The Power to Choose Your Own Story
Have you ever watched a film and by the end it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth; Leaving you with thoughts like “If I was [them], I would’ve done [that] differently”? This form of hindsight bias from the viewer has plagued the forms of storytelling for nearly decades now, with others thinking they would have made decisions differently if they were the main character. While a failure in helping the viewer sympathize with the main character’s actions could be seen as a fault in the film’s production, we must also take into account the major task of putting ourselves within the unconventional situations of the main character as well, something that the hindsight bias often prevents us from achieving. The most detrimental affect of a hindsight mindset is that it can possibly ruin the reputation of what is a relatively great story.
So what possibly can be done today to overcome this goliath obstacle of condemning great stories from their artistic value? Why not give the viewer the power to make their own decisions! With the technological advancements within digital media evolving each day, we have become closer than ever to having the viewer more immersed within the story thanks to the beginning age of “interactive films”; providing viewers with more in-depth stories, variations in simple and complex decision making, and most importantly giving viewers the power to choose their own story.
Taking a look into the origins of this newly revived platform, we can see that interactive storytelling has been around for decades. During the creative renaissance of video games in the 1980’s, home computing systems such as the Commodore 64 and DOS allowed for great leaps in the technical design of virtual gaming, with new and exciting genres to play. One genre in particular allows the player to have nearly limitless freedom, giving them the power to unfold their own story based off of the decisions they have chosen; games found under this genre — like The Lord of the Rings adaptations — became cult classics due to the absurd amount of freedom and interactivity they give to the player, despite being deprived of visual quality. Fast forwarding to the present, technological innovations have created new mediums in which the “choose your own adventure” format could be reimagined through video streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix.
The YouTube web-series, Quest, utilizes this format of “choosing your own adventure” in an interesting way by using a series of hyperlinks at the end of each video clip that lead you to the consequences of your decision. The creator of Quest, David Mattox, had created this interactive series to help give the viewer a better understanding of one’s self; spending months working solely on the conclusion of this massive web of outcomes. Within this interactive world, you travel between the real world and “Arcadia” a fantasy-esque setting; along your journey, you come across a series of doors to take you back and forth between the two locations. David’s creation displays a greatly unique way of interactive entertainment; utilizing a item chart from the objects you collect through your journey as well as a health system to show off that each video is unique to your own story and with nearly limitless ways to approach the story every time. The decisions within the story range from topics like whether to sleep in or get up, which way you would like to attack and which door to go through; or could use more critical thinking like risking to save someone or leaving him to die. In the end, every decision you have made is weighed and you are given mental evaluation of your own character, which is impressive when seeing how many outcomes there could possibly be. However, the only thing seemingly missing within Quest is a coherent story to tell.
Netflix is also a medium in particular that offers its own engaging “choose your own adventure” storyline in the form of a Black Mirror film. For those who don’t know, Black Mirror is a Thriller-Drama series that plays around the concepts of modern technology if it were to be used against us, creating room for fourth wall breaks and nods to potential futures. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive film released in 2018 that follows the actions of aspiring game designer, Stefan Butler, during the 1980s. The film follows Stefan as he attempts to recreate a faithful video game adaptation of Jerome F. Davies’ “Bandersnatch”, a fictional choose your own adventure book. Though, the closer Stefan gets to perfecting Jerome’s vision, he finds himself thrown into the same delusional conspiracies that led to Jerome’s demise, from the realization that he is not in control of his own actions. We watch and interact as Stefan is constantly helped by acclaimed game designer, Colin Ritman, who tries to free Stefan from the make-believe reality he is concealed in. The closer the viewer gets to finishing Bandersnatch, the more Stefan realises he is not in control of his actions and someone is controlling him, that “someone” is you.
Depending on the viewer’s actions, you have the ability to unravel the haunting past of Stefan’s Mother’s death with the help of his therapist, Dr. Haynes; Delve deeper into Jerome’s conspiracies of mind control; or destroy the video game altogether and end the cycle. The variety of decisions the player gets to choose from begin as simple as choosing which cereal you want or what music to listen to; but as you reach the climax, the decisions become increasingly complex and riveting, like whether or not you should take LSD and jump off of a building or deciding whether to bury or to chop up the person you just straight up murdered; quite the turn.
Bandersnatch is compiled with five separate endings, with a maximum runtime of the film having more than five hours of content. Many endings range from Stefan being discontent due to the poor reviews written about his game, jumping off of a twelve story building, or going to prison for murder. Though, the story has a trial and error aspect within it for whenever you get a less desirable ending, Stefan says “I want to try again” and you are taken to a screen where you can replay key moments in decision making; In addition to this, it seems that Stefan somewhat remembers what has happened before, which plays a crucial part into Colin and Stefan finding out that they are stuck in a game. Within the true ending, we see a delusional Stefan in jail for murder but his game manages to receive a perfect 5 out of 5 rating. The film then flash-forward to the present day, where Colin’s child, Pearl Ritman, is creating an Interactive game for Netflix based off of the crimes of Stefan; the exact game we had just played. The viewer is given the decision to destroy her computer and end the vicious cycle once and for all. By the end, we are confused on what to believe, whether the actions of Colin were truly delusional, dissociative disorders since the events were real within the fictional universe or if Stefan, Colin, and Jerome truly saw themselves being controlled like a video game; we will never know.
Even though the two projects — Quest and Bandersnatch — are far from perfect when it comes to creating a balance of effective storytelling and meaningful decision-making; their forms of interactive storytelling can be viewed only as the tip of the iceberg when exploring the possibly limitless creative potential this genre has within films. Though I don’t see this interactive genre of “letting the audience choose” take over the film industry entirely, I still believe that this mode of storytelling will evolve over the coming years, allowing the audience to make decisions more freely than previously conceived and forming their own full stories to tell through the endless databases we can build within. Maybe then, when we finish a film, instead of saying “I would’ve done that differently”, we can say “I should’ve done that differently”.
