Hacker Cinema
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
2018 · Film · 90 min
Directed by David Slade
ThrillerScience FictionMystery
In 1984, a young programmer begins to question reality as he adapts a dark fantasy novel into a video game. A mind-bending tale with multiple endings.
4 positive3 negative21 neutralfrom 28 commenters
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29 comments on Hacker News
I'm writing an extension to the mkv file specification to embed simple scripts that would allow someone to do choose-your-own-adventure style videos directly in the file themselves without outside assets. I'm also making modifications to VLC and mpv so they can play these directly. I've had some success already, but I've discovered a few features of existing videos like Bandersnatch that I've had to go back and add into the specification.
On top of that, it's lead me down the rabbit hole of a 1995 (limited) theatrical movie called Mr. Payback, which may have only ever existed on 50 sets of laserdiscs distributed to those theaters. I'm hoping to track down a copy of it... if anyone had any clues on that one, I'd love to hear them. I'd purchase a Domesday Dupe device and dump it. But it may be a genuine lost movie.
This is such a fascinating & personally inspiring time for me as a programmer.
The real game Bandersnatch (as a business folly) was something else - the "coming soon" advert from just before Imagine's bankruptcy would probably ring an alarm bell now - https://nosher.net/archives/computers/imagine_eugeneevans_yourcomp_feb84
Some of the programmers of Bandersnatch did release Gift From The Gods from the ashes of Bandersnatch - which I definitely had on my Spectrum! But it was very confusing - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/13/giftgod.htm
This 1984 documentary from the BBC archive covers Imagine's growth & demise, must have been a great visual reference for Brooker making the show, and the top comment has some more detail on Imagine's hiring spree - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buuUZFh_pyk also also check out 4:30 or so, where they show the game and the device that will "eventually be reduced to a small cartridge and sold with the game"!!
Also also the name Ritman is probably a reference to Jon Ritman, programmer of the brilliant Head Over Heels. But he was nothing to do with Imagine. He still gives interviews and seems lovely.
> produce something as high-quality as GoT
Netflix is a different creature because of streaming and time shifting.
They don't care about people watching a pilot episode or people binge watching last 3 seasons when a show takes off.
The quality metric therefore is all over the place, it is a mildly moderated popularity contest.
If people watch "Love is Blind", you'll get more of those.
On the other hand, this means they can take a slightly bigger risk than a TV network with ADs, because you're likely to switch to a different Netflix show that you like and continue to pay for it, than switch to a different channel which pays a different TV network.
As long as something sticks the revenue numbers stay, the ROI can be shaky.
Black Mirror Bandersnatch for example was impossible to do on TV, but Netflix could do it.
Also if GoT was Netflix, they'd have cancelled it on Season 6 & we'd be lamenting the loss of what wonders it'd have gotten to by Season 9.
I really believe that if Netflix launched its interactive media with a miniseries of Goosebumps: Choose Your Own Adventure adaptations (instead of... whatever Bandersnatch was...) the format could have been a huge success.
I still want to Escape from the Carnival of Horrors(TM).
Netflix has a number of interactive movies (Minecraft, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch), and it was one of the promised things when DVDs came out, but it remains a niche market / novelty.
Netflix it’s power is innovation. Think Bandersnatch.
I assume they’re going to be (one of) the first with an AI-assisted or even completely generated show that is completely tuned to your taste.
I expect the same to happen with games, with the wildcard of multiplayer. Music probably earlier than movies / series and games even.
I love Kim Newman for his Anno Dracula series, as well as his other genre-deconstructing work. "Coastal City" is a neat little jaunt through the progression in superhero comics, and The Night Mayor is quite a surreal VR love letter to film noir. Had no idea that he wrote a CYOA about a young man in '80s Britain! Sounds like Netflix owes him some inspiration credits for their own Bandersnatch streaming CYOA.
This is nice, I've always wanted to build something like this, but it would integrate life choices and can show you where one's timeline "dead-ends," because you made the other choice.
The idea is inspired by the movie Bandersnatch. There's something so powerful about reflection with clarity.
This is a flawed argument; Netflix is a tech company that dabbles in TV shows (and films). It has the best recommendation engine (and not a commodity) and nothing else comes closer. There is a possibility that it may merely switch to "cloud-generated" characters with multiple plotlines in the same series and its gaming ambitions must be understood in this light. If you use traditional metrics to understand the company, it wouldn't make sense. Why is the company losing more money than it earns from subscriptions? The amount of granular data it has on films (and increasingly on the people's choices) will make it easier to predict the choices users will make. Hollywood's movies rely on "gut-feeling and formulaic approach" to film making. Netflix will replace it with data. Or is it that Ben-Evans missed the initial hype around Netflix and couldn't invest? Its easier to take pot-shots on the blog and call it a commodity. Bandersnatch was an initial experiment. There's more to come with "immersive filmmaking" and "story-telling".
To offer a more pessimistic case this was true for Google, whose Stadia product flopped, and it was true for Amazon, whose video games utterly failed to take off. Currently something like Microsoft gamepass is a far better choice if you want to subscribe and play videogames.
On another note, Netflix has experimented with videogames before using Telltale "choose your own adventure" style games and fitting them into their existing product. They also did a similar thing with Bandersnatch a choose your own adventure from the film side. So I think with the demise of telltale netflix might just be bringing that in house rather than trying to offer a wholesale alternative to existing videogame providers.
Sure, it's kind of absurd that the same 4 people would be at the center of so many technological shifts, over a period of 20+ years. But, you really have to accept that as a conceit of the medium.
There are basically only two ways to construct a TV series that has any continuity to it whatsoever. You can either keep most of the main characters together for the entire series, and watch them grow and change, like most series do; or, you can do like American Horror Story does and just scrap everything and start anew every season or so. Some series don't care about continuity, like Seinfeld, so they fall outside the scope of this statement, but, the majority of TV series will be one or the other of these.
And, there's nothing really wrong with this construction, either. Like I said, it's just something you have to accept, kind of like how every TV home or apartment is absolutely massive compared to what real people live in, or how people are able to comfortably fly on airplanes without squishing themselves into the seats or their heads being within inches or less of the roof of the cabin. Or the fact that if anybody coughs on TV, they're usually deathly ill.
I'll have to check out Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, though. I've been putting off watching it for some reason -- maybe because for most of 2020, I felt like I was living in a Black Mirror episode.
Speaking of Netflix series that really get the time period correct, Stranger Things is 100% exactly like what it was like to be a kid in the 80s. Starting from the bowl haircut on Will, right on down to every last detail of the mall from season 3, and battling the Demogorgon in a friend's basement. Absolute 10/10 set design, and I never noticed a single anachronism.
It is a bit hilarious that the main characters, often Cameron, end up inventing much of modern computing. Mutiny is not only an on-line game network, but includes a graphical chat room (proto-social networking), a Craigslist feature, and a BBS. But I do appreciate it for the sake of the show exploring as many of the aspects of those eras of early computing as possible. Even Joe's "working for an oil company" plotline in season 2 reminded me of the time Exxon got into computing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842547
As far as getting the window-dressing and feel of the time right, there's also Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
That's why I'm asking what regulations are there? I'm not claiming they don't exist. If something like Minecraft Story Mode is a movie on Netflix, what movie ratings does it have? For example, I can find it on ESRB's website rating, but it's not like it's on MPA's https://www.filmratings.com/
https://www.esrb.org/ratings/34178/Minecraft%3A+Story+Mode+-+A+Telltale+Games+Series/
Meanwhile Netflix's own Bandersnatch is not ESRB rated, and isn't too different as a game. Yet Apple has supported both of these perfectly fine regardless of their lack of proper ratings.
I can't tell if the word "imaginary" is a (very good) pun in relation to Bandersnatch (developed by Liverpool's Imagine software) but, as many people will already know, it did kind of exist.
The ambitiousness of the project helped Imagine, one of the UK's most successful games companies, go bust, all while being filmed for a BBC documentary[0].
Bandersnatch would eventually be released as Brataccas[1], and the brand "Imagine" was taken over by the other company in the BBC documentary, Manchester's Ocean software[2], which went on to further success, later merging with French company Infogrames.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt9BsZCifgU
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brataccas
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Software
> Do you really not?
Honestly, no, I genuinely don't. I do think the shirt colors are analogous.
The technical differences you and others are talking about are not differences that affect Apple in any way. It's not harder on Apple's infrastructure for someone to stream a game instead of a movie, it doesn't take Apple any extra engineering effort or development time. The technical differences people are talking about are mostly outside the iPhone and its core APIs. They don't affect Apple or users in way that's relevant to Apple's policies.
Likewise with the user-facing distinctions -- I don't think the distinctions that you're talking about are something that users care about, and I don't think there's a strong argument to be made that Apple is thinking about users when it makes those distinctions. I don't see how users benefit from games and Ebooks being treated differently than movies. From a user perspective, this is all just 'content'.
> If Apple were to make an exception and allow just one game streaming service, then I’d agree it was a valid analogy, but they don’t.
Oh, no. Anyone with a striped shirt, buzzcut, and blue eyes can get a discount. There are likely multiple people who fit that description, it's not just Tim.
But I don't want to get hung up on that analogy if you think that's too direct or contrived. Another analogy I'd point towards is VPNs and video streaming in regards to net neutrality. In fact, ISPs actually had a much stronger argument for treating video bits differently from other bits on the network, since services like Netflix did genuinely consume more bandwidth than services in other categories. However, we all (mostly) still recognized that the differences between streaming a video and streaming any other kinds of data weren't relevant to ISPs.
I think the distinctions people are raising between video and game streaming are the same -- they're not relevant to an app distribution platform. I don't think the Bandersnatch comparison is splitting hairs, I think it's a reasonable comparison to make. I don't think that bypassing app review is relevant to consumers for a streaming platform, since bypassing app review within a streaming platform introduces no security or privacy risks for the end user. The business-facing reason apps can't bypass app review and payment services is because Apple is providing a service that needs to be payed for -- but streaming apps fundamentally do not take advantage of any of those services. It makes about as much commercial sense to charge them as it makes to charge for transactions made inside a web browser.
I especially don't see a difference between a games streaming platform and a virtual desktop, another distinction that Apple seems to think is worthy of entirely separate rules. Consumers do not care about whether a virtual computer immediately boots into a game or whether it forces them to click on an icon first.
Even from a purely practical perspective, I don't think there's strong evidence that games streaming would break Apple's entire revenue model. There's a tangible, consumer-facing benefit to apps working offline that some app-makers will want to take advantage of. Streaming games is not an existential threat to the app store, at least certainly not a larger existential threat than web browsers are.
Finally, I don't think it's possible to separate the theoretical differences between games/videos/ebooks/virtual desktops from the context in which Apple chose to split along those categories. Apple didn't come up with those categories and then afterwards check to see what the market looked like. Sure there are theoretical reasons (weak as they are) that Apple could have chosen to build its policies around esoteric "what is a game" arguments, but the simplest explanation for why Apple chose to put so much weight on those distinctions is because it allowed them to bend to large players on the market who they could not ignore, while still restricting and gouging smaller players and upstarts who could not challenge them.
Worth pointing out that Netflix has even had a game-like interactive movie called “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror:_Bandersnatch
I’ve known people who have fallen down the “CT hole” into full blown mental illness.
I’m guessing these folks had some kind of predisposition. But that doesn’t mean it’s not irresponsible.
Harmful media isn’t limited to news either.
My SO had a psychotic episode triggered by “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” - which I guess means I literally lived through an episode of Black Mirror.
Bragging rights?
For the Black Mirror fans, Charlie talks about using Twine to help write Bandersnatch in this interview: https://www.wired.com/story/black-mirror-bandersnatch-interactive-episode/.
Haha, no problem, but it's mostly just practice. The key thing seems to be recognizing that there's anything worth picking out in a piece of art to begin with—those with little practice don't notice it anywhere, or else will see it everywhere because of course it's possible to bullshit deep themes into an average episode of NCIS if you're so inclined—then questioning why for various decisions. If you're not sure what something means in a thematic or thesis sense, look at which possibility or possibilities go best with the rest of what you've seen (or read, or heard—works for books and music, too).
FWIW I find most of the rest of Black Mirror a lot less rich than Fifteen Million Merits, though I like most of it. I couldn't write as much on most of the episodes as that one, because I'm just not sure there's as much there. Most are a fairly straight route up to usually some kind of twist, with a little worth saying about the relation of the twist to the rest but mostly what they're up to is pretty on the surface. Nothing wrong with that, and that fact that it consistently tries to say anything at all puts it above most TV, so far as that goes.
To expand a little into other episodes, though, to give some more idea of what I mean by asking why about choices creators make in art: take The National Anthem, for example. When a Certain Pivotal Scene (you know the one) happens, the creators could have depicted it several ways without changing the actual story. A few possibilities: 1) actually show it, entirely, 2) show it but crop out the worst of it, 3) keep the camera nearby, say on people in the room or in the next room over, or on the fictional production crew "shooting" the event, 4) any of the above but show only a little and cut away, 5) just skip straight to after, don't have any footage that takes place during it at all, among other options. There was a choice to make, and the one that was made isn't exactly revolutionary, but also isn't one of the most obvious ones: keep the camera going for all of it (or maybe just most? I can't recall for sure) after showing us every moment at the scene of the event leading up to it, but only show the faces of people watching it on TV. Why? It wasn't the only way they could have avoided putting the event itself onscreen, why do it that way?
Showing people watching a screen, especially something sensational that's been teased from the very first scene of the episode, and holding the camera on it that long does a couple things, I think: in the general case, it invites identity with or comparison between the real life viewer and the viewer in the show; in this particular case, I think the show is also delivering on a kind of implicit promise of horrible spectacle by showing us the most disgusting thing that's happening in that moment, by the creator's judgement. Anyone watching the show, even if they hope the event won't happen or that it won't be depicted at all if it does (which is hopefully most people?) was still held in suspense and to some degree entertained by that will they/won't they dynamic. The result is that this choice both casts judgement on the viewers-in-the-show and prevents the real-life show watcher from casting them as Other and distancing themselves from those voyeurs. This option was chosen by the show's creators because it conveys a message different from what others would have (most of the other options above wouldn't convey much at all, without some further effort, but would advance the plot just the same) and does so effectively. That single choice causes multiple effects on and messages to the viewer, working toward one end.
To take that a step further, both reinforcing the likelihood that this was intentional and possibly adding insight into other episodes, the show repeatedly returns to themes along these lines, of the viewer-as-complicit. White Bear's a huge one, obviously, featuring punishment essentially for the act of watching a crime (and filming! The show also loves to jab at itself and its creators pretty viciously, as Fifteen Million Merits manages to also do in addition to everything else) with a kind of Greek hell of... having crimes done to them while "normal people" watch and record, which is called justice. A couple others tread similar ground—Shut Up and Dance, notably.
Moving into more tenuous territory: Jan Junipero may also be doing something like this, forcing the viewer into more direct confrontation with some message in it by identifying them with some element of or character in the show, at the end, just a bit. The long sequence of server farms and robot arms at the end definitely adds a sense of melancholy and unease over the happy ending and neatly reframes our own emotions about the episode, which is probably the main thing it's intended to do, but that also looks an awful lot like any modern-day server farm. Like where Netflix episodes come from. Like the episode you just watched, finding temporary joy in this fiction while sitting, apparently lifeless... and oh look it's suggesting another show or movie, how nice, this could just go on forever, couldn't it? And that's the season Black Mirror transitioned to Netflix, I'm pretty sure.
That's quite stretch from the pretty clear use of those themes and mechanisms in other episodes and I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near as sure of it as some of the other stuff, since it's pretty abstract and there are other, stronger ways to explain why the scene is there and why it looks the way it does... but then again Bandersnatch came out a few years later and hits some of the same notes explicitly, which makes it just a tad less likely that that wasn't on the creators' minds when they decided how the end of San Junipero should go, and a little more likely that that connection was intended.
Arctop | San Francisco, California. | ONSITE | FULL-TIME | https://arctop.co/jobs
Arctop is based in San Francisco, California with an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. We make brain-machine interface software that's used by leaders in the entertainment industry to test new games, TV shows, movies, songs, music videos, and interactive experiences.
Audiences test at home and in theaters wearing Arctop headwear, and clients receive results through our online dashboard, Neuos.io.
The unique "cloud-brain" platform we've built, Neuos, provides a real-time API that makes it possible to programmatically adapt streaming content to a viewer's mental and emotional state. If you're now thinking Bandersnatch, you're right to (see this article on us: https://www.startuphub.ai/this-israeli-startup-is-materializing-netflixs-bandersnatch-using-ai-and-neural-interfaces/)
Currently hiring for several positions on the business-side of the business: https://arctop.co/jobs Email: hr@arctop.co
the line between movies and games will blur dramatically. think bandersnatch, but it's the viewer saying "open the door" and the directorGAN will generate a new storyline.
Random aside: Anyone else watch the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix? I feel like that could be an interesting choose your own adventure similar to how Bandersnatch was done. Let people make decisions as if they were in charge of the festival and see if they could come out the end of it having made it a success or not.
Absolutely in agreement (although I'm on Windows). Here is my list of woes (off the top of my head):
- the supposedly intelligent AI-powered thumbnail/preview generator seems to not understand me in the slightest, often turning me off completely until I look them up on IMDB.
- replacing the 5 star rating system with a thumbs up/down... what about mediocre? Their library (in Europe) contains a huge amount of mediocre stuff.
- some Original Netflix content is only available in the US.
- the selection in Europe is very disparaging.
- after watching some movies e.g. Bandersnatch, you have 5 seconds to full-screen again before it auto-plays some other completely unrelated movie (instead of letting me enjoy the credits and accompanying music). In general I find auto-play only useful with series... although even then some series e.g. Black Mirror I really just want to listen to the great music played during the credits, and I have to scramble to find my keyboard within 5 seconds after watching a sometimes very emotional experience.
- it seems like they are primarily focused on adding series (Recently Added section is 90% series)... they seem to be opting to just fill their library with series as it gets people to keep coming back, but I actually prefer movies most of the time instead of getting sucked into another series.
- no way to disable/pause autoplay of spoiler/trailers when you initially log in, first thing I do after logging in is scroll down until it stops playing.
- sometimes they show an unavoidable/unpausable spoiler/trailer/advertisement right in the middle of the lists as you scroll down.
- why can I only create 4 profiles (and 1 kids profile)?
- I have been vocal lately and clicking the "?" button while watching a movie to leave feedback. I have yet to receive even a notification that they have at least read it, or preferably, that they might be working on any of the bugs/issues I've complained about.
- if you pause a show/movie for > 15 minutes (eg to go make popcorn, etc) and come back to it, your HD (720p of course because it's Firefox) version is replaced with a 240p/360p version, requiring a page refresh.
- no option to change resolution, my LTE modem has bad latency so Netflix auto-selects 360p for me for the first 3-5 minutes... the only solution is to refresh a few times until Netflix detects that my connection is actually sufficient to stream 720p. I was using the ctrl+alt+shift+s to manually set the resolution but they seem to have removed this a few months ago.
- native Netflix app for Windows 10 is horrendously slow and completely unusable.
- 1080p on Edge browser is not much better.
- after watching something from "My List" (where I have about 50 things saved), I have to manually go back to "My List" and find it to remove it... a button to remove it after watching would save me some trouble
- removing an item from "My List" causes the entire page to refresh and the position of everything is apparently random every time
I could definitely go on... it's a mess and it seems to be getting worse. I wonder if I'm an edge case for a lot of these issues... perhaps the general populous isn't bothered by a lot of these things? Otherwise I can't explain how they have so many top-payed engineers and how half of this shit is acceptable.
On the other hand, at least it's not as bad as Amazon Prime Video, which is an utter joke...
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/netflixs-interactive-bandersnatch-movie-isnt-compatible-with-apple-tv-or-the-windows-10-app
Edit: Your first point stands, how haven't they updated their official app for one of their premier releases?
Yes.
They're also deteriorating in terms of product quality.
Tried to watch Bandersnatch last night, and it says "your device is not compatible. Try using a smartphone or a newer laptop"
But I was on a brand new laptop (Windows 10, 7700HQ, Radeon RX480). Netflix is telling people to use laptops, but they forgot to update their own laptop app to support their own movies.
I work in multimedia and interactive video, we have teams of just three or four people who support everything themselves (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, etc). I don't understand how Netflix, with it's millions of dollars, can't do the same. Netflix's marketing claims they "only hire the best of the best" (and they probably do), but their actual product just feels so lazy, it's hard to reconcile the two. Why do you need the best people, if you don't want to build a good product?
This has to be one of the most ill conceived lawsuits since SCO sued IBM. Not because Netflix have an IBM like legion of Nazgul as their legal team, but in this case because it's self-defeating. The popularity of Bandersnatch will probably do more to drive demand for CYOA books than anything Chooseco would ever have done. That mention of CYOA in Bandersnatch? That was free advertising.
And even if the argument is "Well, Chooseco was trying to get into interactive media as well" I think the exact same argument still holds. Bandersnatch is proving (helping build?) the market for this kind of stuff in general. It's success is paving the way for Chooseco to follow with their own CYOA branded interactive movies / tv-shows, if they want.
And never mind that they probably still could have negotiated a deal with Netflix eventually anyway.
Basically there's nothing good about this... it's just killing goodwill, harming a potential relationship, wasting money on lawyer's fees, and distracting them for, oh, I dunno, creating quality content?
Yet another tool of note for writing CYOA interactive fiction is Twine (http://twinery.org/), which has become a defacto standard of sorts of an interactive narrative writing tool more specifically for hypertext CYOA.
For example of its growing ubiquity, it was admitted that most of the Black Mirror Bandersnatch CYOA episode was written and tested in Twine.
What are your thoughts on the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror?
Choose your own adventure books, notably the RL Stein "Give Yourself Goosebumps" variety were the books that swept my imagination away and really lit the spark for reading as a young kid.
There's an art to driving curiosity that I think CYOA books really plays well with. It's accessible by anyone to anyone without the need for technical skills, given all you really need is a basic understanding of free text editors and maybe some mind mapping software to keep structure. We've seen countless CYOA book-style games out within recent years, including "the uncle who works for nintendo"[1], "Buried"[2], and I don't know who could forget "Stories Untold"[3] which to me shows that the art is expandable from the text form up to a more immersive experience. It lends itself to be improved upon, from base story to games, movies, and more.
I would be absolutely thrilled to see a CYOA revival, and if somebody did a kickstarter or indiegogo where they gathered some notable authors to do something a la "Bandersnatch", I'd happily toss some money at it. It's a facet of my childhood I feel wasn't properly respected and I'm glad to see it getting some recognition at last.
[1]: https://ztul.itch.io/the-uncle-who-works-for-nintendo
[2]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/434370
[3]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/558420