Killswitch: A Fakeloric Product in situ PDF

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Chris Ryan POPC 660 Killswitch: A Fakeloric Product in situ Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. —Montaigne, Essays. Spooky stories require enough distance that they can't be easily invalidated. Usually infinite distance. —Conskill1 The prevailing assumption about the creat...

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Chris Ryan POPC 660

Killswitch: A Fakeloric Product in situ Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. —Montaigne, Essays. Spooky stories require enough distance that they can't be easily invalidated. Usually infinite distance. —Conskill1

The prevailing assumption about the creation of the video game is that it exists to be played. What, then, is the value of a game (or the idea of a game) that explicitly defies that expectation? Would such a thing stand as commentary on the concepts of games and playing, or would it just be a ―bad‖ game? The story of the game ―Killswitch‖ brings to mind just such questions, and the responses of the prolific posters on the Something Awful (SA) Forums’ Games sub-forum to an introduction to this story (and this game) demonstrate the sorts of discussion—both in the affirmative and the negative, in the situating-as-plausible and the scornfully-debunking—traditionally associated with a group addressing a legend introduced to, and circulated within, that group. 2 A brief disclosure: I have been an active poster on the SA Forums since 2007, but at no point posted in the thread I examined for this paper, nor did I prompt any posters in that thread to volunteer their opinions—I am documenting their responses to one another without any interaction on my part. For this paper, I will be examining the presence of the story of the Killswitch game in the ―Video game hoaxes and urban legends‖ thread on the SA Forums,3 and how the posters in that thread responded to the story, analyzed the story, and attempted to situate the story within a framework most plausible to them—either as something that could possibly exist, or as forums poster Tewratomeh categorized the story, ―[a spooky story] somebody in a college creative writing class made up … off the top of their head.‖ 4 I will: (1) examine those responses to determine what it is about the game (or the idea of the game) that appeals to people and makes it a popular story (given that within the context of

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the thread it is by far the most commonly-discussed specific story, with an average of at least one post about the story itself across each of the thread’s 60+ pages); (2) outline, based on both community response and real-world logic, why the game itself could not feasibly exist (thus situating the story of its existence as a sort of supernatural or paranormal event); and (3) attempt to demonstrate why, in the eyes of this community, it is irrelevant whether or not the story is itself true or false, and how that particular response makes this story more than just a work of fiction posted on a website and circulated through a forums community—it functions as a fabulate5,and, as such, the discussion of this story serves ultimately as the sort of communal discussion that creates and reinforces a legend. But what is Killswitch? According to the source linked in the original post (OP) of the ―Video game hoaxes and urban legends‖ thread, Killswitch is purported to be a limited-release platform-jumping game from a little-known publisher in Eastern Europe, produced in 1989. The notable aspects of the game’s gameplay (and those which I will be presenting as reasons that, taken in sum, make the game’s existence doubtful), as presented in the story, are as follows: that character selection is locked upon first loading the game (between the options of: (1) Porto, a female avatar whose physical dimensions warp and distort throughout gameplay, occasionally rendering areas unbeatable; and (2) Ghast, an invisible demon whose invisibility extends to the player’s view of the avatar—thus making any precision jumping in the game all but unbeatable by definition) and cannot be undone by any means, even character death; that completion of the game erases the game from all storage media on which it was present (including the source diskette); and that the game has never been beaten by people playing Ghast, and so the developer intent of the game remains unclear to the player. Furthermore, the Killswitch story concludes

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with the cautionary tale of one Yamamoto Ryuichi, a collector who purchased a copy of the game and is stricken with indecision over which character to play. 6 However, my summary here is by no means the only one available. An important aspect of the study of legend is the study of retelling and transmission, and the OP of the Games thread is no exception. First poster SpaceBees opens the discussion of Killswitch with the following: This one is really bizarre and difficult to even explain. The gist of it is that it was a Russian PC game with a very limited run, about 10,000 copies. Upon completion, it would delete itself. It is (in)famous because there were puzzles and levels that players never found ways to complete. The game took place in a Russian factory that was inhabited by demons. Like I said, its difficult to explain what this game is even about, but you can read more [at the link to the invisiblegames.net website] 7 Responses to this post were immediate and emphatic in their interest: This is pretty cool. I hope people have more stories like this instead of crap about their friend telling them how to find mew [referring to a character in the Pokémon franchise of video games]. —Category Fun8 Hell with the other —RBA Starblade9

stuff,

I

want

to

learn

more

about

this.

Yeah, Killswitch seems very interesting. Is it really impossible to stop it from deleting itself or to copy it? —Alberto Basalm10 Man I want to hear more about this one. It sounds amazing. Does that mean once it's installed, that's it? You can't reinstall it? Once it's beaten, it's done for good? How would it even be possible to play as an invisible character? —Buckwheat Sings11 Killswitch is not a real game, but it's a pretty good work of fiction. —ConcernedCitizen12 Man I wish that Killswitch game was real, just reading that whole story behind it gave me the chills. —RCarr 13

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It is these last two responses that demonstrate what I consider one of the more interesting trends in this thread: users acknowledging (or presuming, at any rate) that the Killswitch story is fictional, yet expressing interest in, and appreciation of, the story—a trend that hews closely to Honko’s explanation of the fabulate.14 While I will soon address those who appreciate the story as a story (and those who interpret, analyze, and discuss the story as a piece of fiction/legend), in keeping with an analysis of the community’s interactions in the thread, it is important to now turn to the next emergent trend in the discussion of Killswitch: the detractors of the story (both as presented and as an idea). While it is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt to psychoanalyze the reasons behind posters’ articulations of disbelief—and sometimes, derision—towards both the Killswitch story and those posters advocating in favor of it, a few consistent trends emerge: those who find the story itself to be poorly written, and those who think the facts of the story are so implausible as to render the story itself unbelievable. As to the first point, the importance of the performance in presenting a legend in an effective manner (regardless of the intent of the storyteller) has been stated numerous times in existing scholarship—in particular, Kapchan’s ―Performance‖ articulates this concept numerous times.15 In dissecting the Killswitch story, a number of forums posters found that the story (that is, the literary performance) itself was what led them to consider the story implausible: The Killswitch story sounds neat until you start to think for a few seconds. How do you make a file that can't be copied, and how do you make something that will delete itself to an 'unrecoverable' state? Maybe with magical fairy computers you can do this, but with real world computers if you have data on a disk, you can copy that data to another type of media. —BobTheJanitor 16 I think that whole site [invisiblegames.net] is fake bullshit, actually —Alberto Basalm17

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The only thing that bugs me is that the hoaxer tends to go one step too far and break any suspension of disbelief for me. Like, Killswitch and the dude who tried to lp [Let’s Play: A fan work wherein someone plays a game and records themselves doing so, with commentary either aside it in posts or overlaid with text or audio within the videos themselves] it only recording himself weeping. That being said, whats too much for one dude is too pedestrian for another so who knows. —RentACop18 What makes the story falls apart is the ending. The price is too high to go believably unnoticed. And who would upload a video of themselves crying over a game. It would have been better to end that he has never provided updates, or that the only update was he began the game and nothings been posted about his progress. —Marenghi 19 In these responses, and the quote from forums poster Tewratomeh that I utilized earlier in this paper, it is clear that these users disbelieve the story for the quality and tone of the writing more than anything else; the literary performance is lacking and, as such, the presumed intent (presenting the story of the game as plausible) is not achieved. However, it is important to acknowledge those for whom the story was implausible due to its supernatural or paranormal elements, as well (of which the idea of an irreproducible, selfdeleting game was the most common element cited). For those posters, the suspension of disbelief was not achieved due to their inability to situate the game’s existence itself within the realm of plausibility: What I don't get about this Killswitch thing is what's supposedly stopping people from making a copy of the CD or floppy or .exe or whatever the fuck to just reinstall it after it deletes itself. —Bloodcider 20 Also, it states that some people started as Ghast then went back to Porto showing you can start over with the other character. So we have to believe that a) the game is impossible to complete without doing some weird illogical action b) the game only deletes itself when you complete it and c) EVERYONE who ever owned it, beat it. In reality, even with regular games an absolute ton of players never get to the end.

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Plus, a $733,000 game would have been all over the news. Shouldn't have gotten greedy, $7,300 is more believable to have slipped under peoples radars, and more feasible for a game that had a small fanbase. —Fatkraken21 You know what really makes Killswitch fall apart under examination? If it had been real, what would have stopped people from just reinstalling it and playing again? After all, it "deleted all traces", so there shouldn't have been anything that told the floppy never to install it again. Minus the deletion, add my voice to the cry that this would have actually been a nifty game to play. You have to wonder if some developer out there is reading that and deciding to actually make something similar. —SRoses22 No shit Killswitch is fiction, you all seem to be overlooking the fact that if a company made a game that intentionally deleted itself they would be sued into oblivion unless it was freeware. —Industrial 23 Seriously knock it off about Killswitch. It's fiction, it didn't happen, and couldn't happen without some way to circumvent the deletion of the game data, no matter how clever you think your idea is to make it copy-proof. —RagnarokAngel 24 What bugs me about Killswitch is the horrible design choices presented. A character you can't see at all? A character whose size randomly changes? How would these get through testing? Speaking of which, how would a game that permanently deletes itself go through testing anyway? Would it delete itself every time? —Codfish Cartographer 25 The themes of technical impossibility surface over and over in these posts; while a number of reasons for this may exist (a few attributions could be a desire for the poster to demonstrate his or her technical knowledge over others, or to display that his or her critical thinking skills are superior to the more naïve posters in the thread—the RagnarokAngel post above perhaps serving as the best example of this—or to simply dismiss the idea because it doesn’t sound fun), as I stated previously, it is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the psychology of expressions of disbelief in great detail. However, it is worth recognizing that such disbelief was present in discussions of this legend, if for no other reason than that they then served as a springboard for

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another interesting facet of the discussion: those forums posters who attempted to situate the Killswitch story firmly within the realm of plausibility. In the case of the posters attempting to explain how the Killswitch story could be true (or at least, how such a game could exist as depicted in the story), I noted an interesting parallel to one of the reasons I stated as a possible motivator for the dismissals noted previously: the display of a poster’s technical knowledge to others. In situating the Killswitch game and story as plausible, these posters demonstrate both knowledge of games and gaming history at large: Killswitch may not exist, but the original version of Command and Conquer's [a real-time strategy game] uninstaller had a slight problem where instead of deleting the game's folder, COMMAND, it deleted COMMAND.COM.[the default command line execution program / system ―shell‖ / code interpreter on certain versions of Windows] —LuigiThirty26 EVE Online [a massively-multiplayer game] one uped that when one of their updates deleted boot.ini. [the file that allows your Windows OS to boot up your computer] —SpaceBees27 Continuing the chain, Myth2 deleted whatever directory it was in, so god help you if you decided to install it anywhere but the default one. Apparently they caught it in time and that never actually got out to the consumers though —RentACop28 In the previous examples, these users situate the Killswitch story as plausible by offering realworld examples of games that could delete programs considered ―critical‖ by the Windows operating system (which are thus protected from deletion by most programs by default). The following posters presented Killswitch’s plausibility not from a historical standpoint, but from a technical one, while at the same time demonstrating their own working knowledge of data processing and storage: Yeah. It's entirely possible for a game on floppy to run a separate format process on completion- it's entirely unbelievable for that same game to somehow prevent

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itself from being backed up or copied or otherwise duplicated. —Jetsetlemming29 Let's say it is a external custom harddrive which has a vacuum inside. You install the game as driver for the device, it allows read/write only through game interface, and erases itself along the way. When player dies/finishes, it drops the read/write head to the disk, it has special hardware switch for that, effectively destroying it. If one tries to open the case, it does the same, as vacuum works as a "failsafe" (failsure?). Only way to access the data would be to use the driver, the game, but for that you need to know stuff about the system, or it has some weirdo I/O-system, or it stores stuff crypted, hardware number and license keys being only way to decrypt the disk. wrong hardware serialnumber, it wont start, or internal serial dongle etc. to deter even successful data exports from the system. I'd say it's not completely impossible to design a device which could be read only once, but obviously this would be super expensive, and is a concept I just pulled out of my ass. Besides, the story does say that it comes on disks, not custom soviet hijinks hardware. —Der Kyhe30 How about this: Write the game code so that it checks the seek/read speed of its source medium. If it's too fast (i.e. it's been copied to a HD), game won't run. Similarly, when the game starts it performs a simple check to make sure it has write access to the medium - if the disk has been made read-only, game won't run. This leaves two main problems - the game can still be copied to another floppy, and a virtual floppy drive could be set up and set to emulate the read speeds of a real drive. For the first problem, you could probably manufacture a limited run of oversized floppies so that a regular 1.44Mb disk wouldn't fit the game. The second problem I don't know how to solve, but it wouldn't have been an issue when games were still being distributed on floppies so I'm going to ignore it —TACD 31 Okay, I hate to drag the Killswitch thing up AGAIN, but it is actually possible for a game to delete itself. However, for this we need to start thinking about computers in the distant past of 1989. Now, as I recall, the CD-ROM standard for storing binary data didn't come into play until the mid-eighties. CD-ROM games were actually pretty excessively rare for the first while, so Killswitch probably would have come on some floppies. Maybe only one, who knows? Regardless, let's continue. Now we have to start thinking to things that are a bit more obscure. Something like a little virus called Elk Cloner. Really, all the game would have to do would be make sure that the virus prevents the game from being successfully copied, has to run off the disk (no terribly uncommon) and wipe either the disk or the relevant file from the disk containing a 8

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random encryption key to actually decode the files on the disk. Not saying the story is true, but that this is all theoretically possible and fairly likely that a game with such a limited run would ever have been successfully cracked. Especially with how finicky it was with uninstalling itself. —Unexpected EOF 32 In situating one of the Killswitch story’s more unusual elements (the irreproducible, self-deleting nature of the game upon installation or completion) firmly within the realm of plausibility, these posters position the story itself as holding grains of truth, which are, as much as anything else, necessary in creating and transmitting a legend that a community will both appreciate and retransmit.33 A story too fantastical or too implausible ―feels‖ far too fictive for the audience to desire to retransmit. Poster ―Rollersnake‖ echoed this sentiment: But in a sense, I guess that's what makes it appropriate as a "creepy urban legend" type of scare—it's rare enough to have a mythical quality to it. 34 As the previous statement may indicate, the posters in this thread were, for lack of a better phrase, quite genre savvy when it came to urban legends and hoaxes. For this reason, I feel that letting the posters speak for themselves on the subject of the popularity of this story (and this type of story) may be more valuable than simply offering my own opinions. To wit: Yeah, I like the Killswitch one because it's really just about weird games (which we all know are possible) combined with human weakness. I mean the guy at the end isn't crying because the game has possessed his mind or something, he's crying because he doesn't have the strength to play the last copy the way he's supposed to and the way that everyone is expecting him to. I think that's why I liked the Pokémon: Black game [a story about a variation on the Pokémon game series in which the player’s sole controllable character is implied to be devouring the souls of the enemies he defeats in battle, and that those souls exist in a paratextual space, such that the player is subjected to their cries whenever the game is on] also. It's just vaguely kind of creepy, it doesn't expect you to believe in dead spirits or children being driven insane or anything. —That Rough Beast 35 Spooky stories require enough distance that they can't be easily invalidated. Usually infinite distance. —Conskill36

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This whole business about Killswi...