Lose/Lose: The Scariest Game You'll Play for 3 Seconds

As you may have read in the past about Lose/Lose, I decided to play it. It's a top-down space shooter in the same vein as Galaga, and you shoot incoming aliens. Or not. The only way to win is to not play.

The warning. If you're brave enough, continue on.

You see, when you kill a pixelated enemy, it randomly deletes a file. After being duped by people who speculated that it only deleted game files, I decided to play it. For 3 seconds. Scariest experience of my life. Mac support is available for this game, if anyone out there is wondering. Hit the jump for my crazy experience with this game.

Be afraid.

So, let's get some things cleared up. Aliens are just there. You have a gun. Does natural instinct take over, as you are given a gun, no objectives, aliens and points for killing aliens? That is the moral dilemma in this game. Aliens show no aggression or means of killing you. Your objective isn't clear. The line between friend and enemy is blurred.

Here is the summary taken from the site:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player's mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?

KILLING ALIENS IN LOSE/LOSE WILL DELETE FILES ON YOUR HARDDRIVE PERMANENTLY

Also, the game DOES NOT joke around. After killing an alien, a bit of text appears above the dead alien's head before shortly disappearing. It tells you what it just deleted. Whether it's User/Desktop/Icon or system files, it will delete it. It might delete it's own files, but it's a small chance, considering the game only consists of about 10 files. If you lose, the game's .exe or .app will remove itself permanently from your hard drive.

In 3 seconds, I carelessly killed 5. Just 5. I got scared, and I carelessly died. The game deleted itself. In 3 seconds, I need to reinstall Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament 2004 and replace several icons. Not cool. The catchy music and classic "Pew Pew" sound of the spaceship is more unnerving and disturbing than calming.

You know what's even more of a tease? There's a high score leaderboard on the main page for the game's website. So competitive players can play and reach top score, if they want to risk their computer's health for a title. The top player currently has over 4000 aliens killed. The lowest players on the board killed 1. There are lots of people like that. Even if you've killed 2 files, you've ranked up over quite a bit of people. It shows a lot of players are scared and curious, and only tried with a few files.

The fact that it has a leaderboard, a disturbing twist to the game and simplicity makes it all the more alluring...

Don't download it. Please stay away from it. You know when you're a kid, and you get curious and look at the back of all those old horror movie boxes? Yeah, it's like that. But this will really scar you.

For those who I just sold on playing the game, go here to download it. See what I did there? I'm evil like that. Enjoy.

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Jay Henningsen

October 25, 2009

I'm having one of those strange French feelings like I've seen this before: [url]http://bitmob.com/index.php/mobfeed/this-game-could-be-hazardous-to-your-computers-health.html[/url]

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Kevin Xing

Yup. I linked it in the first paragraph, Jay.

Lance Darnell

You are a brave man, Kevin.

Jeffrey Sandlin

I'm sure the person who created this thinks it's a clever social experiment or something like that. In my opinion what he has created is a trojan virus that attempts to hijack the human brain to destroy computers instead of the computer itself. At least he has the common decency to make it easy to avoid and easy to remove. Still, I doubt that making a program like this will have as many positive results as it has negative ones.

David Matos

Sounds like this was made by a real D-Bag. Thanks for giving people a heads up on it.

Andrew Hiscock

It's great way to kick that old tower to the curb.

Or to fuck with your co worker's computer.

@Kevin - I apologize if my comment seemed abrasive. I work in IT, and when I see applications like this, I think the better approach is to not give these things any more attention. The people who are truly knowledgeable about their computers either will not play it or they know the proper precautions to take to protect themselves and still satisfy their curiosity. The people who do not know enough, or think they know more than they actually do would likely not ever have found this on their own. In this case, posting more and more articles about it is only going to tempt those who do not have the proper resources to deal with the ramifications of playing this game. For the above mentions reasons, I think we're actually doing the community a disservice by giving this game more attention rather than simply letting it fade in to its own obscurity.