What if Balatro, but too much?
Black Mirror has proven itself unnervingly prescient. While watching the first few seasons of Netflix’s dystopian anthology, I thought it clutched the “what if phones but too much” pearls a little too tightly. But given that I’ve since come to think of my phone as a wretched obelisk that radiates psychic harm, I’m now more inclined to listen when series creator Charlie Brooker says there’s an impending threat to humanity and it’s Balatro on phones.
In a recent interview with Deadline, Brooker was asked about the origins and inspirations of Black Mirror’s speculative fiction in episodes like “Joan is Awful,” which led to conversations about the show’s sixth season in 2023. When asked what games he’s been playing recently, Brooker—formerly a writer for the now out-of-print PC Zone magazine—said he, like countless others, has fallen prey to the seductive deckbuilding allure of Balatro.
Brooker said that, alongside Ghosts of Tsushima and Dave the Diver, he rewards himself while writing with short sessions of Balatro, which is, in his words, “possibly the most addictive thing ever created.” The poker roguelike is so addictive, in fact, that Brooker thinks its impending mobile release could endanger human productivity worldwide.
“It’s going to be released on phones,” Brooker said, “and at that point I think humankind’s activity is going to drop about 25%.”
It’s clearly a prediction made in jest, but hey, that Black Mirror episode where a woman had an AI clone made of her dead husband seemed absurd to me at the time. Then tech companies went ahead and started making that a grim reality last year. Oh, and that 2017 episode where the weaponized robot dogs had killed off most of humanity? We’ve started doing that, too.
If we can’t be trusted not to create the torment nexus, is a worldwide Balatro malaise really beyond the realm of possibility? Hard to say. But if the next Black Mirror season has an episode where the world is hopelessly paralyzed by the narcotic splendor of finding a good Joker combo, we’ll all know why.
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