YOUR FIRST DECISION as a viewer comes less than five minutes into Bandersnatch, as game developer Stephan (Fionn Whitehead) sits down at the breakfast table with his widowed father. Nothing life or death here; it’s just a matter of what cereal you want to eat. Regardless of whether you choose Sugar Puffs or Frosties, though, it accomplishes a couple of very important things, both for the very first time.

The first is conditioning you to actually make a choice—something gamers might be used to, but has never been something our screen-based stories have asked us to do. In Engelbrecht’s parlance, traditional television is a "lean back" enterprise, and Netflix’s interactive plans are a "lean forward" alternative. Before you watch Bandersnatch, the interactivity of which is signaled by a new little starburst-like symbol on its description in the app, you’ll be treated to a short tutorial. (Yes, like a videogame.) It’s as droll and disorienting as an episode of Black Mirror, thanks to its own little twist, but it establishes the basics: At certain points, as in the kids’ programming, the action will pause and present you with a choice, which you’ll have about 10 seconds to make.

A user encountering the pre-Bandersnatch interactive tutorial on an iPad.ADAM ROSE/NETFLIX
The second thing the cereal choice accomplishes is under Bandersnatch’s hood. It registers your choice via "state tracking," a technology Netflix developed to accomplish exactly what Brooker and Jones were hoping for, and saves it to be deployed later—in this case, when a television set in the background of a scene plays a commercial for the cereal you chose. (Netflix also built a tool called Branch Manager, which takes Twine out of the equation and enables creators to write interactive stories in a standardized way.)

From then on, it’s off on your own personal Bandersnatch adventure, in whichever of its 28 languages you’re most comfortable with. There’s a spine of the story that everyone will experience: Stephan working to adapt his dead mother’s beloved choose-your-own-adventure novel into a game. But how he comes to it, and what he experiences along the way, takes any number of digressions and double-backs. (I won’t get into them here, other than to say that not a fourth wall is left standing.)

The magic of combinatorial math means that there are technically more than a trillion paths through the story, though in reality the number is much smaller. But "much smaller" is still pretty huge: There are five main endings, with multiple variants of each—though upon reaching an ending, Netflix will also helpfully bring you back to pivotal decision points so that you can ease your FOMO and try the path not traveled. In a visit to Netflix’s headquarters in Los Gatos, California, I had about 75 minutes to make my way through it, and was only able to trigger three endings. Suffice it to say that the Branch Manager visualization of Bandersnatch looks a little bit like Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean trying to eat an entire bowl of spaghetti at once.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com