In middle school—stop if you’ve heard this before—I knew a group of guys who loved to do stupid, reckless shit. They compared themselves to the cast of Donkey, but it wasn’t good enough to do stupid shit like walking through the train tunnels between stations. They needed to be able to share it with their friends and maybe even with the world. So they did what a lot of kids did in the early 2010s and started uploading their hijinx to YouTube. They didn’t become famous for these stunts, but I simply searched for the name of their crew and surprisingly some of their videos are still online – so they managed to capture their stupid fun for future generations to enjoy.
The idea of capturing the idiocy that happens between you and your friends is the main idea of one of the latest trending topics in gaming: Content warning. Content warningwhich appeared in shadows last week and was available for free on Steam for its entire first day, didn’t quite take the world by storm, but it did sold extremely well
Its premise is not entirely different Deadly company before, or even Phasmophobia, two multiplayer games in which your party is expected to enter locations threatened by monsters or otherworldly creatures. Games like these often lack progression systems (except Phasmophobia, which it later added) and many industry-standard features that encourage people to keep playing toward a specific goal. In a word, it makes them seem simple. The conventional wisdom is that these are games that come and go in the blink of an eye.
Depending on who you ask, “simple” is the best a game can be, or the worst. I love dense games like system-heavy immersive sims and Content-intensive titles like Destiny 2. But I also played for about two hours Content warning, where the extent of what you’re doing is screaming at your friends into a microphone, recording it all, and playing it back for you all to look back on and laugh. They are all equally memorable and deserving of credit.
Playfulness comes in all shapes and sizes and so much of what we do in and around this industry is about capturing it. It’s equally present in the labyrinthine complexity of something like this Baldur’s Gate 3
And Content warning deals with that original style of play that I miss and that we so often lose as we get older. I don’t often long to be a teenager, but remember how much fun it was to have no responsibilities and have the world at your fingertips? Do you remember the joy of meeting your friends and playing tag, or the thrill of running through the forest at night? Content warningIn its premise, it pokes fun at how our society has commodified escapades that we would partake in as children, but behind this satire lies a virtual playground where one can create and record such stories. It allows me to be that Donkey Middle school kids, even if just for a few hours a week.
Since its release, I’ve seen several silly clips of groups of friends having a blast Content warning
I’m not an idiot. Content warning does not suddenly challenge the transience and fleeting nature of the joy of life, nor does it resolve what I believe to be fundamental problems surrounding playfulness in this current incarnation of the gaming industry. The clips Content warning Storage resides on devices and social media platforms that die and decay. This shit isn’t forever. One day, for one reason or another, these kids’ videos will be deleted from YouTube and the phones they used to record them will be long gone. But Content warning is a window into something simpler, and it is pleasant to be a part of it, even if only for a short time. It gave me the chance to go back and be a kid again, at least for a moment. Be someone who distances yourself from “content,” roadmaps, and in-game marketing events. It wants to capture the joy as best as possible, and I wouldn’t give that up for anything.
