Abstract
With the release of the film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch Netflix entered the area of interactive streamed narratives. We performed a qualitative analysis with 169 Netflix subscribers that had watched the episode. The key findings show (1) participants are initially engaged because of curiosity and the novelty value, and desire to explore the narrative regardless of satisfaction, (2) perceived agency is limited due to arbitrary choices and the lack of meaningful consequences, (3) the overall experience is satisfactory but adaptions are desirable in future design to make full use of the potential of the format.
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Notes
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https://www.netflix.com/title/80988062. The film is officially named ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’, in this study we will refer to it as ‘Bandersnatch’.
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https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888. Before Bandersnatch, four seasons have been introduced where each has three to five episodes.
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The results of the questionnaire can be viewed at http://bit.ly/InteractiveStorytelling2019.
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Kolhoff, L., Nack, F. (2019). How Relevant Is Your Choice? . In: Cardona-Rivera, R., Sullivan, A., Young, R. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11869. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_9
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