For as long as there has been technology, there have been attempts to let ordinary people shape stories with it. The proto-interactive 1960s project The Sumerian Game allowed users to make choices in an ancient setting that a system could then react to and incorporate. During the 1990s, developers began working on Facade, in which a player could talk to characters in conflict and, with help from an early form of AI, alter the characters based on what was said. And in the 2010s, a company called Interlude allowed people to change dozens of “channels” on a video for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” shifting the story with it; a few years later, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch would expand the concept to feature form.