The "Bandersnatch" Episode of "Black Mirror" and the Pitfalls of Interactive Fiction

When he was a young man, the English video-game designer Peter Molyneux programmed a pixel to slide across the screen of his Acorn Atom computer. He described the thrill as being "as close to sexual satisfaction as you could possibly get." The feeling was shared, seemingly, by many youths in the Britain of the early nineteen-eighties, when there was little economic opportunity for the working class. Before the industrialization of video games--the great American software factories and their nameless workers--these teens staged a quiet revolution from their bedrooms, designing games on home microprocessors. Those who managed to place their games into high-street retailers, such as WHSmith, became rich.