Augmented Reality Bites: “Playtest” and the Unstable Now

In Black Mirror’s (2011–) “Playtest”, a cash-strapped American traveler agrees to test a prototype augmented reality video game for money. Before long, the unsuspecting gamer is in deep, experiencing visualizations of an increasingly profound, disturbing and ultimately lethal order. “Playtest” suggests the seductiveness and annihilative potential of virtual and augmented reality technologies. But beneath its moral tale is a horror narrative of societal anxieties regarding the disorienting pace of advanced technological life. This is symbolized through the main character’s inability to maintain his connection to the real due to a devastating experience with the virtual—an encounter notably instigated by the other. Considering key instabilities of the advanced computational “now”, including (1) the body/machine divide, (2) memory and forgetting and (3) a unitary sense of time, this chapter unveils how “Playtest” represents far more than an anxiety narrative about the corrosive effects of video games.