Bandersnatch, Yea or Nay? Reception and User Experience of an Interactive Digital Narrative Video

The Netflix production Bandersnatch represents a potentially crucial step for interactive digital narrative videos, due to the platform’s reach, popularity, and ability to finance costly experimental productions. Indeed, Netflix has announced that it will invest more into interactive narratives – moving into romance and other genres – which makes Bandersnatch even more important as first step and harbinger of things yet to come. For us, the question was therefore how audiences react to Bandersnatch. What are the factors driving user’s enjoyment and what factors might mitigate the experience. For example, novelty value of an interactive experience on Netflix might be a crucial aspect or the combination with the successful series Black Mirror. We approach these questions from two angels – with a critical analysis of the work itself, including audience reactions and an initial user study using Roth’s measurement toolbox (N = 32).

Roth, C.; Koeniz, H. (2019) “Bandersnatch, Yea or Nay? Reception and User Experience of an Interactive Digital Narrative Video”. In: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video Pp. 247—255, New York, NY, ACM DOI 10.1145/3317697.3325124

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