Plaything – how Black Mirror took on its scariest ever subject: a 1990s PC games magazine

Out of all the episodes in the excellent seventh season of Black Mirror, it’s Plaything that sticks out to me and I suspect to anyone else who played video games in the 1990s. It’s the story of socially awkward freelance games journalist, Cameron Walker, who steals the code to a new virtual pet sim named Thronglets from the developer he’s meant to be interviewing. When he gets the game home, he realises the cute, intelligent little critters he’s caring for on the screen have a darker ambition than simply to perform for his amusement – cue nightmarish exploration of AI and our complicity in its rise.The episode is interesting to me because … well, I was a socially awkward games journalist in the mid-1990s. But more importantly, so was Charlie Brooker. He began his writing career penning satirical features and blistering reviews for PC Zone magazine, one of the two permanently warring PC mags of the era (I shared an office with the other, PC Gamer). In Plaything, it’s PC Zone that Camero...