Traversing across intermediality and transmediality in a choose-your-own-interactive-adventure television episode

Abstract

Intermediality refers to the interconnectedness of media that depend on, refer to and interact with each other, both explicitly and implicitly (Jensen, 2008) and can be regarded as part of the emergence of a post-human entanglement of living bodies with technologies, because each mediates the other (Bignell, 2020: 2). This article seeks to examine the way that intermediality and transmediality are so closely interwoven in the interactive television episode Bandersnatch. This interactive narrative folds into its structure the results of the convergence of video game techniques and aesthetics in television series production, as an example of the conversion of the medium according to the demands dictated by the evolution of technology and the audiences’ new expectations and social needs and can function as the threshold towards a reassessment of intermediality. Bandersnatch, a video game based on a “choose-your-own-adventure” book of the same name, is remediated and re-articulated from the book to the designed video game as the key feature of the narration and, simultaneously, as the key element remediated and implemented into the whole interactive episode. This allegorical approach, deliberately created by the episode's creators, triggers a reflection on the fluid and malleable relations between media forms and the transformation of each medium identity. Under this digital circumstance, the sensory copes in direct contrast with the palpable, revealing a complex conception of transmedial encapsulated in intermedial within user-generated contents.

Keywords

• interactive tv episode
• in-betweenness
• media convergence
• algorithms
• agency