Netflix's Bandersnatch;is it a game?

[Lackrobat]

On Friday 28th of December Netflix released Bandersnatch,a feature length Black Mirror episode.It's a choose your own adventure experience with the viewer(player) tasked to make key decisions that drastically affect outcome though out the movie. Does this qualify as a game? or an interactive movie?

[PriestTroit]

It's a game in the strict sense of the word, but a really bad one. It's those multiple guess problems you used to get in school. There's only one right answer. Don't choose it, you lose.

[Erebus]

I disagree. You can't find one of those in the gaming section, board games section, card games section or in a hobby shop. Ya wanna know why? Because it's a book.

[Ice-Flame]

It's as much a game as any other interactive medium. Unless I'm mistaken, that is what makes a game after all, user interaction for entertainment purposes.

[ciderPunk1877]

What if I told you...

That "Choose Your Own Adventure" books were, in fact, games. A thing can have two descriptions. "Book" and "game" aren't mutually exclusive.

[ciderPunk1877]

Yes, it's a game.

Remember those old text adventure games from the 80s? They're not novels. They're games.

This is a game.

[Justince]

It's a game in the same sense that Night Trap on Sega CD was a game. You watch, you interact when it tells you to for a few predetermined events. Not exactly cutting edge.

[isturbo1984]

Is it a game? Yes. Is it a video game? No.

[Erebus]

No, it's an interactive film. It's just like those books that let you make the decisions in it. That's still a book.

Video games are primarily an intereactive experience with controllers.

[Doom Video Vault]

Tim is pretty spot on and I do remember the old CD era of games that had "Interactive movies" type stuff but never really worked well.

[twidget]

Seems relevant.

[Inkdipper]

It's a game in that there are "failure states" and it is interactive. But in my opinion I would not classify it as a game. More of an interactive experience, but the line has become more and more blurred with how games are made these days. I can see something like this being easily applied to VR and I think that is the future for this sort of thing.

[Dub-Z]

Just bumping this after seeing that Activision Blizzard's Spencer Neumann was poached by Netflix to be their CFO. I'd say they're confident that interactive programming will be their rock going forward.

The pessimist in me would say to expect a future where even watching a show is going to be full of recurrent spending, and I can already picture fans of film needing to have their own version of the "walking sim" debate about whether this counts as film, and companies saying eye roll-inducing, EA-style "[viewers] just aren't interested in linear [movies] anymore" things to their investors when non-interactive movies "just aren't profitable enough" etc.

[Dub-Z]

Sure, and Netflix is clearly making a push towards this, with their old Telltale deal in the mix. It might even be a good thing in terms of accessibility and giving a demographic of people something that traditional game designers just aren't interested in creating. It might even let most of the philosophies around that push go where they aren't a detriment to an engineering-oriented mind's focus on mathematical precision and gameplay development, or player expectations.

At some point we're debating whether it's Dragon's Lair or a DVD menu, and even games like Dragon's Lair are appreciated more for their Bluth animation and Laserdisc novelty (shout out to Time Gal). Same for Night Trap's nostalgic controversy and B movie appeal... something which, to this day, is better experienced by just watching the video files than by playing it. However, in recent years with games like Her Story and Roundabout, maybe technology and design simplicity is finally ready for FMV games to be a valid thing.

[Damian Cunliffe]

Nah, it's a TV show with a few quick time events.

It's the same as those old books where you'd choose your option then turn to the appropriate page.

"To go left, turn to page 33"
"To go right, turn to page 71"