“YOU’D SEE
ONE PERSON
GIVE THE
SIDE-EYE TO
SOMEONE
ELSE WHEN
THEY
MADE A
CERTAIN
CHOICE.
ONE WOMAN
THREW
THE REMOTE
AT HER
FIANCÉ AND
WAS LIKE,
‘YOU CHOOSE.’”
According to trends Engelbrecht has gleaned from
Netflix’s research, parents enjoy watching their chil-
dren consider the ramifications of their decisions. A
child who’s tempted to make a choice that provides
some thrill or gross hilarity—force Grylls to eat poo,
say—might then display concern, electing to have
Grylls go foraging instead. Much as the woman in
Phoenix had wanted Stefan to succeed, both children
and adults seem to feel sympathy for the characters
whose lives they momentarily control. In some cases,
Engelbrecht has also noticed more of a willingness to
act out, an approach she refers to as “vicarious cathar-
sis.” Certain adults, steeped in the twin enticements
of videogame-like joy and a momentary reversion to
childhood, savor the chance in Bandersnatch to make a
choice between “kick him in the balls” or “karate chop
the dad,” she says.
Engelbrecht still plays videogames. One of her favor-
ites is the indie exploration game Dear Esther. It’s a
first-person-shooter construct, but with no guns or visi-
ble characters; the player walks around an island listen-
ing to a narration of a man’s letters to his dead wife. In
one key sequence, the player goes down to the beach,
where the water glistens ominously. “The player can
walk into the water,” Engelbrecht says. “And as you do
that, it’s designed in such a way that you realize you’re
drowning.” The experiential power of the narrative
moved her to tears. She felt equally invested in Papers,
Please, a game where the user acts as a border con-
trol agent. “You’re being drawn into the empathy of the
moment,” she says, “the tie to the character.”
N O B O DY Q U I T E K N O WS how to categorize inter-
active TV yet. It could be a genre or a new kind of story.
Its history is spotty. In the late ’70s, Warner Amex
Cable Communications introduced something called
the Qube system, where viewers could, among other
things, vote on issues during talk shows. It was a flop.
A few decades later, Mitchell Kertzman, then the chair
of Liberate Technologies, told The New York Times: “It
sounds like interactive television is about making tele-
vision harder to watch, like I have to work at television
when I just want to watch it.”
Literature offers cautionary tales. Jorge Luis Borges’
1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths” imagines a
novel in which every possible choice plays out simul-
taneously. The branching narrative, described by one
character as a “tenuous nightmare,” would eventu-
ally inform the creation of hypertext fiction, an arcane
literary experiment of the early internet that tried to
share control with the reader and was navigated by
clicking textual links. In his 1992 treatise “The End of
Books,” Robert Coover, a writer of short stories and
metafiction who thought hypertext might be the future