Thoughts on Creepypasta

 So, I've been reading shitty video game creepypastas lately, and as I noted all the common tropes, I started to really look at why they're there. This led me to a few interesting thoughts.

One common thing I notice is that the protagonist almost always has a nostalgic fondness for the game in question, but seldom has reliable access to it. They always either lost it, gave it away or sold it. Thus, they have to buy or otherwise obtain it used from another source.

Now, in the days before the re-emergence of the internet and accessible ROM fullsets, looking through old video games was something of an adventure. As far as little babby Paph was concerned, anything could turn up in these places.

Games could be about anything, and anything could happen in them. As a kid, my imagination filled in all the blanks of why things were happening, and the game worlds felt as much like real places as everywhere else.

When actually buying them, however, all you really had to go by was the cover art. If it was used, then there was no indication as to how the game got there in the first place. Used games seemingly came from the ether. A lot of these things were also true for VHSes and DVDs you found at thrift stores, and in a lot of ways still are.

In the age where the internet and proper smartphones have re-emerged, a lot of that mystery is gone, or at least easily removed. There's reviews, gameplay footage, the works. Anything you could ever want to know about nearly any game ever made is a few clawtaps away.

Creepypasta writers grew up in an era where all this was happening for the first time, and in a way, game creepypastas were a way of indulging this nostalgia. The unpredictability of used video games is recaptured by way of something being wrong with them in these stories.

The "realness" games had as a kid is recaptured by these games actually affecting the real world, or simply by being treated as their own twisted pocket realities. Video games never actually talked to you— yes, you, Gregory— beyond random fourth-wall breaking. Of course, even this would be cheapened now by the fact that it’s trivially easy for a program to find out what your real name is.

Trying to make something you loved as a kid "scary" is an attempt at making you feel heightened emotions about it again. In this sense, video game creepypastas aren't about fear; they're about nostalgia.

In a culture that worships irony, it almost feels as if these pastas are being written by people who are too scared to let themselves feel genuine nostalgia over something, lest their fragile emotional shields fall down entirely. Everything you loved pre-irony is tainted, and must be purged from your system.

Perhaps this is why these stories almost invariably end with the game in question being destroyed, or all future attempts at playing it being irreversibly scarred (characters not showing up, the game not loading properly): disillusionment has ruined a source of comfort.

Lost Episode pastas often follow a similar formula; the media being corrupted is different, but the sentiments are the same.

Admittedly, this post isn’t as substantial or insightful as I’d have liked it to be, but I wanted to put something out there so I wouldn’t miss a month. Hopefully, I’ll have something lined up in October.