“The road not taken”: an interactive film between narrative and database

This article discusses the impact of the interplay between narrativity and database logic on the interactor’s engagement with interactive digital films. It explores their co-deployment in three recently released works—Late Shift, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Her Story—within a theoretical framework extending Hartmut Koenitz’s model of interactive digital narrative. Late Shift and Bandersnatch expose the interactor to relentless narrative progression, as he/she is to decide what action the protagonist should take at various junctures in the plot, culled from the database of multiple potential storylines. By contrast, in Her Story database becomes the surface structure the interactor gains access to: his/her task is to solve the case of a missing man by searching through fragmented video clips from police interviews with his wife. This dominance of database logic paradoxically enhances narrativity by provoking the interactor’s hermeneutic desire, while narrative agency Late Shift seemingly ascribes to him/her may attenuate his/her immersion due to its being limited to the choices presupposed within its database structure. Bandersnatch dodges this problem through self-reflexive, performative thematisation of illusory agency, which ties in with the disclosure of the tension between narrative and database as its organisational principle.