If you’re somebody who has watched ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’, or are waiting for Netflix India’s newest special, ‘Ranveer Vs Wild with Bear Grylls’, then you’ve already got some idea about it. For those who play video games, you already know what it is. 

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Interactive entertainment is unique in that it can help tell incredibly powerful stories by engaging people. Not just that, but it engages viewers or players in the story, letting them choose how the story will play out, giving them a sense of ownership and immersion as the story unfolds. 

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The way it works is very simple. Through the course of either playing or watching a piece of interactive entertainment, users are presented with choices at specific intervals. On being presented with the choices, users must make a decision within a (usually) limited amount of time. The choices that they make will end up altering the narrative going further. And so the process repeats itself, with consumers being presented a choice, making the choice and the narrative changing to fit the choices made. Often, decisions made earlier in the story, will affect how some other things will change going forward, but it’s unlikely that a user will know the consequences of their actions until they’ve reached a certain point.

Interactive entertainment has been around for a while, ever since the creation of Role-Playing Games. For those who don’t know, role playing games have been around since the 1970s. The first commercially available RPG was Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop pen-and-paper game where players took on the roles of different characters while another guided the rest in a story of their own design. Of course, as electronic media became more popular, video games latched on to the popularity of the RPG, spawning a whole genre of games dedicated to telling intricate stories, making tough decisions and dealing with the consequences. 

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Some games and their related series became extremely popular for their take. Many have taken the route of putting cinematic storytelling on the forefront, with game mechanics taking a backseat. Some that come to mind are ‘Heavy Rain’, a game where four characters hunt for a serial killer; ‘Beyond: Two Souls’, a story of a telepathic girl, and Telltale’s immensely popular, ‘The Walking Dead’ (based on the comic and TV series of the same name) but with choices. 

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Cinema, on the other hand, saw a similar trajectory, albeit one that hasn’t been as popular. The world’s first interactive piece of cinema was the Czechoslovakian film, Kinoautomat, which premiered in 1972 to much fan fare. Unfortunately, given the global situation at the time, and the USSR’s Iron Curtain, the film never really took off. However, it can be called the great-grandfather/of Netflix’s ‘Bandersnatch’ and all the interactive films that have been made so far.

Interactive entertainment has always been one of the core systems at play when it comes to videogames, but in the world of cinema, companies and distributors are only just now realizing the potential of a market of viewers who are not only trying to watch a story play out, but are also deeply invested in the successes and failures of the characters that they’ve made choices for.