In Content Warning, Role-Play as Influencers Dying to Go Viral

The list of things that influencers have done for attention is terrifying. Creators have eaten 10,000 calories in one sitting, glued their lips together and smashed gallons of milk on the floor in public. When Logan Paul recorded himself finding a dead body in a Japanese forest known for suicides, it caused a backlash across the internet.

The new video game Content Warning pushes that do-anything-for-fame premise to a madly meta extreme.

Players role-play as content creators venturing to abandoned factories and spectral ships to record murderous monsters. The objective: Get footage to upload to the fictional website SpookTube without being killed. Players earn “views” depending on how frightening their clips are, and will lose if they do not meet a quota within a few days.

“It’s inspired by influencer culture, the grind of creating content and beating the algorithms to get views,” said Petter Henriksson, one of the game’s designers and programmers. “The length people will go to go viral or die trying is really something.”