Thank you for starting such an intriguing thread and for sharing your scary stories January0
I like the idea of the forums taking on more of a horror theme.
I found those two stories interesting. The survey one, contains flawed logic, which Is certainly a horror if you can't see through it. For instance "Or do you enter the elevator once and end it all?"
this presents an all or nothing situation, dictated only in relation to the narrative.
Most people fear being trapped to some extent, and to be trapped by a flawed mode of thought is the very essence of schizophrenia(indeed it's cause).
The character mentions getting fired from his job of ten years. Here there is already a suggestion, or rather a priming of the idea of losing control, at having the known world (the characters life) start to come apart.
Surveys are horrors in themselves, because they present reality as a set of answers, more importantly someone else's pre-thought answer's. Agreeing to anything you are already locking yourself into another's, subjective mode of thought and mode of reasoning.
You can't reduce reality to a set of yes, no question/answers as there are always many ways of looking at the world, and to do so only leads to the kind of thinking that I have been yammering on about, pure reductionaism, the deadly stench of the absolute. Only zombies think that way, and anything made absolute immediately becomes a sort of horror, except love, perhaps.
Gameshows are another "true horror" in my view, and I'm sure you'll agree with me here.
The theater story was cool. It reminded me of a game I was working on ages ago, called "your computer wants you dead". It was half joke, half based on the arban myth of the polobius game cabinet, which was itself based on the urban myth that the game berzek caused someone to die of heart failure in the arcade. It was also supposed to generally embody the fear of technology having control over a person, or of a machine doing more what it states it is doing, ie code with malicious intent. That is one idea that I have been exploring for years actually, because I believe it is pertinent to the world we live in. How many times do people click "yes" to install an app on their phone, in full knowledge that it may be stealing their data, their identity, indeed perhaps even their very soul?
You could see me playing around with that idea, of programs being somehow evil, first with the windows satan game, the original version of course would delete windows components when you lost the game, (like when clippit got hit, the game would uninstall clippit)
I further experimented with this idea with, the unreleased game "Jesus christ sexual healer" that was briefly uploaded onto yoyo games.
In that game, you basically had to fuck a nun (as jesus), while marvin gaye sexual healer played in the background, then on level 2 you control a priest who has to shoot up a zombie jesus.
After finishing the game, you got a game over screen,, but the game would also enter into a loop that would continually re-size the size of your monitor,
resulting in crashing your computer and potentially damaging the monitor. I can upload that game if someone is really interested.
err, then I was working on YCWYD, so, this game was supposed to use tones and frequencies that I had gotten from patented military equipment and crowd control devices designed to induce fear,
but also I worked from patents that described the creation of certain visual stimuli and patterns that would result in damaging sensory information/processing/seizure inducement and to a certain extent the Russian virus666, which is supposed to work on similar lines.
Anyway I kinda got bored with that project, or actually more likely something disrupted my working on it, so I never released it, but I do have plans to. I did also have a massive seizure, which I have never had before or since, probably not related but it happened around the time I was working on that.
that games not really that scary because it kinda grew into something more interesting and I didn't stick to most of those "death ideas".
Alot of people are afraid of what they don't understand, and with technology much of whats going on (infact most of it) is happening in the background, lines and lines of code are being executed at every microsecond. It is scary not knowing what most programs are actually doing, cause only the programmers really know whats going on, so it's a justified concern, justified also because many programmers don't have the users best interests in mind. Take the phone app industry that bases it's business model on "whale hunting", actively targeting individuals with deep pockets and problems with self control, isn't this just another way of targeting "vulnerable individuals", and yet hardly anyone is talking about this, and of course it is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of app-nastyness.
Scariest story I've read? something iv'e written maybe. Why would someone want to be afraid in the first place I wonder?
Also commenting on Macabre's posts. Thanks for sharing, as always.
