“Fifteen Million Merits”: Gamification, Spectacle, and Neoliberal Aspiration

Looking at the series as a whole, four episodes stand out as having commonalities, although none are especially close. In “The Waldo Moment” (02.03), we see a “gamification” of the political process, which undergoes something akin to a Situationist conversion into play, into a farce, into a mockery of the seriousness it is supposed to represent. In “Nosedive” (03.01), meanwhile, we see that social life rather than economic life has been “gamified” through a ratings system that everyone carries around with them, strikingly similar to the system that mainland China is currently in the process of implementing. The very next episode, “Playtest” (03.02), is the most game-focused episode in the entire series, in which once again systems that are either designed to be play, or designed to use play to mask other elements, come to profoundly and irreversibly shape the lives of their so-called players. Finally, in “USS Callister” (04.01), the interest is again in how play can turn into something profoundly not-playful with only a few particular applications of contemporary, or near-future, technology. Lastly, the series’ recent interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), the entire narrative is in some sense a game, and a game about the development of a game, further reinforcing the series’ strong interests in play, the corruptions of play, and their impacts on our lives.