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lose/lose

September 25th, 2009 (Visited 2326 times) Tags: art games, indie games

Here’s an interesting game experiment — shades of Ender’s Game, in a way!

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?

via lose/lose and @mrseb

Video is below. I am amused that the top player blew away thousands of files on their hard drive.

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.

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Tweets that mention Raph’s Website » lose/lose -- Topsy.com wrote on September 25th, 2009 at 11:13 am:

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by reBang™. reBang™ said: Intriguing. RT @raphkoster New blog post: lose/lose http://bit.ly/3zRYi9 [...]

William said on September 25th, 2009 at 8:58 am:

OK, off to install this game on the library computers.

Seriously, this is brilliant. I could almost sense the giddy exultation in the random destruction of the player’s filesystem watching the video – like watching a furious tantrum. I have an interpretation of that game (essentially, whenever I say a Space Invaders/Galaxian type shoot-em-up mechanic, I reflect upon xenophobia and immigration-anxiety) but I wonder how much of this is more an exercise in the possibilities of creative destruction.

elias said on September 25th, 2009 at 10:12 am:

Creative destruction is something different.

Anyway I think this is funny and cool. I hope it gives enough warnings, though, that people won’t be able to trick each other into playing it…

Yukon Sam said on September 25th, 2009 at 10:48 am:

I want a Tetris clone that doubles as a disk defragger. One of you devs hop on that, kthx.

Enno said on September 25th, 2009 at 10:52 am:

This is the last game everyone should be playing at work after getting made redundant.

LSK said on September 25th, 2009 at 1:01 pm:

I’m genuinely worried that the program could be distributed without warnings and used as malware. It’s a fun concept, but a game I’d never want to play.

Bryan Suchenski said on September 25th, 2009 at 1:26 pm:

That’s…wow.

The problem here is, I don’t think the game actually brings up the kind of questions it thinks it does, because the only people who will actually play it are ones who for one reason or another don’t mind files on their computer being destroyed. Since there are thousands of Space Invaders style games out there, it’s not like it’s providing a unique experience that tempts you to destroy your files, and it’s not like there’s some point to playing the game and not shooting at the aliens – destroying your files is entirely what the game is about.

Now, if the game were, say, an in-depth RPG where certain elements of a complex story would only be revealed if I were willing to destroy random files on my computer, then at least I would have a real choice to make.

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on September 25th, 2009 at 2:11 pm:

Not all that different from those games where you get to suffer from physical pain (electro-shock) then?

William said on September 25th, 2009 at 4:26 pm:

This is, of course, why we invented virtual machines.

Andy Havens said on September 26th, 2009 at 6:25 am:

Reminds me of the game we invented years ago called “Megaball.” Two teams of at least 100 people meet at the center of a large field, surrounding a giant, inflated, leather ball 50′ across. They push the ball back-and-forth across the field until one team quits. First team to quit wins.

The all-time world champion Megaball team is the Brazilian “Chupax,” who never even actually formed a team.

Michael Dickens said on September 28th, 2009 at 7:52 pm:

This is a clever experiment. I am not going to play this, but if I were to, I would create millions of empty files and completely fill my hard drive with them.

How can this game get permission to delete files?

Rohan said on September 28th, 2009 at 11:42 pm:

While the “only move is to not play” trappings is somewhat interesting, the idea of using a game to interact with the underlying computer system has been done before, and done better.

Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

Ace Albion said on September 29th, 2009 at 2:01 am:

“only move is to not play”

I had this realization years ago while struggling with XCom. I discovered that the alien threat vanished if I just never played the game again.