User blog comment:Urkelbot666/Experiments./@comment-5934310-20140707204457

I honestly think people need to come up with better origin stories for their haunted games. I remember a few years ago when Jadusable's "Majora" creepypasta, now widely referred to as "Ben drowned", became popular because of a Kotaku post that lead to a huge spread of the story. Before then, most gaming creepypastas were just scary stories set within a game's universe, with the occasional case of a game designer going nuts and putting something weird in their game. After "Majora", the gaming creepypasta genre exploded, with tons of people using the same "old man gives you haunted game for cheap/free" type of scenario.

I'd like to see more original origins for these things. I mean, in a properly-paced story, the creepy stuff doesn't happen as soon as you turn the game on, which is literally all most used game stores will do to check whether they work. There's no reason you couldn't just buy a haunted game, for a normal price and with a normal experience, the store clerk knowing nothing about its true nature. When I was a kid, I found a battered but working Pokemon Red cartridge in the street walking home from a friend's house. It's kinda weird, sure, but kids lose things all the time. Maybe you buy a box of comic books and find a game cartridge in the bottom, maybe you're at a thrift store and there's an unpriced game that the employee currently manning the register knows nothiing about. The game doesn't HAVE to come from a crazy person selling it for a suspiciously low price.

That said, the creepy old man yard sale scenario CAN work, if you know what you're doing. A few years ago I bought a box of picture frames from a yard sale, which was being held because the old man's wife had died. I don't know how long it had been since she died, but it had apparently been long enough that he was ready to get rid of some of her stuff. When I got home, I discovered that one of the frames was small and heart-shaped, and had a picture of what I assume were the man's wife and granddaughter. It was kind of sad and kind of creepy, so I just donated the frame to Goodwill. Let THEM be haunted for removing the picture.

Another thing people seem to have trouble with is matching the origin of the game with the game's effects. If a store clerk is essentially forcing the game on you, they clearly know there's something off about it... but why are they being spared and allowed to give the game away, while you're going to have blood pouring out your eyes as you're murdered by a Pikachu plushie after playing the game for twenty minutes?

An example of this kind of story done right is The Ring. If you watch the video, you will die in seven days unless you pass it along to someone else. It CAN kill you, but you can make it out alive by becoming the start of the story for someone else. That's a great plot device, integrating the passing of the video with the effect of the curse. You don't want to just rip off The Ring, obviously, but there should be some kind of congruence between how you get the game and what it does. The next creepypasta I write will be playing with this idea, and maybe poking fun at the creepy yard sale cliche.