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Black Mirror Season 7 has begun streaming on Netflix, and one of its episodes, “Plaything,” is about a sim game from the 1990s where players care for little critters in the wild and teach them to survive on their own.
The fictional game is called Thronglets, and guess what? It’s not so fictional after all. Netflix has released Thronglets for Android and iOS and you can play it right now—if you have a Netflix account, that is.
If you haven’t watched Black Mirror Season 7 yet, the episode follows up on a character from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the interactive movie Netflix released in 2018. The Plaything episode isn’t interactive, but it features the same game developer from that story, Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), who invites a game journalist from PC Zone magazine to try out a demo of his new game.
But Ritman claims Thronglets isn’t a game at all. It looks like a sim where you care for little critters—feed them, bathe them, give them toys to play with—but Ritman insists these critters are actually alive. They’re created with code but they’re still biological, “living individuals” rather than “obscene puppets like Sonic the Hedgehog,” Ritman claims.
I’ve played Thronglets a bit and it looks and works just like it does in the episode. You can feed the Thronglets apples, wash them with a cloth, give them beachballs to play with, and they’ll eventually learn to care for themselves. And, if the conditions are right, they’ll multiply. And multiply. And multiply.
I won’t say where the episode leads, and I don’t know where the game itself goes, but it’s pretty cute and probably not dark and ominous and twisted or anything like that.
I think Thronglets may be based on Creatures, a sim game from 1996 which featured odd little animals called Norns that players could feed, play with, and care for, ultimately teaching to take care of themselves.
Creatures used machine learning and neural networks to allow the Norns to learn things, and the game was sound groundbreaking for its time that it influenced genuine AI research. When you’re done with Thronglets, you can check out Creatures on Steam.
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Kurt Indovina
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