The gamers are expressing anxieties about technology that advances so quickly it could usher dark, unforeseeable consequences into our lives. Like all folklore, it creates meaning beyond mere entertainment-through these stories, a generation of gamers is telling us its fears and asking what the digital saturation of its childhood might mean for its adult mind. The idea of haunted software is really only one step away from a plausible threat like data breach, identity theft, or a computer virus.Ĭreepypasta is popular because it reintroduces the thrill of the unknown into a Wikipedia-mediated world. Gaming creepypastas play with familiar tropes-the gamer driven to find every last secret, the graphical glitch that seems to mean something, the hidden room a developer conceals inside a game. In order to go viral, such stories must contain a kernel of believability. In these stories, just like the videotape in movie The Ring a generation before, a dominant media form is recast as an unsafe space whose malevolence can spill out, contaminate your hardware, and hurt you. Audiences found these compelling because they violated the central principle that allows us to enjoy horror stories: that the game is a safe place and its horrors cannot escape the boundaries of the screen. More recently there was Petscop, a YouTube channel sharing videos of a disturbing (and fake) game that contains references to infanticide. The most famous is Ben Drowned, an elaborate story told across 10 years about an evil spirit trapped in a Zelda cartridge. The most sophisticated gaming creepypastas reach beyond fiction to become interactive transmedia narratives. Online commenters eagerly jumped on these, untangling references to serial killers and psy-ops, but both are likely hoaxes dreamt up by horror fans. More recently, a YouTube video emerged called “Sad Satan” that showed a creepy corridor in a mysterious game apparently downloaded on the dark web. Polybius was supposedly a 1980s arcade game, created as part of a US government experiment, that induced psychoactive reactions in players. Some popular legends concern haunted games that probably never existed. Another concerns a mod for fantasy adventure Morrowind named “Jvk1166z.esp” which causes characters to stare blankly at the sky while a figure with long, spidery limbs haunts the edges of your screen. There is the story of Herobrine, a misty-eyed character who stalks Minecraft, only glimpsed in the distance or through fog. Much gaming creepypasta revolves around cutesy games for children such as Pokémon and Mario. It wasn’t outlandish, either, to suspect games had secrets: even on a program as unassuming as Excel 95 a particular combination of commands opens the “ Hall of Tortured Souls,” a lurid, game-like hellscape within the spreadsheet that displays the names and photos of the Microsoft developers. Back then, game development was the domain of hobbyists and lone programmers who could create curious experiments and distribute them at computer fairs or yard sales. They were more believable before the Internet, when you could still come across a game nobody else knew. Stories of haunted video games have circulated for decades. No cases of child suicide were ever conclusively linked to the game’s music-the closest case was a 1997 episode of the Pokémon TV show featuring strobing lights that triggered epileptic seizures. Lavender Town Syndrome is just a legend, a ghost story for the gaming generation. In extreme cases, these could alter brain chemistry and trigger psychosis-after playing the game, hundreds of Japanese children put down their Game Boys, climbed on to the roof, and jumped to their deaths. The eerie, detuned soundtrack to Pokémon Red’s Lavender Town contained harmful sonic irregularities played at such high frequencies that only the youngest players could hear them. It was the music, they said, that drove the children to madness. Lavender Town is quite eerie, in fairness.
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