Puss in Book: Testing viewer preferences from A to B

A screenshot from Puss In Books.

Having only recently finished watching The Handmaid's Tale, with its story of a horrific society that increasingly feels disturbingly just a few steps from our own, I now see the beginnings of dystopia everywhere. Sometimes, I guess, this is probably paranoia.

Netflix call their new interactive children's show Puss In Book a "branching narrative", which at least avoids the taint of having it called "choose your own adventure" after the series of books that - even as a young child - you sensed were extraordinarily terrible.

The main difference is that Netflix, who already understand far more about what you like to watch than you ever will, are going to gather so much deeply psycho-analysable data about you from the decisions you make in the course of these programmes that it could change the face of television.

What the show allows you to do - and there are more of these shows on the way, so don't think it's just a gimmick - is to choose one of two alternative paths at multiple points throughout the story. Tap left to make Puss in Boots fight angry baddies, tap right to make him share a cup of tea with them etc etc.

Among web developers, there's a thing called A/B testing, where visitors to a website are randomly directed to one of two pages (page A and page B) to see which page gets a better response. Developers then get rid of the lesser performing page and A/B a new set of pages, and so on. Endlessly repeated, this process should yield something close to the platonic ideal of a website.

Netflix's "branching narratives" are a brilliant way for the company to disguise A/B testing as entertainment, gather a massive amount of data about viewer preferences, then use the resulting data set to draw a sort of map for how to make commercially successful television.

The world of TV is already a bleak enough place for creatives, often forced to conform to dull formulas and ideas about what works and what doesn't. Where will the next act of genius come from if acts of genius don't pass the A/B test?

The question here is, "Is this going to be entertainment or just badly concealed customer research?" And, related: "Does it matter?"

Five or six narrative branches into Puss in Book I started feeling weirdly like I was being exploited, a tool of Big TV, a unit to be monetised rather than the unique individual I would like to believe myself to be. I began to see it as my responsibility to confound Netflix by making the opposite choices to what I imagined they would expect, in an approach I thought of as "creative chaos theory". If I think about it though, it seems likely that all this act has achieved is to mark myself out in the company's analytics software as an oddball, an outsider, part of a presumably tiny minority. If there are enough of us, Netflix will probably still make us the odd programme, but minorities don't tend to drive double digit year on year growth.

If you look at it democratically, it's possible to say it's right and fair that if most people want the bears to be angry, they should have angry bears. But if your average viewer knew how to make good TV, he'd already be doing it.

Lowdown

Puss in Book, on now on Netflix