In the press that followed the December 2018 release of the Netflix interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, several references were made to the use of Twine in the project’s development process. While early stages of planning utilized Post-it notes and whiteboards, the Bandersnatch team eventually turned to Twine, “which is often used to design video games with multiple story branches,” and even provided actors with copies of the script written and published in the program so “they could navigate” the various threads of the project. Many instructors and students in digital humanities, media studies, and game studies courses have gravitated towards Twine in and around the higher ed classroom, and most of this pedagogical work has focused on the immediate contexts of games and interactive fiction. Until reading the press around the making of Bandersnatch, I hadn’t thought of this software’s potential in the context of digital project development.
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