Content Warning Is The Game Of Our Times

If we’re talking triple-A games, the 2024 release calendar is looking a little barren, meaning hits keep coming from all sorts of unexpected places. It is, as Chris puts it, the year of “strange power vacuum games.” The latest? Content Warning, a Lethal Company-alike where you play as woefully underprepared content creators trying to extract ad revenue from horrifying snail monsters. On this week’s episode of Aftermath Hours, we discuss the game and its broader implications. 

There wasn’t a ton of news this week – at least, not until after we finished recording the podcast – so we decided to do something a little different, discussing games we’ve been playing almost entirely to force Luke to pronounce “Doronko Wanko.” We also ended up talking about Content Warning, a game I badly wanted to write about this week, but for which I did not have time. So I guess this kind of counts as me doing that! Then we moved on to an XCOM-alike Luke has been loving, Classified: France ‘44, and, of course, Dragon’s Dogma 2. Somehow, Chris and I still had more to say about it.

After that, we Remembered Some Games. Do you remember Windjammers 2? I don’t, but Chris sure does. None of us remembered Wii Play. Perhaps it’s for the best. Then we closed out by answering reader questions, which led us to find out that some people do indeed invert video game controls horizontally (in addition to vertically). Wild. The world is full of wonder for those with eyes to see it.

You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we are not forced to become content creators who sacrifice ourselves to snail monsters for cheap views.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Nathan: Content Warning has been blowing up on YouTube and Twitch this week. It's basically Lethal Company, but you play as a dipshit content creator. At first I thought it was red meat for content creators, that it was meant to get their attention. But instead, a lot of the best clips come from non-content creators roleplaying as content creators. Because basically the idea is that instead of it being like Lethal Company where you go into these horror environments and collect scrap, you go in and film your friends getting up to hijinks with monsters, and then you harvest views for ad revenue.

But the really smart thing it does is, you have an in-game camera you carry around. One player films the other players. At the end of a run, all your footage gets compiled by the game into a single video. It does this automatically, so the game decides where the video cuts [Correction: It just auto-compiles whatever you've filmed, sans any editorial decisions]. It's very good at creating clips where, in one moment, you're in the outside world and it's very colorful and nice, and you're introducing your video like "Hey everybody, we're gonna go into blah blah blah and it's gonna be a really cool time." And then it just cuts to people screaming and running away from snail monsters in this dilapidated, creepy gray world. Almost every clip is basically that, but they're very funny. There's a lot of variance within that formula.  

The game makes the videos, but it lets you download them to your computer. 

Chris: That's so cool.

Nathan: So it's become this social media machine. It seems really good. It was a little fun April Fools' Day project from the people who made Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, but it's blown up hugely. It's been in the top ten most-played games on Steam.

Chris: We're in the weird year, and as a result, we're getting these kinds of games blowing up. Strange power vacuum games. I need to play it. I actually just bought it.  

Nathan: What I really appreciate about it in the context of the weird year is that another game that's blown up is Helldivers, which also has this component of people roleplaying. They've gotten really into the game's lore such that it's become part of how they communicate online or in voice chat and text chat in the game – being in-character as part of this faux-fascist society where the people within it are not aware of what they're doing even though they're effectively genociding bugs for oil.

Similarly, Content Warning also really encourages people to roleplay, and that's a big part of why it's caught on. There are so many people sharing clips, and when you look at their follower counts on Twitter, and they have, like, 100. They're not content creators. They don't claim to be. But they have this very clear idea in their mind of what a content creator is like, especially a comically inept one, and they just slip into that role immediately. The moment they start speaking over voice chat, they become that character. It leads to so much good, organic humor from people messing around and enjoying being in that role. Making fun of some of the darker sides of content creation – people being exploitative or terrible in the name of getting views. But yeah, it's a clever little concept. 

Chris: I do like the idea of the shoe dropping more on content creators. There was a longer piece on this fucked-up style of Mr Beast YouTube editing that has just infected every other social media platform. And it's hitting a point of diminishing returns and also being erosive and difficult to do. I like the idea of putting a lens on that, because it's grotesque to have that kind of relationship [to content] and position yourself as such. I find the whole thing kind of strange as a content creator [myself]. 

Nathan: Yeah, there was that really good article Patricia Hernandez wrote for Polygon about the end of the Mr Beast era – or at least, the fact that more and more people seem to be becoming aware of this style of editing and grandiose content creation that's not really sustainable on any level, even the happiness of the people making it. You see Mr Beast talking about his own process and being like "I could go on a date with my partner, or I could make content within that hour, and that content would generate $100,000. Is this date worth $100,000?"

That's such a horrifyingly dystopian way to view your own life. What's the point of making all that money? What are you doing if you're not using it to enrich your own life?

Chris: Just dumping it back into the idea of content creation.

Nathan: Yeah, chat just said Mr Beast videos now cost around $3.5 million to make, per video – which, as I saw somebody else point out earlier today, is the cost of a season-one episode of Game of Thrones.         

Chris: You could just live off that, man. Put it in an index fund and never talk to anyone again.

Nathan: Or! Talk to the staff of Aftermath Dot Site about transferring that fund to them.

Chris: You could invest in a workers' cooperative!  

Nathan: I saw Mr Beast in an ad for a [financial services corporation], Western Union, the other day, and I was like "That's the closest that we will ever see Mr Beast to a union." 

Chris: I will be very nice to Mr Beast if he just drops $5 million on us. I'm kidding. 

Luke: Would we have to complete some awful challenge first, though?

Chris: It'd be like Takeshi's Castle.

Luke: We'd have to race 500 babies to earn $5 million.

(Podcast production by Multitude.)