Like many people today, I woke up to many recommendations to check out the new Black Mirror release, Bandersnatch. After going through the piece and reaching a number of different endings, I really enjoyed it and think that this really is an experimental progression in the Netflix medium.
I really like experimental things. I really like breaking the 4th wall and the magic circle. I like concepts around multiplicity. I’ve loved every Black Mirror season up to this point as well. So really, it was almost a given that I would like it. At the same time, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch adds interactive elements into the Netflix experience, and I think the word-of-mouth results validate the success in this concept’s ability to foster greater audience engagement. In this age of social media, greater audience engagement is quite visibly linked to virality, and surely in the following days reviews will be mixed as to whether the engagement was a marketing gimmick or a legitimate advancement in digital media (wait, that’s already happening here and here). I would argue that this is irrelevant — though the use was a brilliant growth-hacking trick to foster engagement of both the audience and likely the media without doing anything beyond producing the piece. It creates virality from its novelty on the platform if nothing else, even if the concept of interactive theater or digital media has been around for a while.
Image pulled from https://www.express.co.uk
At the same time, I think that the concept of experimental use of interactive media in new platforms is something that can be immensely powerful when done correctly. It’s only a matter of time until an experience like this is ported to a virtual reality (VR) experience. Beyond that, who knows? AI interaction? Digital Asset integration into digital worlds à la “Ready Player One” or Black Mirror’s own “Fifteen Million Merits”? On a more social level, is this leading us toward or away from Bratton’s concept of the Black Stack? These are some of the more intense questions that I don’t think we can answer yet. But the concept of creating more interactive and engaging media is something I’ve thought about for a while, and thought I’d share another old piece that I wrote back in my undergrad for a digital literature class. I don’t think I’ve put it up anywhere else (although I’ll also post this to my Medium page), so I figured I would share it as some of my older work that has taken on particular relevance today. It also talks about some older works that integrate interactive elements into different forms of literature if Bandersnatch left you hungry for more experiences like it.
Also, this is an older piece, so I’m posting without edits and simply adding additional commentary — but I’m happy to talk about the content with anyone that finds it interesting! It was also produced for an academic context, so some of the language may be a bit stuffy. I’m also happy to clarify any terms after the fact as well.
If the concepts of multiple realities and multiplicity are interesting to you, you may also be interested in a theoretical piece I wrote about integrating the concept into policy.
The Potential of Interactive Elements of Ergodic Literature to Increase Reader Engagement
Barbara Laurel’s idea of an “Interactive Fantasy System” was a very early look into the possibility of creating a tie between the audience and artistic or literary work through interaction with the work which later influences events within the work. The idea of interactive games taking advantage of engagement of the audience has been expanded on with the creation of video games, although many video games still follow a linear storyline and offer very little in the way of choice outside of the specified objectives. There have been several games developed recently which incorporate the elements discussed in Laurel’s work, in different ways and with varying storyline effects. Other important factors to be explored are the effects that interactivity has on the audience of the developed works, and whether the use of interactivity within games creates a stronger connection between the audience and literary work than those which do not employ interactive elements.
An important connection to make early on is the connection between video games and the concept of ergodic literature, coined by Espen Aarseth within Cybertext — Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997). The concept of ergodic literature involves works in which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (Aarseth, 1997). Examples of trivial efforts would be turning the pages of a book to continue the story, or the movement of eyes from side to side. With video games, controls must be learned and manipulated in order to traverse the texts, and some skill development is involved. In addition, some games require the reader to utilize a degree of logic and problem solving, while others require interaction in the form of decision-making. All of these examples of requirements of the user in order to traverse the text place video games squarely in the realm of ergodic literature as described by Aarseth.
One of the differences between ergodic and nonergotic literature explained by Aarseth is that when there is engagement and interaction with the text, these actions influence the story; some events become more or less accessible depending on the interactions chosen by the reader (Aarseth, 1997). This is particularly evident within a particular genre of cultural texts — video games. While many video games offer a distinct and single flow storyline in their programming and design, some more recently developed games are employing choice and interaction as integral to advancing the storyline of the game while also influencing and branching particular elements of the story. Examples of the first type of video game include the Call of Duty series campaign modes, which follow a strict storyline and requires the reader to progress through set missions in order to play out the story, also requiring the reader to replay missions until successfully completing the linear progression of events to move to the next segment (Call of Duty Black Ops, 2010). An example of the second type of video game that allows differing storylines based on interaction would be games such as Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and The Walking Dead games (Fallout 3, 2008, Fallout: New Vegas, 2010, The Walking Dead, 2012). These games employ interaction with the reader in very different but highly significant ways, each of which will be explored in more detail.
Within the Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas games, the reader is asked upon entering the game to create their character, giving the reader immediate choice of name, gender, and various aesthetic qualities of their character. The reader also specifies certain skills that the character will begin the game with, which have an effect on later gameplay. As the games progress, the reader makes a multitude of choices that influence the storyline, available characters throughout the game, missions that are available, amongst other effects. Past choices made can affect certain non-playable characters or groups to react differently to the playable character, available interaction choices with these groups or characters, while also determining a form of moral judgement of how “good” or “bad” a character is. All of these choices made throughout gameplay serve as mini branching points for the story, which line up nicely with the concept of ergodic literature in terms of aspects becoming more or less likely to occur based on interaction.
The idea of creating a character and moving through the game as the created character also links very closely to Brenda Laurel’s idea of the interactive fantasy system, which she described as a genre “in which the user may create, enact, and observe a character whose choices and actions affect the course of events just as they might in a play” (Aarseth, 1997 page 136). The Fallout universes’ effect on readers’ habits within the game world are described in another way by Hayot and Wesp in that video games “tend to encourage (and sometimes even require) players to adopt distinct strategies during the course of their play, usually by confronting them with a shifting set of goals and rules that inspire a change of approach” (Hayot and Wesp, 2004). Through experimentation with different types of choices, the reader gradually discovers and develops patterns of playing the game employing their past experiences in later decisions that achieved similar results to what the reader was hoping to obtain. Hayot and Wesp (2004) suggest that through this process, the text has the potential to discipline the reader into making “good” choices on it’s own terms. The Fallout series goes a step beyond this analysis as well, given that both “good” and “bad” aspects may be expanded and played upon with differing results. The allowance of the reader to explore both morally acceptable and unacceptable choices underscore the technological advances that have occurred since both Laurel’s original writings as well as Aarseth’s Cybertext (1997), in which Aarseth proposed that allowing the users such interactive control would result in either accepting the author’s narrative or subverting the narrative into a metanarrative with a logical conclusion unlikely, and ultimately proposing that the idea was unviable when these modern day games have allowed for the successful implementation of Laurel’s ideas (Aarseth, 1997).
The Walking Dead game is quite different in its use of interaction with the reader than the previously discussed Fallout game series. In fact, The Walking Dead game was designed quite differently than many other video games, particularly different than those in the sub-genre of zombie oriented video games which are often a first person shooter style, or at minimum, action and combat based. The Walking Dead game is based strongly around a type of gameplay that offers several choices in conversation and action, which influence other characters’ actions throughout the story as they are programmed to remember and react differently based on past choices of the reader. This game is a great example of the yo-yo model of interactive narratives that is described by Hand and Varan (2009), which is characterized by different branching events that follow an interactive choice, which are then followed by bridging scenes that serve to tie the decision made back into the main story. While decisions are made by the reader and both remembered and influential to later conversation and events, the events still lead back to the same overall story that is laid out in the beginning.
The Walking Dead game also utilizes many instances of reader manipulation discussed by Aarseth, such as requiring the reader to make difficult and undesirable choices in order to continue the game (Aarseth, 1997). For example, in one of the episodes within the game, the lead playable character finds himself in his late parents’ abandoned pharmacy, and encounters his brother who has been turned into a zombie. The reader is required to steal the pharmacy keys from his brother’s body (who is still animated, but stuck under a heavy object and is immobile) to continue the story. While carrying out the act, the reader is given the option to kill the brother as well, to put him out of his misery. Should the reader choose to kill the brother though, the programmers required several repetitions of key presses in order to fully sever the zombie brother’s head from its body in a graphic scene. Through the game’s movement away from traditional forms of action based gaming into the choice based interaction style of gaming, The Walking Dead feels more like an interactive play or television show than the traditional concept of a video game.
How does interaction within the previously discussed mediums change the experience of the reader? Though it is by no means a large body of conclusive research, there has been some research done on the idea of differing experiences based around interactivity in texts. In the article by Hand and Varan (2009), four important factors play a role in engaging the reader with interactive texts: transformative narrative, immersion, agency, and empathy. Transformative narrative involves the evolution of a character through a series of events, which may also serve to transform readers’ real world beliefs. With interactive texts, readers take an active role in rather than simply observing events within the story, which serves to more deeply internalize events and shifts in thinking within the reader. Immersion describes the reader’s feeling of being consumed by the story, of which interactive media may allow readers to become fully immersed in the story as a participant as compared to non-interactive media. Agency refers to the ability of the reader to influence meaningful action that produces visible and far-reaching results, and is an important factor and tool within interactive literary works. Empathy in terms of literary work, refers to the ability of the reader to relate to the situations shown within the storyline and identify with the thoughts, actions and beliefs of the characters within the work. It is suggested that the existence of interactivity could potentially either increase or reduce the amount of empathy experienced by readers of interactive works.
In the study done by Hand and Varan (2009), interactive works were significantly more entertaining to readers when likened to comparable non-interactive works. The interactive works scored higher in all evaluated criteria that were statistically significant (immersion, empathy, appetite and entertainment). The results showed that the inclusion of interactive elements within texts allowed the readers to develop a stronger connection to the events and characters that they encountered in comparison to the non-interactive works of similar form. The study did find that the yo-yo model of narrative structure worked best in order to keep the reader entertained and empathic, as the call for interactivity is increasing, however in order to maintain a high degree of empathy, the reader should not have a large effect on the overall outcome of the narrative structure (Hand and Varan, 2009). Because of this finding, the yo-yo model (as best shown in The Walking Dead) is the most effective at engaging readers in as many aspects as possible through interactivity that is meaningful, but maintains position within a set narrative structure.
Interactivity is an important part of ergodic literature, and serves to manipulate and tie readers to the storyline and characters in ways that have previously been unreachable for traditional, non-interactive mediums. The potential for the reader to influence events and create multiple storylines and influence events within the literary work tends to create strong ties to characters and creates a more deeply immersive experience of the work for the reader. Video games such as Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and The Walking Dead exhibit strong interactive characteristics and are very good representations of emerging works of ergodic literature that allow the reader increasing control over storylines to varying degrees. Though research into the effects of interactive literature in comparison to non-interactive literature is only beginning to emerge, initial studies show cautious projections of increased reader engagement through the inclusion of interactive elements. While the formal research seems to be lagging, the commercial success and reviews of these types of video games speak volumes as to the popularity and effectiveness of these types of narratives to actively engage the readers.
Works Cited
Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Call of Duty Black Ops [Video Game — Xbox 360]. (2010). Santa Monica, CA: Treyarch.
Fallout 3 [Video Game — Xbox 360]. (2008). Rockville, MD: Bethesda Game Studios.
Fallout: New Vegas [Video Game — Xbox 360]. (2010). Rockville, MD: Bethesda Game Studios.
Hand, S., & Varan, D. (2009). Interactive Stories and the Audience: Why Empathy is Important. Computers in Entertainment, 7(3), 1–14.
Hayot, E., & Wesp, E. (2004). Style: Strategy and Mimesis in Ergodic Literature. Comparative Literature Studies, 41(3), 404–423.
The Walking Dead [Video Game — Xbox 360]. (2012). San Rafael, CA: Telltale Games.