Once in a while, you come across something on the interwebs that's such a fundamentally bad idea that you couldn't possibly suggest that people explore it, yet you feel compelled to write a post about it because it's also so fundamentally awesome. So I'm writing a post about Lose / Lose, a new game created by Zach Gage, that you really, really shouldn't play.
Here's the basic premise: You're a little spaceship hurtling through space against a steady stream of alien spacecraft. You have a cannon and are free to use it, but each enemy is tied to a different file on your hard drive, and when you kill an enemy that file is immediately, irrevocably deleted. For real. It chooses files at random, so you have no choice in the matter other than whether or not to shoot in the first place. Oh, and if your ship is destroyed, the game application deletes itself.
Here's a video of what gameplay looks like. I literally cringe with each enemy death:
lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.
More detail, along with some rationale, from Zach himself:
Lose/Lose is a video-game
with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on
a random file on the players 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 an 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?
A wise computer named WOPR once said something very wise to me: "The only winning move is not to play." You would do well to listen, and to never play Lose / Lose. Unless....you're trying to reformat your hard drive and want something more engaging than an MS DOS terminal.
Deployed as a bus shelter installation in Hamburg, Germany, for Amnesty International's domestic violence awareness initiative, this ad forces you to unwittingly engage in a brief role-play scenario that simulates the problem Amnesty is seeking to address, raising awareness not just about the larger problem, but highlighting the fact that this broader issue is the cumulative result of hundreds of thousands of daily, individual acts of rationalization, deferral and feigned ignorance. 
