EARLIER THIS YEAR, Carla Engelbrecht flew to Phoenix, sat on the couch in a stranger's living room, and observed the stranger watching-or possibly playing or experiencing-a movie-length installment of Black Mirror. In the film, called Bandersnatch, a young English programmer named Stefan tries to adapt a nonlinear fantasy novel into a nonlinear videogame, and the result is itself a nonlinear story in which the viewer exerts influence over the plot. Using a remote or videogame controller, the viewer makes choices about what Stefan should eat for breakfast and whether he should kill his father. As the director of product innovation at Netflix and an architect of this unusual form of entertainment, Engelbrecht was intent on studying the emotional responses of Netflix subscribers to Bandersnatch's choose-your-own-adventure approach.
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