Video games and movies have a somewhat fraught relationship. Movies based on video games are just crawling out of the deep dark hole they’ve dug themselves into, but movies about fictional video games have a different history. When horror movies use games, they usually do so with the Most Dangerous Video Game trope.
There’s something hilarious about the games kids play in movies and TV shows. Viewers often look at characters playing games that look awful while watching characters play games that look awful or absurd. However, sometimes the games invented by screenwriters and VFX teams for other media are scarier than they are funny.
The “Most Dangerous Video Game” trope represents a video game that has a nightmarish effect on its players. It is usually cursed, chased or developed and published by some sadistic monster. The game can be just about anything, although it usually falls into the survival horror genre. Players are tied to their in-game avatar. Their safety is often linked to their performance in the game. Other haunted video games can inflict insanity in their players, the sheer nightmarish experience of going through the challenges that evoke a Lovecraftian dread. A few of these games don’t even kill or corrupt their players, they just enchant them through sorcery to make them play forever. The trope combines comically outdated scaremongering about the negative social and personal effects of gaming with supernatural horror, sometimes with the graceful paranoia of an after-school special.
While far from the prime example, the seminal film “Most Dangerous Video Game” is William Brent Bell’s 2006 classic stay alive. The film is produced by Terminator Rescue directed by McG and distributed by Buena Vista, making it Disney’s only full-fledged horror film to date. stay alive follows a handful of friends who are shaken by an unexplained and sudden death. When they find the PC game of the same name in the deceased’s personal belongings, they make the inexplicable choice to play it. The game leads them through a prayer similar to the Latin at the beginning of Evil Dead. Players begin to die in eerily identical ways to their in-game fates, leading to the immortal rule “If you die in the game, you die for real.” It’s a hilarious movie, definitely worth watching as a spot object. It is also the perfect encoder for the trope.
Numerous TV series have a single episode where the Monster of the Week is a deadly video game. It’s an oddly common gesture that shows of all genres can enjoy, but it doesn’t always carry the same risk. Star Trek did it at least twice. Deep Space Nine includes an episode called “Move Along Home,” which plays with the idea by introducing a race of aliens obsessed with a VR game. At the end of the episode, Quark fails, but everyone immediately realizes that the game is just a game. There also is a Next generation episode in which a woman uses a VR game that addicts its players to steal the Enterprise, and turns it on through peer pressure. X files has a hilarious episode called “First-Person Shooter” where a VR game is haunted and starts killing real people. Spectral Superhero Danny Phantom released a ghost in an MMO in “Teacher of the Year” that could kill players in real life. It’s a simple and common story for an episodic story.
There are some fun variations on this figure of speech that have cropped up in movies. The 1994 movie brain scan introduces a game that uses hypnosis to create immersion, then reveals that it also incites players to violence in the real world. Neveldine and Taylor’s 2009 Movie gamer puts players in control of real people in first-person shooters and Second Life clones, but that’s not a twist, it’s the unique selling point. The universally panned third Spying on children The film borrows this trope by threatening to trap players in a VR world forever. More recently, Netflix released Choose or die, in which an 80s text-based adventure game distorts reality and forces players to risk the lives of their loved ones. Numerous anime series depart from this concept or borrow it for a short weekly threat.
The funniest thing about this figure of speech is the fact that the vast majority of examples seem to know nothing about video games. So many of these killer video games come from a place of comical fear mongering about the violence, addiction, or societal degradation that some claim video games will cause. Most of the movies that use this trope are cash-ins hoping to grab the attention of gamers. They usually lack a real critical lens on video games. There are a lot of interesting elements of the video game world that could be ripe fodder for horror movies. Hopefully this worn and often silly trope can be used to explore some more interesting aspects of the concept.
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