A follow-up to Bandersnatch, Black Mirror series 7 episode, Plaything, might be Charlie Brooker’s most autobiographical story yet.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Black Mirror: Plaything.
“That was the worst thing about being stoned,” Charlie Brooker wrote in a 2010 Guardian column. “There came an inevitable point where you’d find yourself shuffling around a massively overlit convenience store feeling alien and jittery.”
Fifteen years later, and it’s Peter Capaldi’s dishevelled ex-games journalist, Cameron Walker, shuffling around a massively overlit convenience store in the Black Mirror episode, Plaything.
In the near future, the UK is overseen by an all-seeing state computer, and Cameron – straggly-haired, bespectacled – has been arrested for the seemingly minor crime of attempting to steal a bottle of wine. The bulk of the episode, however, takes place at least 35 years earlier, and explores how an innocent-looking videogame could change the course of human history…
Brooker’s sci-fi horror anthology series has always borne the mark of its creator – the show’s tone is acerbic, satirical and humorously downbeat, much like the columns he was writing in the 2000s. But Plaything, the fourth episode in the seventh series, is perhaps more autobiographical than most.
As James wrote in his review, Plaything is a quasi sequel to Bandersnatch, the ambitiously knotty interactive episode first uploaded to Netflix in 2018. That story, about a young programmer making a piece of interactive fiction and losing his mind in the process, was steeped in nostalgia for the British home computing boom of the early to mid 1980s. Plaything, however, takes place almost a decade afterwards, in 1994 – the very year a 23 year-old Brooker began working as a videogame journalist.
Brooker writes in all kinds of nods to this period in his career throughout the episode. Like Brooker, Cameron Walker (played as a young man by Lewis Gribben) writes for PC Zone – a games magazine first published in 1993, and which soon became known for its irreverent sense of humour. In the real 1994, Brooker both wrote reviews for the magazine and provided a number of cartoons (one of which prompted WHSmith to withdraw an edition from sale).
In Plaything, we see a copy of PC Zone with System Shock on the cover; Brooker reviewed that pioneering first-person action RPG in the November 1994 edition. Walker has a copy of Magic Carpet sitting on his desk – a game reviewed in PC Zone’s December edition, though not by Brooker himself. The nod to Magic Carpet could be a knowing reference to British developer Bullfrog, whose god game Populous looks more than passingly similar to Thronglets, the life sim strategy hybrid we’re introduced to later in the episode. (Netflix has even launched a real-world Thronglets mobile game…)
If Bandersnatch caught the boom years of British game design, Plaything catches it on the other side of the slope. By 1994, the 8-bit computers and homegrown games of the 1980s had given way to a new, more sophisticated (and increasingly corporate) era. Instances of games being developed by a lone programmer were growing increasingly rare; overwhelmingly, the smaller British software companies were being overtaken by such US publishers as Activision and EA.
Read more: Black Mirror series 7 episode 4 | Plaything review
Plaything reveals that Tuckersoft, the games studio introduced in Bandersnatch, has survived into the 1990s. It’s an echo, perhaps, of how the ill-fated Imagine Software – a real-world company that evidently inspired Tuckersoft – was succeeded by the publishers Ocean and Psygnosis. Those firms rose from the ashes of Imagine and published some of the most successful British games of the 80s and 90s before they eventually merged with bigger entities and faded from view; Psygnosis was acquired by Sony in 1993. Ocean was bought up by French publisher Infogrames in 1996.
Like Tuckersoft, programmer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) is something of a refugee from a more off-beat era of game development. His likely inspiration appears to be his near namesake Jon Ritman, programmer of such 8-bit classics as Match Day and Head Over Heels, and Matthew Smith, who became a celebrity game designer with Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy before personal issues saw him bow out of the public eye.
Colin Ritman’s pet project, Thronglets, looks and feels both ahead of its time and of a piece with the sort of borderline experimental games that were emerging in the late 80s and 90s. Brooker has said that he was loosely inspired by Tamagotchi – a digital pet – and The Sims – both interactive crazes that emerged in the years after 1996. But the notion of looking after a virtual lifeform emerged much earlier in 1985’s Little Computer People; meanwhile, Thronglets’ godlike perspective and resource management are akin to Sid Meier’s Civilization (released in 1991) or the aforementioned Populous.
There are other retro nods elsewhere – DCI Kano (James Nelson Joyce) appears to be named after a character in the controversial 1990s brawler, Mortal Kombat. Psychologist Jen Minter (Michele Austin) is a clear reference to Jeff Minter, another legendary British game developer. In one scene, the young Walker is seen visiting a branch of Computer Entertainment Exchange, or CeX – a chain of shops largely dedicated to selling second-hand gaming hardware and software. Per CeX’s own website, Brooker was one of the people who established the company in 1992; he produced a number of cartoons for its adverts and even designed the logo it still uses decades later.
In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Brooker recalled that it was around this time, when he was working for CeX, that writer Patrick McCarthy walked into the London store and asked Brooker if he’d be interested in drawing cartoons for the magazine he worked on, PC Zone. With that, his career in videogame journalism began.
Read more: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch | Revisiting its ambitious, interactive episode
Plaything is therefore bound up in Brooker’s own roots as a young writer and artist emerging from his student years. There’s a trace of nostalgia, certainly, but also a hint of relief at a path not travelled. Black Mirror often explores how technology can be as addictive as any drug, enticing users down obsessive rabbit holes and isolating them in bubbles. Both Plaything and Bandersnatch have characters who take LSD as a plot point – an action that hastens their self-destructive, tech-based spirals.
Back in his 2010 Guardian column, Brooker said that he’d once taken LSD, but decided it “definitely wasn’t my bag.” He did, however, smoke dope “throughout much of my early 20s”.
“It prevented me from getting bored, but also prevented me from achieving much,” Brooker wrote. “When you’re content to blow an entire fortnight basking on your sofa like a woozy sea lion, playing Super Bomberman, eating Minstrels and sniggering at Alastair Stewart’s bombastic voiceover on Police Camera Action! there’s not much impetus to push yourself. Marijuana detaches you from the world, like a big pause button. The moment I stopped smoking it I started actually getting stuff done.”
Amid its affection for the past, Plaything is therefore a reflection on how easy it is to hit the pause button Brooker described. The notion of a 1990s videogame belatedly taking over the country might be fanciful – the whole episode is William Gibson meets Dixons. The sentiment that obsession and addiction can sneak up on the unwary certainly isn’t.
Black Mirror series 7: Plaything is streaming on Netflix now.
