Bandersnatch and Free Will

Black Mirror has come a long way from its edgy days on Channel 4. It feels as if Charlie Brooker’s modern day Twilight Zone has grown up an awful lot since 2011, when we watched the British Prime Minister screw a pig on national television, to displaying some of the most touching and terrifying critiques of our interconnected world. Now the show that delves into the darkest aspects and potential for technology has gone interactive with its latest episode, Bandersnatch.

Its interactivity makes Bandersnatch a very different experience, meaning the viewer is now a player, which also means I can finally write about this amazing series. The whole episode revolves around the game development experience, following a young man called Stefan in 1984 as he completes a video game adaptation of his favourite choose-your-own-adventure book – the titular Bandersnatch.

In perhaps an obvious choice for an interactive experience deriving from the choose-your-own-adventure genre, Bandersnatch’s core focus on about free will and individual agency. As the episode progresses, Stefan begins to realise that he is not in control of his own destiny, and other characters feed these anxieties. But, being made how it is, Bandersnatch is ambiguous as to the end goal of these musing on self-determination: is Stefan suffering psychosis from his self-imposed isolation to finish his game on time? Could it be his childhood trauma? Or is there indeed something deeply sinister and fourth wall breaking about the whole thing?

Early on in the episode, Stefan meets a famous games developer called Colin, who is the main source of this questioning of free will, either directly or implicitly. Right at the start, Colin is working on a game, which crashes during a demonstration. Colin offers an explanation, and the player continues the story. But if the player keeps looping back to this beginning scene, Stefan will offer Colin the explanation as to what the issue with his game is, leaving Colin confused. This will escalate further and further to the point where Colin won’t give the player the opportunity to offer the explanation, instead sighing in boredom and simply, flatly stating “Oh no, it broke.”

Colin, whilst a vocal advocate for free will (as demonstrated by his rant about PAC-man), he seems to be heavily invested in denying Stefan freedom of choice during their interaction. When invited back to his flat, Colin will ignore the players choice to not take acid, and during a standoff over who will jump from the balcony, where the gameplay loop will force the player to make Colin jump to his death.

House of Tomorrow/Netflix, 2019

The film continues with this illusion of free will, as there is no way to give Stefan a happy ending. Stefan will always: die, breaks free of his control by killing his dad and end up in prison, or submits to societal control but will not complete the game to a reasonable standard. Sometimes, however, there is an ending that implies that the control isn’t being exerted by society or the universe, but the game Bandersnatch itself. Colin’s grown up daughter in the present day teams up with Netflix (oooh, the meta) to recreate Bandersnatch as an interactive story, but starts to suffer from the same lack of personal agency that Stefan suffered from, with the ultimate ending being to either pour tea on the computer, or destroy it.

Metanarratives like the inclusion of Netflix occur earlier on, with the player able to try to explain that Stefan isn’t in control, and that he is on someone’s television. Television being used as a control point for people, along with being a surveillance tool is directly linked to George Orwell’s 1984. This link is made even more obvious with 1984 being the setting of the episode.

In a way, this leads on to the idea that the game is a source of control in of itself. It is claimed by the creators that there are millions, if not trillions of pathways that players can take in Bandersnatch. If true, this is a massively daunting prospect. By providing a simply overwhelming amount of potential choices to the player, Bandersnatch is forcing them into a small pool of more desirable options. This seems to play on Scott Adams idea of the Confusopoly that phone providers employ to get customers to adhere to a few simple, profitable packages.

Eventually, though, I got bored of choosing Stefan’s fate like the capricious God I am, and went to play something else. But perhaps a lack of choice is what players are used to, or even want. Andy Kelly wrote a fantastic article about how the lack of real choice in TellTale’s Batman was, despite his previous gripes with the developer’s games, genuinely enjoyable: “Even though the story will end the same way for everyone … these little choices—and the ripples they send through the narrative—are enough to make the experience feel like more than just passively watching a TV show”

Could we apply this logic to Bandersnatch? The ultimate ending for Stefan is that he never gets a happy ending, always unable to enjoy his success. But by allowing the player to make narrative decisions, both major and minor, it briefly provides the thrill of having control, no matter how much these choices ultimately don’t matter.