Yes, I am also going to do the Wargames introduction, although it is so obvious that at least 20 websites must have used it. I love Wargames, it is the only hacker movie I have seen in my whole life, and it will always stay that way because I hate hacker movies. Now for the introduction, Joshua: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
For everybody who is about to try his luck at shooting mean aliens in lose/lose, a nice game of chess is really the only way not to lose. Not to lose data, actually. New York based artist Zach Gage has programmed a nice looking and “mildly challenging” (Symantec antivirus squad) space shooter in which the killing gets real. Every alien, floating around in front of your little space ship, is generated based on a random file in your documents folder. For every alien homicide, this file will get deleted. If you lose the game by having your space ship destroyed, the application will terminate and delete itself.
Gage’s concept of lose/lose explores the meaning and importance of digital possession – how can we trust we really own things that we don’t even fully understand? Have we already reached the point where we value some of our real physical possessions less then our data?
Of course the game has quickly made its way into the antivirus databases of our beautiful globe, and in the meantime has even been garnished with warnings of possible code mutations or alterations – a terrible fear of an art space shooter running wild, and you yourself as the killer of your own creation, giving your power point presentations hell, slaughtering your mp3 collection and annihilating your summer holidays.
If anybody is to hack or make use of lose/lose, I’d like to make this very constructive suggestion: How about combining it with an antivirus program, so you can game away your time and at the same time zap spyware and trojans on your system yourself? DIY adware removal! Keep your computer clean with your own two hands, no matter what these kids come up with next!
One Comment
1 Ben Chandler wrote:
Oh dear – remember that game we nearly had ready for release?
I got addicted to this game and it deleted the whole resource folder, meaning that the whole thing is gone.
Everyone’s a loser(except New York based artist Zach Gage who is clearly now guffawing in a way only those who are both evil and a genius can)!