The list of things influencers have done for attention is terrifying. The creators ate 10,000 calories in one go, taped their lips together and spilled gallons of milk on the floor in public. When Logan Paul recorded himself finding a dead body in a Japanese forest notorious for suicides, it sparked an internet backlash.
The new video game Content Warning pushes this do-anything-for-glory premise to an insanely meta extreme.
Players take on the roles of content creators who venture into abandoned factories and ghost ships to save murderous monsters. The objective: Get footage to upload to the fictional website SpookTube without getting killed. Players earn “views” based on how scary their videos are, and will lose if they don’t meet a quota within a few days.
“It’s inspired by influencer culture, the way you create content and overcome algorithms to get views,” said Peter Henriksson, one of the game’s designers and programmers. “The lengths people will go to go viral or die trying is really something.”
Content Warning quickly became one of the biggest horror games of the year, a surprise hit from Swedish studio Landfall, which is known for other silly physics-based titles like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Released for PC as part of the studio’s April Fool’s Day tradition, the game sold a million copies within two weeks.
Both Content Warning and the similarly successful Lethal Company take advantage of proximity chat, which allows players to communicate only when they are physically nearby within the game. But the added camera feature raises the Content Warning, motivating players to make life-threatening decisions that they will later watch on the TV in their shared home.
The footage is often joyous: a low-quality montage of players giggling as they dodge silly creatures like giant slugs, a robotic dog spewing machine-gun fire, and a murderous stirrer.
“It’s actually a bit triggering as a YouTuber — sometimes you’re here and you’re a slave to the algorithm,” said Marcos Cardenas, who posts gaming videos to nearly 1.4 million subscribers under the name Macro.
“You get more SpookTube views on the game if you do more crazy and goofy stuff,” said Cardenas, 28, who has played for more than 30 hours.
By encouraging players to save clips to their computer, Content Warning successfully drives social media uploads.
As a result, the internet has been ablaze with the game: there have been scenes of players pretending to interview the sick beasts, as well as suggestions to further satirize influencer culture by adding fake brand deals and sponsorships. Players have even tried to speed up the game, which is impossible to beat completely because the quotas increase indefinitely.
Landfall CEO Wilhelm Nylund said the studio chose to spoof YouTube over a vibrant platform like TikTok or Twitch because it holds a special place in the hearts of many gamers.
“I spent a lot of my teenage years and now my 20s on the platform — I think that’s true for most people who play our games,” Nylund said. “YouTube has been with me throughout the journey of creating games and one of the ways I initially found players to play them.”
Although it may take place in a future dystopia, the YouTube parody component makes the game seem strikingly contemporary. There are other hyper-modern aspects, such as a caged creature that forces people to fill in a Captcha if they want to escape, and a feature that mimics live broadcasts, complete with fake commentators reacting to the clips.
While Content Warning doesn’t have an official story mode, there is subtle lore. The concept created by Nylund is that the players live in a cloud society because the air in the “Old World” has become dangerously polluted. They have to wear diving suits to dive into the sick old world to get shots of pseudo-virality.
The theme in part provokes overly optimistic solutions to climate catastrophe, Nylund said: “The whole idea that, ‘Oh, well, it’s okay, we can mess up the Earth and then just build our way out of it and carry on as before. .'”
The stakes at Content Warning are much lower. Getting zero views can make a YouTuber irrelevant in real life, but the game can just be shut down after a bad round. “There’s a nice catharsis in that,” Cardenas said. “You’re not really losing anything.”
