Tag Archives: Internet

The Game

Nationality: American
Age: 26
Occupation: Student
Residence: Long Beach, California
Primary Language: English

“In high school, my friends and I were always playing The Game and messing with each other. Every time you think of The Game, you lose. So the only people always winning the game are the people who have never heard of it. I think that we liked the irony and parodoxical nature of The Game. Also, school was really boring and The Game never stops. It’s endless entertainment. Except it’s also so infuriating. Most of the time when you’re actively playing The Game, you’re just trying to remind your friends that it exists to make them lose. It’s a game you play for other people as much as yourself.”

Context: The informant went to high school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and graduated in 2010. He learned this game online.

Interpretation: This game illustrates the idea that “ignorance is bliss.” The most successful players are those who do not know they are playing. It is also deeply ingrained in Internet culture, and is an excellent representation of the principle that people on the Internet do things “for the Lulz” alone rather than for some greater purpose. The goal of this game is to annoy one’s friends as much as it is to keep oneself from losing. Furthermore, it is an example of how games that start or spread mainly online can make their way into everyday life in-person.

 

Rickrolling

Nationality: USA
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/05/18
Primary Language: English

The particular details and background of the following prank were introduced to me by a fellow student majoring in computer science.

 

The prank in question takes place on internet video platforms, most commonly YouTube, where viewers are led to believe they are accessing entirely unrelated material and instead are met with the surprise appearance of the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’ Having been performed so many times as to have earned its own name, the prank has come to be known as ‘rickrolling,’ a reference to Astley’s name.

 

Although I was previously familiar with the prank’s ubiquity, having been ‘rickrolled’ myself a number of times prior, its intentional nonsensicality was not apparent until being explained.

 

As a prank that exists in a simple digital form and relies entirely on taking advantage of the internet’s functions, ‘rickrolling’ is a definitive example of the relationship between perpetrator and victim when pranks are performed over the internet. In real life, there requires some kind of physical interaction to be pranked, but on the internet, there remains complete anonymity. The victim will likely never have any idea who ‘rickrolled’ them, and given the nonexistent physical consequences of the prank itself, will not have any incentive to find out themselves.

 

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A transformative step for this prank occurred as that of a marketing tool in the leadup to the release of the second season of HBO’s television program Westworld. The creators of the show, known for its complicated narrative and plot twists, formally announced they would release a video revealing a comprehensive guide to every narrative step of the show in advance, effectively spoiling every surprise the season held before airing.

 

Because much of the show’s popularity derives from trying to guess and anticipate each of these twists, critics and viewers alike contentiously debated this unprecedented decision that would undermine the effectiveness of a highly anticipated release and seemed to reflect an unsettling ignorance (on the creator’s parts) of the show’s major appeal.

 

When the aforementioned spoiler guide was released onto the video platform YouTube, viewers were treated to the sight of the program’s lead actress singing a piano cover of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up,’ a nod to the traditional practice of ‘rickrolling’ and a solid indication that the entire announcement was a prank itself.

 

It is worth noting that even this sly and cleverly-angled marketing strategy relied on an unexpected narrative twist (although created in real life, impressively), just as the show itself relies on such methods to keep viewers engaged.

Staying Close Through Minecraft

Nationality: Italian American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Woodside, CA
Performance Date: 4/8/2017
Primary Language: English

Informant:

Dina is a college freshman from Northern California, she comes from a large yet close knit Italian family.

Piece:

My brothers and I love to play all types of games. Like board games and video games and just all types of games. I mostly like board games, but those are way too hard for us to play since we are all at college and away from each other for so long each year. So to make up for that we play video games with each other online. They like to play league of legends, but I don’t like that game at all. But we all play Minecraft together and built this house together on Minecraft and it’s super cute. And we built it to be the same layout as our house so that even when we are in all different places we can be at home together.

Collector’s thoughts:

This is a great example of how the internet has allowed people to stay close to each other despite long distances. The informant’s ability to stay close with her family is completely dependent on the internet which links them up via a game.

 

 

Polybius

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Seattle, Washington
Performance Date: 4/12/16
Primary Language: English

Polybius is an urban legend videogame–meaning a video game that is only rumored to have existed.

 

What’s Polybius?

BA: Polybius is a video game, supposedly made by SEGA, that caused the kids to play it to have seizures. They say there’s only been one Polybius cabinet–this was the 80s, when games were in cabinets in arcades, like Pac Man and Asteroids and stuff…and this cabinet was in Portland.

Why was there only one cabinet?

BA: There was only one cabinet, because that’s how they tested the game before release. It was a big game by a big company, and it used new graphics technology, so they just secretly tested it under a fake name…if the game passed testing, it wouldn’t be called “Polybius”. But… the kids who played it got addicted to it and had seizures. People reported seeing men in suits watching them play, and some say it was the United States government watching to see the effect of the game, to somehow use it as a weapon. Anyway, they scrapped the game and hid it from the records once the kids had seizures, so they couldn’t get any bad press, so nobody’s heard of it since.

 

The mystery of Polybius originated on the internet in discussion boards in 1998. It’s since snowballed to a huge essential question: “Is Polybius real or fake?”. Some claim that it is a fabricated story based on the overwhelmingly negative reception of the early testing stages of Tempest, while others claim to have been part of the developer team responsible for the game.

There are some slight references to Polybius in popular culture, such as a background joke in The Simpsons and the plot of a long-cancelled G4 series, Blister

Squidward’s Suicide

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Seattle, Washington
Performance Date: 3/23/16
Primary Language: English

Squidward’s Suicide is an urban legend surrounding the Nickelodeon children’s television show, Spongebob Squarepants (referencing the character “Squidward”).

 

BA: So, the story goes, that there was an intern at Nickelodeon; I think he just started working there, and he was really excited about it, I guess. And during one of the episodes, when they’re watching the..I think it was the final cut before air, I guess… And they were looking at the timestamps, and they saw it was edited only a few seconds before they watched it–basically the times of them editing it didn’t match up, and they realized. So, it starts out kind of normal, but something’s off: the eyes of all the characters are hyperreal–like not real, but not exactly CGI. But that’s, “that’s whatever”. SO they keep watching, and it’s an episode where Squidward has a performance (Squidward is a musician). He really f***** it up, it was really bad. But the booing was really intense, it was very unsettling.

Do you know if that was intended by the animators, or if that part just showed up?

BA: Oh, no no no, it was not intentional. The part where the eyes were hypperreal, that was not supposed to happen. The part where the booing was really unsettling, that was not supposed to happen. But, whatever, it happens. So, he’s in his house. And he’s sobbing. Sobbing uncontrollably. Then those sobs turn to screeches, and again, very unsettling–oh, it’s something like… there’s a noise that happens, that doesn’t sound like speaker noise, if that makes sense. So, the animators hear that and they’re like “so, this is super weird”. And I guess the creepiest part is that there are frames that are intercut into the episode of, like, dead children, who are completely maimed with their eyes falling out. And it looks like a crime scene, except there’s no tape or chalk, so it looks like whoever did it took those pictures. And they played it back, and they could see the kid move between frames, and they could tell he was still alive. Then, at the end of the episode, Squidward kills himself, and we don’t know where all the changes to the editing came in.

 

There are several variations to this story: In some versions, the episode was sent on a disk from the serial killer in Scotland to Nickelodeon, where an intern played it and later gave it to higher-ups for investigation by law enforcement. There’s also a version where the disk was made by a disgruntled ex-employee of Nickeoleon looking for revenge by broadcasting images of murdered children on a children’s network. Either way, this legend has circulated on the internet and even inspired some animators to recreate the episode based off the legend, then post those images to falsely prove that the legend is real.