Playtest is a 50 minute episode in the series Black Mirror narrating the journey of a man named Cooper who finds himself beta testing a game that distorts and adds layers of reality to his own. In the beginning we see him running away from home, and a short scene on the plane in which he is asked to turn off his electronic devices to avoid interference with the plane. On his trip around the world, he never picks up phone calls from his mom, who we later find out he abandoned by herself without a goodbye after his father died. For him, he was afraid and didn’t know how to interact with her so he ran, but he seemed to have never thought about her, who lost her husband and then her son and she calls everyday but he never picks up. Sonja tells him to call his mom, but even when his credit card was hacked, he called Sonja instead of his mom because he was afraid. The job he picks up from SaitoGemu revolves implanting a small device on the back of his neck which allows them to enter him into a new layer of reality which he can see things that they cannot. Before they started the medical procedure, Katie had turned off Cooper’s phone, but he turned it back on to take a picture for Sonja while Katie was gone. As they started the download of the game reality, a phone call from Cooper’s mom comes through his phone. After the test demo, Katie invites Cooper to meet Shou and test the full game in a model of a haunted house, to which he starts seeing and hearing visual hallucinations which is part of the test game. Then, suddenly Katie’s voice on the earpiece malfunctions and Sonja appears at the door and while she insists he is in danger but he thinks she is a part of the game until he realizes he can physically touch her and feel her warmth. He still believes she is part of the game test as an actor until she turns around and stabs him and her face melts into a bloody skull, taunting him and saying he should’ve called his mom. Cooper kills her and the wound and knife disappear and Katie’s voice returns to which she said that she had been talking the entire time. When Cooper tries explaining that he felt Sonja and the knife wound and Katie said that wasn’t possible, we see the turn in the story where the game reality is becoming physical reality, which further warps when he is led by Katie’s voice to an “access point” and then taunted and observed to lose his mind as the supposed real SaitoGemu staff appear and try to stop the game but are unable to. Then it appears that the whole game experience was just a “dream” and it was only 1 second in which they started up the game program. They send him home to America with an apology, to which he finds his mom trying to call Cooper even though he is in front of her and she can’t recognize him. He screams out mom and suddenly the scene changes to him back at the first room after they first did the medical procedure and were downloading the test demo game. The interference of the phone signal from his mom’s phone call interrupted the medical procedure and killed Cooper.
The whole time, we see that Cooper is rather dependent on his cell phone. The whole time his mother is calling him, and he takes photos on his trip, finds Sonja through a dating app, finds SaitoGemu’s job offer through a job app, and even during the game test he was unused to not having his phone. The SaitoGemu’s virtual reality game brought a new layer of reality and horror to the experience. However, in our current world today, the closest virtual reality we have are headsets, which are already pretty terrifying. However, we know for sure that nothing can physically harm us and when we take off the headset we are safe and the game isn’t real. In Cooper’s gaming experience however, he is still in the real world but with an added layer of reality that only he can see and hear. This messes with his sense of real and not real, starting from Sonja’s appearance to Katie’s voice to the game overwriting his memories. In the end, we find out it all never happened and Cooper died through interference of his mom’s phone call, which links back to the first plane scene and the rule of turning off electronic devices that might interfere with the plane during take off and landing, a rule Cooper disobeyed to take pictures of the medical tools for Sonja, who said in the beginning that calling back his mom would solve everything; but he never did and that cost him his life.
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