Raymond.CC Blog

As always, I was surfing around the internet looking for many things, especially for oddities and such stuff that I could share with the Raymond.cc crowd. And this is one of the times that I’m not sure if anyone has heard of this “game” or not. Going by the name of ‘Lose/Lose‘, and classified as a virus by Symantec, it is quite unique in terms of an art game. It is modeled after Space Invaders but it’s one of the few games that I will recommend that you stay away from at all costs. This is because, if you couldn’t tell, the title is extremely suiting: you can not win this game, no matter what you do.

Lose/Lose is unique to my knowledge as it is the only game that will go out of it’s way to get even with you. Every time you destroy an enemy ship, a single random file is deleted from your hard drive, randomly. That’s right, Lose/Lose ‘rewards’ you with deleting files off your computer every time you earn a point by destroying an alien. You thought Bastet was evil, Lose/Lose manages to put everything you thought was sacred and fair in the world to shame. And when you lose the game, the game itself is deleted. The creator of this ‘game’ had this to say about it:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real-life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the player’s 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 and 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?

While I refuse to link to this game out of respect and knowing misuse of this game will occur, I would like to link you to a video, at the bottom of this post. It’s not that hard to find out there, but it’s just one of those programs that you never deliberately would want to play. It is available for Windows and for Macintosh… though I’d not recommend you play it all the same. I am not sharing this because I feel it is a virus that everyone needs to learn about, however, I am sharing this to alert people to this only because we all know someone who is not very wise in terms of computers and might come across this. I had to help a friend recover some critical data that he had deleted though this game. So this is my warning to you of what you might have to face one day because of someone being foolish. It has always been my logic to be more prepared against something we might never face, then to face something we are completely unprepared for.

- Official Video from Symantec -