Netflix's 'Black Mirror' Blurs Reality with AI-Driven Game 'Thronglets'

Black Mirror Season 7 has an episode about a sim game where you take care of cute little creatures, and here's the twist: it's a real game you can play right now

Gosh, they sure are cute. There's definitely no dark side to this. 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.

How Netflix Turned a Terrifying 'Black Mirror' Plot Device Into a Real-Life Video Game

In "Plaything" -- one of six new episodes from creator Charlie Brooker now streaming -- a video game journalist (played by both Lewis Gribben and Peter Capaldi) becomes obsessed with a game called Thronglets developed by the legendary developer Colin Ritman, marking a return for actor Will Poulter. (Yes, the episode is something of a sequel to the 2018 Black Mirror interactive film Bandersnatch.) That obsession ultimately leads to a dystopian future, as the game (or rather the "throng" that exists within the game) seeks more power and to break free from the constraints of their PC home. Netflix, of course, is in the video game business now. And Black Mirror viewers can now play Thronglets for themselves, deciding the fate of the new digital species from the comfort of their couches. Thronglets can now be downloaded via mobile app stores, included with Netflix (and was prompted via a QR code in the season seven trailer). "The promise of seeing an episode that is already something that we found so inspiring and cool and strange and singular, and then getting to live with those characters in your own at home is something that I can't overstate how excited I am for, because I believe that it's not just a tie-in, but rather, you get to star in your own version of "Plaything," or Thronglets," says Sean Krankel, who leads Netflix's Night School Studio, which developed Thronglets. "Our team wanted to do something with Charlie [Brooker]," he adds of the Black Mirror creator. "One: We were big fans of Bandersnatch already, but two: The idea of a game that is going to exist only in these snippets in the episode, and that we could expand on that and go, 'Let's make it a real thing, not just a marketing activation, but a real full-fledged game inside of there.' That was just like a dream." Krankel says that his team began developing the game spinoff in late 2023, when "Plaything" was just a script, some sound design and a handful of still images. And in another first for Netflix, the design of the thronglet characters from the game actually inspired the creatures in the episode itself. "We were in pre-production when we started collaborating with the games team, and it meant that we started taking cues for the look of the game from the games team," Brooker told attendees at a Netflix panel at the Game Developers Conference last month. "So actually collaborating on the game improved the look and the feel of the game in the episode itself, and hopefully vice versa." In fact, "Plaything" may be one of the most autobiographical episodes of Black Mirror that Brooker has ever written. Years before he became one of the most subversive writers in TV, Brooker was a video game journalist at a magazine called PC Zone (the magazine makes a cameo in the episode). At the GDC, Brooker recalled having to review a video game called Creatures, featuring cute animals that players had to nurture and take care of. "That's as autobiographical as this gets, because then all sorts of horrible things happen," Brooker quipped. "I always knew it was going to be somewhere in between kind of Sim City and The Sims effectively, and that it was a sort of riff on the things people do to The Sims, and also sort of have an artificial AI component to it." Indeed, while the thronglets are only onscreen for a few minutes in the episode, the game is more fully fleshed out, featuring elements reminiscent of Tamagotchi, Sim City and other simulation games. Just as in the episode, the digital creatures watch the player's every move and will react accordingly. And yes, they remember the choices you make. "It was really critical to us to not feel like it was just a disparate sort of feature set that loosely ties into it. Rather, we wanted to be like, 'Oh, this is the game that literally got lifted out of the episode,'" Krankel says. "The other competing goal that we have is that, as a studio, we care really deeply about letting players have agency inside of the story, and that we wanted this, at the end of the day, to be a story, so it wasn't just going to be a sort of anemic simulation game, because we weren't going to go as deep as some of the games that it's inspired by." In the version of Thronglets that Black Mirror fans can play on their devices, the game starts out almost identical to the version in the episode, as they feed, bathe and play with the adorable creatures. However, the creatures quickly evolve from pets to play and into a civilization that needs the player's help in search of unfettered power, mirroring [spoiler alert here] a critical plot point from the episode that culminates with the thronglets being let loose from their PC confine. In the game, the thronglets subvert the player's expectations, learning from you and ultimately feeling pity for you, as their strength and knowledge in numbers dwarfs anything that mere humans can understand. Sure, there are some departures from the episode (characters communicate with the throng by taking acid... not exactly something Netflix can or would want to bring to gamers at home). But the joy, horror, sadness and discomfort present in the scenes in the show are all present in the game. "Because Black Mirror is oftentimes darkly a parody, or can show the current state of affairs through a slightly cynical or comedic lens, I think we slanted towards that sometimes in how we talk to and interact with those characters," Krankel says of the thronglets in the game. "But at the end of the day -- and if you've played through it, you know -- they don't actually become bad guys. They're not actually trying to do anything to harm us." Typically when a Netflix user is done watching an episode, they are done with the show. Krankel notes that the game can have a longer shelf life and replayability: "I can't wait for people to find and start uncovering the secrets, because there's a lot of secrets," he says, taking inspiration from Brooker, who leans heavily into Black Mirror Easter eggs. This all comes full circle, as Bandersnatch was Netflix's first adult interactive feature, and took two years for Brooker and his team to develop with the streamer. Now, "Plaything" and Thronglets clearly marks a new frontier in Netflix storytelling, and a new way for subscribers to immerse themselves inside the world they are watching onscreen, as terrifying as that world might be. "It's been really rewarding to see how the two different fields feed into each other, more cross collaboration, more of that is what I'd like to see," Brooker said at the GDC. "Where it will all be in 10 years time, I dread to predict, but presumably, we'll all be locked into some kind of infinite entertainment vortex, which which sounds better than the real world." For now, Black Mirror fans can take control of their own virtual world, as long as they don't mind its inhabitants scaling exponentially.