Meet Lose/Lose, the Game You Can’t Win

Seriously. You’re the ship, and aliens are attacking. Do you shoot them? Would you change your mind if you knew that each alien was based on a file on your hard drive, and when you destroyed the alien, that file was deleted? Yeah. If you do nothing and the aliens destroy you, the game deletes itself. Hence the title, lose/lose. The game was made by Zach Gage, who explains it thusly:

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?

I fucking love this. Admittedly, I wrote a 150-page thesis on why videogames should be considered art, so this is pretty much my nerd heroin — I understand if you guys aren’t as excited. Still, I wanted everyone to know about this little masterpiece. (Via Geekologie)