The Stack

The keynote at Narrascope was delivered by Natalia Martinsson, who described how her point-and-click adventure Fran Bow was inspired by her own experiences with trauma. Fran Bow has been installed on my laptop for some time, but I never seemed to be in the mood for it. It’s a troubling game, grotesque and gruesome. But now, I’ve been inspired to make a go of it. I’m currently in the middle of the second chapter of five.

Fran Bow is a severely traumatized ten-year-old girl in a stereotypically awful mental hospital, which she spends the first chapter of the game escaping, with the aid of some magical pills. She’s first given the pills in the intro sequence, but they give her nightmarish hallucinations, so her doctor immediately orders that she never be given them again. However, in the hallucination, she hears her beloved cat, Mr. Midnight, telling her to seek the pills out again, and so she does. The hallucinations essentially form an alternate reality, Silent Hill-style: it’s the same rooms, but there’s blood and dead animals all over the place, and shadowy monsters roam about. Sometimes Fran is strangely oblivious about this given that it’s her hallucination, referring to clearly dead creatures as “asleep” and the like. Other times, she is not. Her manner is a little Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, a mixture of childish whimsy and insistent precision, which makes me think a little of American McGee’s Alice, which similarly had grotesque loony bin scenes. But those were constructed entirely out of trope. Fran Bow‘s treatment of the same theme is more heartfelt, I think, although I can’t know what I would have thought without having heard the author speak on the matter.

You can toggle between the two worlds at will, and sometimes the nightmare world has hints for real-world puzzles, usually scrawled on the wall in blood. I suppose it’s sort of shamanic, the use of hallucinogens to access the spirit realms and learn secrets of importance. In this realm, other patients at the hospital tend to have black shadow-creatures holding them, presumably manifestations of their mental illness. A couple of times, I’ve heard people say things like “You can see them, can’t you?”. The pills are, at the very least, enhancing your perceptions, showing you things that are in some sense objectively real. But more than that: there are puzzles based on bringing objects from the spirit world back to the real world with you. In the second chapter, the lines get blurred even more: there’s a couple of monstrous insects that really belong in the spirit world, but which you encounter in the real world. Maybe none of the adventure is real. Maybe Fran is still in her room in the hospital, tripping throughout.

At a different panel at Narrascope, it was pointed out how Black Mirror: Bandersnatch had a possible sub-plot about the main character going off his meds in order to regain control of himself. The consensus among the panelists was that this was a terrible lesson to teach people about psychiatric medications. Fran Bow leans in the opposite direction, but it’s still kind of the same: Fran doesn’t trust her doctor — in fact, she pretty much hates him — and so she enthusiastically takes pills that he doesn’t want her to have, and they turn out to be vitally important to her progress through the game, which I’m at the moment assuming is positive for her psychological recovery and growth. If “Go off your meds” is a bad message, surely “Take meds your doctor specifically forbids” is even worse? But I suppose it’s saved by its unrealism, as well as the sheer unpleasantness of Fran’s otherworld. Doing what Fran does outside of a game is such a clearly and obviously bad idea as to deter imitation in itself. At least, I hope so.

Yesterday, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive movie, was released on Netflix, and my entire Twitter feed immediately became very annoyed. Apparently it was accompanied by a suite of breathless articles about how daringly innovative it is, a claim that ignored decades of prior experimentation, including four earlier interactive releases by Netflix itself. Oh, but those were aimed at children! Black Mirror is serious grown-up drama, and high-profile at that.

But also, it’s Black Mirror, which means the whole thing was constructed around the constraint of making CYOA dismal. It does this by going meta. Most of the meta is is reasonably restrained, almost even subtle, but a couple of branches take a dive into the crassly meta. The story is of a game developer named Stefan Butler in 1980s Britain — a distinct branch and era of gaming history, presented here condescendingly but, based on what I’ve read about that scene over at The Digital Antiquarian, fairly accurately — descending into madness as he works on a game with CYOA-style branching narrative, based on a CYOA-style book whose author also went mad in a similar way. Part of his madness is a sense that he has no free will, that someone else is controlling his actions. There’s a sense that he’s coming to be aware of the metafictional truth because he has some memory of the failed branches you’ve put him through; in some cases, he “wakes up” from a branch as if it’s a dream, and one early choice seems to change how multiple characters behave in its replay (something that I find myself thinking of as an “Undertale choice”).

It’s all very thematically tight on paper, but it all hinges on the idea that Stefan lacks agency because he’s under the viewer’s control, and it undercuts this idea by not giving the player a whole lot of agency either. It feels like most of the off-trunk choices just result in immediate failure and rewind, or maybe one other choice before failure and rewind. Some of the choices even deny player agency by using a choice to assert authorial control. At one point, you’re given the choice of “shout at dad” or “pour tea over computer”. The story needed Stefan to behave irrationally as a result of his lack of control, so it put the irrational behavior into viewer choice. But neither of the choices reflected my desires, so I was just as powerless as Stefan. The writer either expected an audience of sadists, who would relish such a choice, or wasn’t thinking about the the experience of the interactivity at all there. At another point, the player is given a meaningless choice between two ways for Stefan to fidget just so he can be shown successfully resisting your command. Well, good for you, kid. You sure showed me. How about we stop fighting and team up against the writer?

A lot of this is the result of treating the format as a gimmick rather than a medium, but some of it, particularly the shallow structure and inconsequential choices, can be blamed on technical limitations. The fact is, streaming video makes it hard to do the sort of narrative interactivity we’re used to seeing in games, as I learned while working on the Netflix adaptation of Minecraft: Story Mode. ¹My involvement was slight, but it mostly involved removing things: pruning branches, getting rid of conditional logic, simplifying it into a form that Netflix could handle. And the result was still far and away the biggest, most complicated interactive video they’ve got. People who say that Telltale games are just barely-interactive movies have no idea what they’re talking about. Throwaway callbacks are suddenly expensive, because they require an entirely separate video stream. Choices have to be spaced out — you have to give about two minutes between choices because it has to buffer both branches in advance to keep playing smoothly. This also means that the video clip that plays in the background of a choice has to complete playing in full, which I found particularly irksome. You could make your choice in the first second, but Stefan would just sit there indecisively while his dad repeats “Well? Which do you want?” and similar filler. Streaming video just isn’t the ideal medium for this sort of thing.

But it may be the most accessible. If this is what it takes to get interactive narrative deeper into the mainstream than it already is, should I really complain? And, as gimmicky as it seems to those of us steeped in the stuff, it probably at the very least serves as a good showcase of the platform’s capabilities. One of the first choices you get, of which of two music tapes to listen to, has a very obvious callback after the story has trunked, as if just to tell us that it’s capable of keeping state. (This isn’t the only piece of state-tracking, but it’s the only really obvious one.) At another point, there’s something that’s almost a puzzle: you use a special UI to enter a telephone number that was clued in a subtle and cryptic way earlier. The solution is thrown in your face while the UI is up, so it isn’t actually relying on the viewer to solve anything. Maybe it did in an earlier draft. Regardless, what it’s communicating is “We could have made this a puzzle if we wanted to. That’s something we can do.”

Ultimately, it’s a first-released work of IF by a new writer — not new to writing, but new to IF specifically. It may have a larger budget than your typical Comp entry, but it’s about the same length. It should be welcomed as such, but also criticized as such.