You absolutely don’t need a gaming console. Maybe it doesn’t work on some Smart TVs (via their Netflix app) but it worked just fine for me in my browser, and probably works on the bigger appliances like Roku and Firestick.
As for *Bandersnatch *and choose your own adventure movies, I give it a big thumbs down. *Bandersnatch *was novel for a minute but I really disliked having to “write” the story myself. I like consuming entertainment that was well-thought-out with a beginning and an end. Being able to choose my own path in the story brought me no joy.
I went through one and a half times, then quickly jumped online to read capsules of other possible paths.
Dragon’s Lair and it’s clones did this almost 40 years ago. We’ve had the concept and technology to do it for a long time, even at the consumer level. If it were ever to be more than a novelty, it already would be.
There are a LOT of modern games that are in effect, interactive movies. The Fallout series, the Mass Effect series, and even the Call of Duty games all have fairly involved single player games that are very close to interactive movies.
The real issue is that the degree of interactivity is too high for most casual viewers. People might really dig the whole Mass Effect story line and universe, but not everyone wants to learn how to do combat, how to drive the Mako around, etc…
For the most part, the Telltale Games products are what you’re looking for I think.
I think most of the world sees watching a movie as a passive activity. You would first have to change this mindset before it becomes the next big thing.
Minecraft Story Mode reminded me a lot of an interactive movie that you could play. It was fairly interesting but honestly I wish it had a bit more fighting like a traditional RPG.
The problem with Bandersnatch was that it followed the Choose Your Own Adventure books formula to a fault. Meaning, a lot of irrelevant choices that took you back to the main plot, a lot of dead ends that forced you to go back and start from the moment you took the “bad” choice, and a bit of path divergence at the end.
It was an interesting experiment, just not something I’d like to repeat on a regular basis.
While I think that plot interactivity will always be pretty much a novelty thing, I don’t get why studios are missing the train on the idea of customization. You want to watch a streamed movie? Here, choose between the PG-13 cut and the R-Rated one. Seems like a no brainer to me.
I watch Netflix by hooking my laptop to my TV. I used the laptop touchpad to control the choices. I have no idea how other systems might work.
Of course, the story was about a guy trying to develop a game based on a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so that might have been inevitable.
This was pretty much my assessment. It was interesting as a novelty and I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I would be inclined to watch too many others. I was disappointed when I realized that not all the choices let to different paths. Some made absolutely no difference to the plot. Others were dead ends and you had to go back.
As Stranger says, it would be difficult to develop a satisfying story that would benefit from many different divergent endings. You can’t foreshadow later plot developments in the early part of the plot that will work for all the narratives.
Watching DVDs, I’ve always been annoyed that you have to watch deleted scenes separately, rather than being able to opt for the theatrical cut or the extended cut with the deleted scenes inserted where they should be.
I think that listening/reading/watching a story, and taking part in a story, are two different and equally valid experiences, and there’s room in the world for both. I love RPGs, both computer and pen&paper, but I also like reading a book or watching a movie and thinking, “And then what happened?”
Japanese visual novels are probably the closest to this. They’re choose your own adventures but are for the most part entirely visual and free from having to do obligatory gameplay gimmicks like Western games have, as well as being able to make the plot go as completely off the rails as you want. The high quality ones actually are fully animated so they play out like an anime you can choose what to do and where to go at certain points.
There are adult examples of the genre, including Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier, and the arbitrariness is apparent at multiple spots where you, the reader, can choose between options where one is clearly the more prudent, i.e. hide in a closet vs charging into the zombie horde. There will almost certainly be a zombie in that closet, and a nick-of-time rescue from the horde when a biker gang suddenly materializes to run them all down.
I think I lost patience from one passage where the protagonist runs into a woman he had a crush on in high school and the choice is to stay with (and try to seduce) her or abandon her. If you choose the latter, it leads to a page that says more or less “What?! How dare you give up your chance to bang Lisa Johnson?! You disgust me, put this book down immediately. THE END.”
I thought Bandersnatch was clever because of the twist wherein Stefan began to realize he was being controlled by outside forces (you, the viewer). Also, no matter what choices you made, he was always going to kill his father eventually, bringing the very nature of “choosing” into question. Without the layers that Bandersnatch had, I would likely find the process of deciding where to take the story over and over to become extremely tedious. That’s the writer’s job, not mine.
You may not have watched all the endings. That’s not true of all of them.
[spoiler]He doesn’t kill his father in all the iterations. If he chooses to work together with others rather than by himself, he doesn’t commit any murders but the game is a failure. If he chooses to take the train with his mother, he dies as a child. However, in no iteration does he develop a successful game and live happily ever after. He either suffers some catastrophe, or the game isn’t successful. So it’s typically black for Black Mirror.
The twist I liked is if you choose “Netflix” for the agency that is controlling him. He then discovers that the viewer is controlling his actions, or that he is an actor being filmed for a game.[/spoiler]
How about some technology that would make the viewer see “depth” on the screen? You could wear something lightweight like disposable glasses with special lenses that would make it seem like objects were coming out of the screen directly at you! No one would ever settle for a two-dimensional image again.
You’re right. Those options you mentioned ended the story so abruptly that you pretty much had to go back and try again, though. So I kind of forgot they were there.
Kidding)