I believe mass entertainment suffers from a bit of format rigidity due to the natural inertia from structural ossification in the music, film, and publishing businesses, to name the most prominent.

One of the ways this manifests is in the one-way broadcast nature of much of our entertainment despite the fact that several billion people own internet-connected smartphones now, and even though they consume an increasingly large share of that entertainment on such devices equipped with all sorts of input options and sensors.

Whenever I say this, however, people seem to want to leap to choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, and the most cited example is Netflix’s Bandersnatch. In its earnings report for 2018, Netflix famously declared “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.” I happen to agree with them that the threat of gaming looms larger than any other in the future, and it’s not surprising to me that they’ve spun up a group to experiment with interactive stories like Bandersnatch and Bear Grylls’ You vs. Wild.

However, stories like Bandersnatch fall into an uncanny valley of interactivity. That is, compared to regular movies, they repeatedly force you to do a bit of annoying work that breaks the suspension of disbelief and the flow of the story: the first choice you’re offered in Bandersnatch is to choose which cereal to eat for breakfast. If you’re in the mindset for lean-back entertainment, you can let the story choose an answer for you on its own after some amount of time, but the distracting question prompt is still displayed on the screen.

On the other hand, if you want real interactivity, something like Bandersnatch feels like a busted low-res knockoff of the continuous interactivity of video games, a step function compared to the smooth curves of video game calculus. Why play a game with such crude branching when so many great games, many of them multiplayer and synchronous, offer a truly unpredictable and immersive form of user controllable storytelling?

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy branching stories in concept. One of my favorite movie and television genres is what I refer to as the recursive escape room genre.

You’re likely familiar with it from its most famous examples. Groundhog Day (in fact TVTropes refers to this genre as the Groundhog Day Loop). Edge of Tomorrow. Russian Doll. A Christmas Carol.

“Phil, maybe we should just Google a playthrough video on YouTube.”

In these stories, the protagonist keeps reliving the same set of events in what feels like an endless loop in time. As they realize their conundrum, they start to experiment and iterate until they eventually come to an epiphany as to why they’re trapped. Then, and only then, can they break out of the loop.

In a way, these are the film version of a really popular form of YouTube video: the video game playthrough.

Watching these films reminds me of how I’d read Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child. Every time I came to a choice in the story, I’d dog-ear that page, then eventually revisit it to take the other path, until I’d read every possible branch of the story. However, works like Groundhog Day reduce the effort required of the viewer by simply playing all the branches in a linear fashion, offering both a lean-back viewing experience and the sensation of narrative progression as the protagonist moves closer and closer to breaking out of the loop. Bandersnatch offers the ability to jump back to any decision you made previously and change it through a sort of decision history carousel, but that still requires work on the part of the viewer.

I feel like the author of “You Are A Shark” didn’t really have his heart in it

The appeal of recursive escape room movies and TV shows, I theorize, lies in its echo of something many people feel, that they are trapped in some runaway routine in their lives. Wake up, go to work, come home, scrounge up dinner, unwind a bit, then back at it the next day. These recursive escape room stories offer up the possibility that we can puzzle our way out of these Moebius prisons which keep depositing us back to the same starting point. Maybe if I stop eating carbs. Or meditate in the morning instead of checking social media. Or start working out before the morning commute. Maybe if I’m more assertive and ask for a raise, or a promotion, which I richly deserve. With every test, I close off one branch but converge a little more on a solution.

I’d guess that the easiest way to predict how any person’s day will go is to look at the previous day. It’s quite plausible that most lived days on Earth feel like a barely modified replay of the previous day. We all run, for the most part, a standard script of life routines.

The appeal of self-help gurus and podcasts about the habits of successful people is that they resemble those escape room chaperones who offer occasional hints to groups who get stuck on one particular puzzle. These secrets to success from modern gurus feel like video game tips for specific levels, except for real life. Sleep more. Eat keto. Lift weights. Delete social media apps. Walk 10,000 steps a day.

That sense of progressive mastery is a hell of a drug. That’s why, while I’m bearish on choose-your-own-adventure films like Bandersnatch, I’m bullish on the right types of light interactivity when it makes sense. If you were designing a game show today, for example, it would likely look much more like HQTrivia (RIP) than, say, Wheel of Fortune.

Gamification Someone, I can't remember who, recently described golf as the gamification of walking, and I'll never be able to shake that from my mind.has gotten a bit of a bad rap in recent years, and some of the implementations out of Silicon Valley can feel scammy, to be sure. Still, when I look at the progressive mastery tactics of something like Candy Crush, I can’t help but find them more fun and effective, in some ways, than the Suzuki method of teaching violin playing, or Mr. Miyagi’s “wax on, wax off” school of teaching Daniel Larusso karate.

The more I read about the power of habit in human behavior, the more I think of self-help genre as a series of macros one downloads to try to upgrade one's day-to-day regimen. Pair that with the educational power of failure and I've come think of recursive escape room stories as a way to accelerate the improvement of our life productivity.