Games being over

Normally, people complain that video games make kids less intelligent. Some people claim that gaming has become an addiction. I would have agreed with these claims if gamers weren't the people making the claims. Since before Creepypasta and similar horror websites have existed, gamers have been questioning the games they've been playing. Some of these questions come in the form of haunting stories of video game glitches gone wrong, and these stories make plain some interesting questions that gamers ask about their medium of entertainment.

For me, the most interesting of these stories was a story on Creepypasta named (unispiringly) "Tick Tick Tick" (which I am unable to find on the Creepypasta site, though there are various youtube videos and other blogs that tell the full story). It tells of a Pokemon hack wherein most of the major characters of the game have all of their text replaced with the words "Tick... Tick... Tick...", which meant little to the player early on. The player's rival, however, makes repeated pleas that the player should not face the final boss of the game, claiming that "The ticking needs to continue." When the player does beat the final boss- he realizes that the game's save file was erased- raising a critical question: do the characters inside games have lives? If they do, does their world only exist as long as the power switch is on?

There are similar other stories too, but they all end in a player realizing that some hacked or glitched video game has darker intentions than it would have led the player to initially believe. However, all of those stories have their main points summed up in the internet "visual novel" titled "Uncle who works for Nintendo." The author leaves several notes that are unlocked after the game is played to explain the inspirations for the story, and these notes suggest that gamers are somehow trapped by the games they play, and that these games, if they had their way, would keep people playing them till we died. The author suggests that the games need players in order to be worth anything and that they only truly exist while the power is on.

People don't seem to show this level of caution around any other type of media- possibly because games affect people in a way that no other kind of media can. Perhaps games do, unintentionally, prey upon people in order to not be forgotten. Perhaps it is too easy to lose oneself in a game, and maybe there really is reason avoid letting that happen. Either way, the gamers have realized that, perhaps, their games are an addiction. That perhaps their games are somehow eating away at the people who made them. That perhaps the games should be over.

The Uncle who Works for Nintendo