Branching Narrative

The Forking Path

A branching narrative fundamentally changes the relationship between the story and the audience, transforming the viewer from a passive observer into an active participant. Unlike a traditional linear story, which follows a single, predetermined path from beginning to end, a branching narrative is structured like a tree. At key ‘user choice moments,’ the story ‘branches’ into different paths based on the viewer’s decision. This allows for a highly personalized experience, where each viewer or group of viewers can have a unique journey through the narrative world. The structure’s complexity can range from simple branches that quickly reconverge to the main plot, to complex, sprawling trees with dozens of unique scenes and multiple distinct endings.

Roots in Gaming and Literature

The concept of branching narratives is not new. It was popularized in literature by the Choose Your Own Adventure book series in the 1980s. However, its deepest roots are in video games, particularly in role-playing games (RPGs) and adventure games, where player choice and consequence are core mechanics. The application of this structure to high-fidelity, live-action video has only become technologically feasible and mainstream in the streaming era, requiring a robust technical backend to seamlessly switch between video segments based on user input.

The Production Challenge

Creating a feature-length branching narrative film is a monumental production undertaking. The screenplay, often written in specialized software like Twine, resembles a complex flowchart more than a traditional script. The production team must shoot all possible branches of the story, which can result in a total volume of footage many times that of a linear film. For example, Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) had over a trillion possible story permutations, though it contained around five and a half hours of unique footage that had to be written, shot, edited, and scored. This exponential increase in content makes branching narrative projects significantly more complex and expensive to produce than their linear counterparts.

Modern Cinematic Experiments

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch stands as the most prominent and widely discussed example of a modern interactive film, introducing the concept to a mass audience. Following its release, streaming services have continued to experiment with the format, though often in lighter, more comedic contexts. Examples include Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend and the animated special We Lost Our Human. These projects continue to explore the creative possibilities and audience appetite for a new form of cinematic storytelling that blends the passive enjoyment of film with the active agency of gaming.