I think most of us can agree that Pokémon Go is a pretty fun game, but for many people (including several people in our offices), it’s become an obsession, a daily devotion, and the master of lives. It’s that kind of cautionary technological tale that Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror was founded on, the anthology series about how increasing dependence on devices is making us lose our humanity, and it becomes more prescient every year. It would seem a no-brainer for the show to do a pastiche on Pokémon Go, but Patrick (H) Willems beat them to the punch with his mashup parody.
The parody has two distinct sections. It starts out as a comedy about a shitty boyfriend who’s way too attached to playing the phone game, ignoring his girlfriend and making her feel dumb for only having a few Pokémon compared to his 100s. He then completely blows off a dinner out they had planned to go catch a Charizard, then gets mad at her for purposely ditching several of his ‘mon, causing him to go out into the night to catch some ghost-types.
That’s when the video starts to go off the rails a bit; some sort of evil government or independent scientific facility picks the boyfriend up and displays to a shady guy in charge that people are indeed addicted to catching Pokémon, and it’s all a scheme to…create real live Pokémon in test tubes and stuff? To be honest, that’s where the short kind of lost me. Still for the bulk of its run time, it’s a proper skewering satire of people with their noses in their GD phones.
We’ve already seen, though, many reports of people actually forming new communities while playing Pokémon Go, though there might be some significant others who are peeved about it. Let us know your thoughts on the short, on Pokémon Go, and on Black Mirror in the comments below!
What’s the science of Pokémon Go?
Image: Patrick (H) Willems
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. Follow him on Twitter!
