Every day, the world seems to be slipping further and further into dystopia, with President Donald Trump placing tariffs on islands inhabited by penguins and the country's head of Medicare and Medicaid touting AI-first healthcare. In case you needed an even higher dose of Orwellian anxiety in your life, though, Black Mirror has finally returned for season 7 with six brand new episodes. In its new season, the anthology series about our, shall we say, complicated relationship with technology takes on AI sentience, subscription pricing models, lost loves, high school grudges, and the privatization of health care. It's also got plenty of action, romance, and a heaping helping of tech-era terror. As with any anthology series, Black Mirror has plenty of hits, and also its share of misses, and season 7 is no exception, which only makes it more perfect for ranking.

When Charlie Brooker's Netflix series about tech-driven dystopias, Black Mirror, returns, it will do so with a surprising new twist: a mobile video game tie-in called Thronglets. Think Tamagotchi, but psychologically threatening. Netflix showed off both a sneak peek of the new season of Black Mirror and the accompanying life sim game from Night School Studios during a private event in March during the Game Developers Conference. Sean Krankel, cofounder of Night School Studios and Netflix's newly appointed general manager of narrative, says the team worked closely with Brooker to create "an artifact" from the show people could experience as an extension of its story. "The way I came back to the team and I was like, oh my God, imagine if you brought a Mogwai home and it effed up your life after you watched Gremlins," Krankel says.

After a four-year hiatus, Black Mirror is back. Season six is now on Netflix, along with the whole back catalog--including one Christmas special and an interactive movie. The show, created by Charlie Brooker and producer Annabel Jones, is a modern take on classic anthology series like The Twilight Zone. Through Brooker's dark, playful, and sometimes uplifting lens, the show examines the unintended ways technology impacts our lives. Because it's an anthology series--in which each installment has new subject matter and a slightly different tone--each episode has its fans.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. When my husband asked me if I wanted to try the "cat trivia game" on Netflix, I thought it was going to be some sort of quiz about felines. I like cats, so I said sure. The "cat trivia game," it turns out, is Cat Burglar, which Netflix calls an "edgy, over-the-top, interactive trivia toon." It debuted in February and comes from the makers of Black Mirror.

Netflix is planning to add video games to its massive library of films and TV shows within the next 12 months, a new report claims. Games will be available on Netflix at no extra cost to the standard subscription price, according to Bloomberg, although the move may make it easier for Netflix'to justify price increases in coming years'. Netflix has also confirmed to MailOnline that it has just hired Mike Verdu, a former executive of Electronic Arts (EA), the successful video games firm, who will lead the expansion into games. At EA, Verdu previously worked on mobile games including titles in the Sims, Plants vs. Zombies and Star Wars franchises. He has also worked for Facebook and Kabam, one of the biggest creators of smartphone and tablet games.

Swipe right for "would like to meet", left for "wouldn't". Seven years after Tinder made choosing a date as simple as flicking your thumb across a smartphone screen, it is by far the most-used dating app in the UK and the US. Downloaded 300m times and with more than 5 million paying subscribers, it is the highest-grossing app of any kind in the world, according to the analysts App Annie. For Americans, apps and online dating are the most common way to meet a partner. "It's an amazing responsibility, and an amazing privilege," says Elie Seidman, Tinder's 45-year-old chief executive.

Its success will inevitably pave the way for more ambitious creators, would-be auteurs and flagrant imitators who, just like Bandersnatch's protagonist Stefan, are eager to explore what can happen when the outcome of their stories is decided by the viewer. Of course, video games have been playing with the power of narrative decision-making since the 1980s. Here are five of the best. This interactive spin-off of the hit TV show has you regularly wrestling with your morality as you guide a young girl named Clementine and her companions along a post-apocalyptic journey that showcases the necessity of selfishness when it comes to survival. The game's shining moments come in how it handles group dynamics.

Netflix's choose-your-own-adventure content will find its audience--first through novelty, then because creators will tease ever more fireworks out of the form. But interactive TV starts at a disadvantage: It is arriving just as we've learned, in so many ways, not to interact at all. Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the Tetris effect in issue 26.11. This article appears in the February issue.

A new episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror debuted on Netflix just before the new year. Unlike most previous examples, Bandersnatch is not a cautionary tale of how current technologies might evolve to further ruin our hearts, minds and communities. It is, rather, a period piece set in early-1980s Britain, when young video-game programmers were becoming millionaires selling their games in WH Smith. Unlike all previous Black Mirror episodes, Bandersnatch is a nonlinear film that allows the viewer to steer the plot using simple A/B choices at key moments in the drama. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the period, these choices range from the mundane ("which cereal would you like for breakfast?") to the life-imperilling, and each path winds to one of a number of possible endings.

When he was a young man, the English video-game designer Peter Molyneux programmed a pixel to slide across the screen of his Acorn Atom computer. He described the thrill as being "as close to sexual satisfaction as you could possibly get." The feeling was shared, seemingly, by many youths in the Britain of the early nineteen-eighties, when there was little economic opportunity for the working class. Before the industrialization of video games--the great American software factories and their nameless workers--these teens staged a quiet revolution from their bedrooms, designing games on home microprocessors. Those who managed to place their games into high-street retailers, such as WHSmith, became rich.