out more and more content.