Television’s Representations of Play in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Using the special episode of the anthology series Black Mirror: Bandersnatch as an example, this essay will retrace the interrelationship of play, game, and television, as this episode offers a representation of diverse variations of play, going so far as to present its playfulness as the actual protagonist in terms of narrative content, storytelling, and structure. Precisely because of this topicality, Bandersnatch lends itself to the interpretation as an indexical phenomenon of remediated and thus playful processes, which not only puts paradigmatic variations of play on display but also leads to conclusions about implications concerning reception modes and media structures.