This read was honestly a little tough for me. I was very excited at the initial point of Bandersnatch and how we react when we play these choose your own adventure games.
My first experience with a choose your own adventure medium was the goosebumps series. R.L. Stine’s Give yourself Goosebumps
These books were so exciting in the sense that I chose what happened to the characters. But I think theres a few different ways people could approach these books.
I think for me, when reading these books - I picked option 2 a lot of the time. I always wanted to win. However I think that there were times that I would try and find endings that appealed to this sense of chaos in me. I wanted to see what would happen when the character poked the monster, or entered through that very suspicious door. The idea that you will feel sympathetic when experiencing a piece of media doesn’t ring true in many instances. Like in Goosebumps, I wouldn’t poke the monster. I’d hide out, wait until the coast was clear and run home. I do
Arendt argues that it’s not about “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes”, it’s about helping you care more about what others go through.
This idea really resonated with me because I do think it’s tough to truly encapsulate how someone feels when put in a certain situation and so making an experience where yiu become the character won’t resonate the same way.
If you try to put yourself in the place of another without the knowledge of their experiences, this ends in a total failure of understanding, and at a larger scale can lead to destructive misperceptions.