Black Mirror Season 4.5

Last night, I dreamed I was the involuntary viewer/protagonist of seven episodes of Black Mirror. An elevator served as the dream's framing device; I rode it up and down to different floors, and when I stepped onto a floor, its respective episode would begin.

I only remember two; one began with the elevator car suddenly losing its ceiling and walls, revealing pitch darkness all around. I dropped prone and clung to the remaining floor as the elevator plunged sideways and down, eventually flinging me into an ornate bedroom where it was revealed that my bride (not Sylvia) wasn't human; she peeled all her skin off and revealed a faceless mannequin beneath, the suddenly-revealed backstory revealing the ironic twist: my character had complained about robots dehumanizing marriage.

In the other episode I recall, I was joined in the elevator by an old colleague named Judy, back from my days at the Official Opposition. We chatted for a moment, and when the elevator doors opened, she vanished and I stepped out to meet at least a dozen Kevin Tafts (or would that be Kevins Taft?). Each Kevin had a different costume and role, and we appeared to be attending a very classy fundraiser for the Alberta Liberals, held in a swank hotel gilt in gold and diamond. Kevin welcomed me "back," (whatever that meant), and encouraged me to climb a makeshift ladder to the ceiling of the ballroom, a ladder made of sofas, love seats, and recliners stacked atop one another.

"Watch it--precarious," he warned. I begged off and retreated down a dark, candlelit corridor, which turned out to be a strangely-designed restaurant. I thought I saw some of my old caucus friends there, but the Black Mirror dead channel static ended the episode. 

A New Twist for RPG Gamemasters

Today at work I played Dungeons & Dragons with some colleagues over our lunch break--genuinely great team-building exercise, as there were at least four people there who I only infrequently work with and whom I got to know a little better.

The experience must have sparked my imagination, because on the drive home tonight a thought occurred to me. Wouldn't it be fun, I thought, if you gathered a group of friends to play one roleplaying game or another, but with a twist: instead of playing Jandalor the Barbarian or Maxi the Hacker, what if your players played themselves, but tossed into the roleplaying setting with only their own skills plus their knowledge of pop culture tropes? And, furthermore, what if the characters/players knew that they were not the originals tossed into the roleplaying world, but perfect copies, with the originals living out their lives back in the real world, a la Black Mirror? (I stipulate this because if this actually happened to us, I know we'd spend the entire scenario trying to get back to our loved ones in the real world. Copies might feel conflicted, but they'd be comforted to some extent by the knowledge that they're copies. Plus this adds an existential crisis angle to roleplay! Postmodern fun!)

In my own case, I was thinking specifically of the new Star Trek roleplaying game that I'll likely never play simply because we're all too busy at this point to cram another game into our lives. But it made me laugh to think if, for example, perfect copies of my Gaming & Guinness friends were tossed into that milieu, but with random roles assigned.

In fact, I'm going to pause right now and randomly determine (by rolling a d8) which of my friends gets assigned which roles in this kooky scenario. The setting is the U.S.S. Excalibur in the year 2266, right around the time of "The Corbomite Maneuver," the first regular episode of the original series.

Captain: Mike T
First Officer: Scott
Science Officer: Rob
Chief Engineer: Steve
Chief Medical Officer: Pete
Helm: Colin
Navigation: Island Mike
Redshirt: Jeff

All right. This is going to be inside baseball to some folks, but these results are hilarious to me. Mike has a pretty good handle on Star Trek trivia, knows the episodes, and would probably do a pretty good job of using inside knowledge to keep the crew safe. He's pretty well suited to the Captain's role in this scenario, but he can also be rather volatile in a gaming setting, and might wind up ordering crazy shenanigans just for fun; for example, I can see him saying "Let's mix things up by slingshotting around the sun and going forward in time to the Next Gen era," or "I've always wondered how powerful the weapons are supposed to be. Let's see if we can shatter a planet with torpedoes."

First Officer Scott, on the other hand, is somewhat infamous in our circle for getting heavily invested in the rules of the games we play, but sometimes, as we all must, misinterpreting them. So I can see him and Mike arguing a bit over what the group can do as opposed to what they should do.

Rob, I can see having fun throwing his hands up in the air and saying "WTF do I know about microbiology (or whatever)?" and simply ordering his staff around to do the actual science work.

Actually, that probably holds for Chief Engineer Steve, too, who (I believe) does not necessarily have the technical knowledge to maintain a 23rd century starship. But he, too, has a lot of Trek trivia knowledge, and could rely on his team to do the real work.

Poor Pete winds up as the doctor, and for some reason I see him as taking on the role with ghoulish relish, choosing to trust in his tools and hope that by this time, medicine is pretty much automated.

As the helm officer, I imagine Colin would have fun flying the ship around, since that, too, is controlled mainly by computer, with only gross inputs from humans required. This should also be true for Island Mike at the navigation station. They also get the fun job of managing weapons and shields, and I think Colin, in particular, would enjoy blowing things up with photon torpedoes.

Poor put-upon Jeff winds up as the red-shirted security officer, which is funny to me because of all of us, Jeff has gotten into the most accidents, most of them not his fault. I can just hear him saying "OH, GREAT!" when he (or rather, his copy) arrives on the Excalibur.

I, of course, would serve as gamemaster. I'd provide the initial setting, the first initial problem for the players to solve, and I'd play the roles of the other 422 Excalibur crewmembers. I'd play them as rational but compliant beings, following the orders of the senior officers if not without question, then with only reasonable resistance to truly crazy decisions by the team. But ultimately, what the players say goes.

I think playing this out would be hilarious, although the idea probably tickles me more than my hapless friends. Even so, I think the basic idea is sound, and could be fun if used for other roleplaying genres: high fantasy, superheroes (Villains & Vigilantes approaches this, but you're not supposed to have metatextual knowledge of the setting and tropes), spies, the old west, etc.

Fun to think about! 

50,000 Marks

In the dream, we are all in a house that is trying to kill us. One by one it picks us off with trap doors, electrical grids, swinging bludgeons and shadowy figures who drop from ceilings and pop from behind false wall panels to pull their prey to oblivion.

The worst is when Sean is taken and then, some minutes later, tossed back at us, crashing through a glass door to lie bloodied and gurgling on the floor. When I go to him, he says:

"Don't worry - it's just special effects. It's all a TV show."

Baffled, I look up to see with my mind's eye that a well-muscled black woman is leaping through a series of glassless windows in another part of the house, bouncing like a gazelle in free fall. She pulls a lever and suddenly the walls pull away to reveal the film crew that's been monitoring our every move.

Those of us that had been killed by the house are hale and hearty, well-dressed and made up, congratulating each other on their winnings now that the ruse has been revealed. My own performance was top-tier; I finished fourth, earning 50,000 Marks, enough in this world for a comfortable early retirement.

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Clearly I've been watching too much Black Mirror; fans will recognize elements from two or three different Black Mirror episodes. Imagine a world in which reality show producers can terrorize their contestants without legal repercussions, all for the sake of entertainment and money!