randomly fascinated by video game glitches
Every now and then, I find myself fascinated by the concept of game glitches. For example, yesterday, I watched a video showing some unused content from the 2nd gen Pokemon games that. In this specific case, the unused content was a house with a woman (and a Pokemon in it). It still exists in the game's code, you just can't get there because the entry tile to the house has been moved to an inaccessible location and "turned off", so you can only reach the house by using cheats.
Whenever I interact with stuff like this, I immediately start imagining how interesting / scary it would be if this kind of thing could happen in the real world. Essentially: What if reality really was just a giant "game" programmed by someone (Matrix style), and there are things that have been deliberately put out of reach for the average "player" / NPC, or oversights in the code that can have seemingly mundane actions lead to catastrophic outcomes? What if, by performing an insanely specific chain of actions, you could gain access to a part of reality that has been "sealed off"?
A book by Susanna Clarke that I read earlier this year, Piranesi, plays in this kind of space, even though it's not explicitly about games or features a reality-as-simulation type of setting. I think this is partly what made me devour the book so quickly. There isn't anything "deep" or philosophical about it - I just find it a fascinating concept to explore in fiction, be it games, books, or movies.
Now, there are a lot of Creepypastas that use game glitch stuff for horror, but the thing is, I'm not really a Creepypasta fan. Usually they involve some sort of demon, or angry spirit of a dead person, or a monster. Of course, ghosts don't exist, but if they did exist, it's perfectly understandable that some would be angry or vengeful and do bad things to people. There's agency there, a motivation that's understandable. But what I find fascinating (and, hypothetically scary) about game glitches is that most of them lack this element. To quote the guy from the same channel with the video about the woman in the house (from a different video):
"There's no special reason for this, it's just something that happens when we mess with the game in ways we weren't supposed to."
There's no villain. From an "ingame" (assumed real-world) perspective, the character just took a wrong step to the right and accidentally "softlocked" themselves. And perhaps the same glitch removed their requirement for food and froze their aging. And now they're simply stuck in existential torment forever.
I'm currently reading The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, which also has a small "gaming" element. I'm not a "gamer" in any sense of the word, but I can see why games can be an interesting way to think about stories, or even the real world. I guess the ultimate endpoint of this would be game theory...