Black Mirror: Playtest

By Eric Steinhart

Every philosopher should be

aware of Black Mirror. I regularly
use two of its episodes in class:
Be Right Back, and The Entire History of You. Theyre worth talking about
later. Black Mirror is set in the near future. Its a character-driven show
which takes current technological trends into dystopian territories. Its
like the old Twilight Zone, except that the scary stuff is technology, and
its much darker than the Twilight Zone. It raises lots and lots of
fascinating philosophical questions about persons, reality, good and evil,
and so on.

I just recently watched Playtest, which is Episode 2 from Season 3, now

streaming on Netflix. If you havent watched it, you should, and you
should watch it very, very carefully. One of the finest features of almost all
the Black Mirror episodes is just how carefully crafted and well-written
they are. They can be subtle, and the subtleties can be easy to miss.
Much of the deeper horror lies in the details. So: SPOILER ALERT. If want
to avoid the spoilers, see the episode before advancing to the rest of the
article.

Heres the Simple Default Interpretation of the episode: The Playtest

episode is about a young American man named Cooper. After caring for
his dying father, he leaves home secretly and goes on a round-the-world
youth-hostel-backpacker type adventure. Which lands him eventually in
England. There he hooks up with Sonja using a dating app. After learning
his credit card has been hacked, he uses the OddJobs app to find some
work to earn some quick money. He gets a job doing a playtest for a
highly secretive gaming company. The game involves a neural implant
which produces an augmented reality, sort of like Pokemon Go but
running inside your brain. The game hes going to test is a horror game, in
which the implanted neural network will learn his fears and challenge him
accordingly. He plays through several levels of this game, and, at the end,
he appears to die.

Heres the Problems with the Simple Interpretation: The episode is full of
discrepancies and twists. If you watch it carefully, or watch it a few times,
the internal inconsistencies multiply until youve got to figure that theres
something else going on, something deeply sinister.

The episode has lots of issues with time. Time doesnt flow linearly: it
expands and contracts. At the end, youre told that Cooper went through
over thirty minutes of game experience in 0.04 seconds. But theres no
way a human brain can process that much information that fast. And
youre told that Coopers phone caused a malfunction which killed him.
Except that the phone also rang in the first set-up with the Wack-a-Mole
game, and the game downloaded just fine (all the blue bars on the helmet
light up), and Cooper is just fine, and Katie appears to turn his phone off.
There are plenty of time-stamps on the internal security videos if you
want to see the temporal discrepancies. Errors in the filming? Hardly.
There are many clocks displayed prominently in every scene. This is tight.

The episode has lots of issues with physics. In the Haunted House, Sonja
comes into the room and interacts physically with Cooper. They have the
same physics. If shes a game character, then so is he. She walks into him;
he can touch her; shes solid unlike the ghostly figure of Coopers high
school nemesis, which Cooper can walk right through. You cant
hallucinate solid matter. You cant lean on an illusory wall. So maybe
Cooper is hallucinating himself being inside of the Haunted House, like
you can see yourself in a dream. Fine. But then you should conclude that
Cooper is hallucinating the whole episode, including the time he spends
with Sonja in her apartment talking about the Singularity. The physics is
the same.

The episode has lots of issues with point-of-view. Whos watching the
security cameras? They show Coopers world without his hallucinations.
And yes, there was a security camera in the White Room. You see the
footage it shot. So they could have watched Cooper turn on his phone
and take a snapshot of the contents of the black box. The episode has
issues with character consistency. Saito wears different clothes in
different scenes. Sometimes he can converse in English; sometimes only
in Japanese.

The episode has issues with repetition. The phone calls from Mom start
at 6b16am, just after Cooper gets into the taxi taking him away from his
house. The scene of him leaving is the same as the scene of him
returning. The shots are identical. And if the scene of him returning is in a
game, then so is the scene of him leaving.

So this episode is good for metaphysics and epistemology. One

traditional trope here is the appearance-reality distinction, in which theres
clearly an outermost or deepest reality level, the true reality, the basement
bedrock level of truth. At that level, theres a True Story about the world,
told by a reliable omniscient narrator, whose point of view is the real POV
of the story. This is the Platos Cave approach. Or were living in the
Matrix, sure, but there really is a true reality opposed to the simulated
reality, a truth opposed to an illusion. Theres a capital-T Truth: Cooper
dies at the end. Sorry, but that just doesnt fit with the rest of the story.

Playtest is more like Inception or eXistenZ than like the Matrix. In

eXistenZ, at the end, one of the players asks Tell me the truth, are we still
in the game?. Similarly, at the end of Inception, were left wondering
whether the main character is in the real world or still in the dream world,
or whether theres any real world at all. And its also sort of like Memento,
where the failure of memory becomes a failure of reliability. Does the
main character in Memento kill the real John G or just some arbitrary
person? Is his own backstory true or just another confabulation? For me
at least, the terror of Playtest lies in the total disintegration of narrative
coherence.

I showed it in my Metaphysical class under the topic of Impossible

Worlds. I urged the students to watch carefully, but I gave no
interpretation of my own. After watching it, several students stated right
away that Cooper was a game character. Cooper himself is the Playtest.
Hes a software character generated by an AI. This helps explain why he
can go through so much experience in only 0.04 seconds. But theyre all
software characters. This helps explain why his girlfriend Sonja can
appear physically inside of the Haunted House (the Gamekeepers Lodge)
just as she appears physically in London. And why, when Cooper gets
stabbed, it seems to happen to him physically. Software doesnt have any
level at all. It also helps to explain how Katie and Saito can operate on
multiple levels.

On this interpretation, the entire episode, all of it, is set in some game-
theoretic reality. We are all game characters, playing a game with almost
no plot structure at all a game much like eXistenZ, or perhaps No Mans
Sky. There are layers upon layers of phenomenal experience, but they
arent nested. They overlap and intersect. The characters create the
levels around them. They weave the web of the world. A program running
on one level can run on all the levels. All these levels overlap and
intersect. They arent nested, they arent dreams within dreams. Each
dream has its own time and space, but the dreams crisscross in variable
ways. Characters dont stay in their levels. Like Allegra says in eXistenZ,
Theres some weird reality-bleed-through effect here. And there isnt
any coherent omniscient point of view.

Playtest is a metaphysical horror story. Its more like a Lovecraftian

nightmare than like a Platonic dream. You coud develop an idealist
metaphysics here: there are lots of finite software minds interacting in
poorly coordinated ways. Ultimately, nobody has any identity. And there
isnt any real world. Theres no hardware, no rock bottom. There are
computations, but no computers.