Ludonarrative Dissonance in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Abstract:

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a stand-alone interactive movie in the Black Mirror series. In this chapter, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is analyzed as an example of interactive cinema. Interactive cinema flourished in the early 1990s, with the possibility of storing long digitized videos to CD-ROMs. Bandersnatch suffers from the same type of structural problems associated with older examples of the genre of interactive cinema. From a ludological perspective, games and stories are two distinct and incompatible structures. In game studies literature, a contradiction between ludic and storytelling structures is called ludonarrative dissonance. In this chapter, conceptual tools will be developed to locate and explore the dissonance in Bandersnatch by elaborating on different readings of ludonarrative dissonance. Utilizing different readings of ludonarrative dissonance, Bandersnatch’s structural problems will be accordingly analyzed.