Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplashed

You think you’ve already heard the news. Playing games rots children’s brains and makes them unable to speak or learn at school. Fortnite makes teens beat up their parents, take drugs and throw themselves from tall buildings. Adults who play games willingly starve themselves to death. How much worse can it be?

But wait, there’s more. YOUR kids, YOUR friends and co-workers, maybe the people who LIVE NEXT DOOR who are obsessed with the latest gaming craze are doing DANGEROUS PHILOSOPHY and discovering SICK, HIDDEN SECRETS about reality. In the first of our two-part series, here are 3 DISTURBING things that gamers don’t want YOU to know.

“OUTSIDE IS A GAME”

Weeping and trembling, attractive blonde Nicky (30) logged on to Reddit in search of answers. “I’m not enjoying the game as much as I used to”, she moaned to r/Outside, a sick, perverted group of hardcore gamers who have realised that what YOU think of as real life is actually a GAME. “I’m level 30. I finished the University expansion pack ages ago, I don’t want to do the Start A Family quest line yet so I’m stuck doing the Work daily quests for gold coins and I’m starting to wonder what it’s all for. I’m so bored. Surely there’s got to be more to the game than this. Can anyone help?”

Straight away, dozens of perverts, their brains addled by gaming, rushed to give her advice. “Everyone needs gold because ultimately this game is pay-to-win” advised Mark (24). “Unless you’ve inherited a lot of gold from a previous player, you will need to keep doing the Work daily quests, because everyone has to.” “Have you considered Hobbies?” chipped in Ronald (45). “I know some people don’t regard them as serious gameplay but I rear pigeons and built my own shed and I can tell you, every time I go to that shed I get a +15 Happiness buff that lasts for the rest of the weekend, plus I found a load of new friends through a pigeon-breeding guild.”

In other corners of the sick subreddit, addicts were discussing who is the greatest player of all time and what happens after your character dies.

Obsessed players of the game Outside co-operate on a group quest. This activity is known as Having A Meeting and in combination with other activities it yields virtual gold coins which players can spend on in-game items such as Clothes and Food. Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash.

“EVERYONE HAS MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES”

Student Jeremy (18) stared in growing horror at the character creation screen of popular game World of Warcraft as he realised what the horde of Frankenstein’s monsters he had created revealed about himself. “I used to be an ordinary lad”, he told our reporter. “I had one, simple personality. I liked Pot Noodles, holidays in Greece with my mum, and West Bromwich football club. I had one set of opinions. I was a dream come true for market researchers because I always knew what I wanted and my answers would never change. Then I started playing World of Warcraft, my personality started to come apart and each of the pieces multiplied in frightening ways.”

Jeremy’s hands shook as he pointed out each of his monstrous creations. “That’s Otylia, an orc”, he said, pointing to a hideous, green-skinned beast. “After more than 10 years of gameplay, she’s an accomplished military leader, but she never boasts or swaggers around Dalaran in the latest hi-tech armour because she just doesn’t need to. She has an inner confidence that makes her quite different from my rogue Attiva who can be jealous and bad-tempered or my death knight Bayo who will always feel like an outsider, having been born at level 50, in a bizarre twist of science-fiction fate.”

“As my personalities multiplied I started to realise that this is what everyone’s personalities are actually like and the simple, internal, individual self that I had enjoyed previously was nothing but a convenient fiction,” said the troubled teen. “I started to look into what science had to say about it and realised that all sorts of people don’t have a single, unified self or even any self at all. For example, babies don’t seem to develop a sense of an embodied self until they are several months old and studies of feral children who have grown up in unusual, ‘wild’ conditions show that they may never develop a sense of self at all. It made me realise that the single personality I used to have was basically just a con.”

“There’s another thing that continues to bother me,” said the teen, surveying the dozen unique personalities that he has managed to create, each with their own distinctive characteristics and life stories. “All my World of Warcraft characters are girls. And out of 12 girls, only one is a lesbian and I don’t have any transgender personalities at all. I’m hoping that the forthcoming expansion pack Battle for Azeroth will help me to get off this track I seem to be stuck on.”

Jeremy’s terrifying MULTIPLE personalities. The teen has over 12 personalities, all distinct, yet all uniquely his own. Not ONE of them has a human appearance. Photo: user’s own.

“I STAYED AWAKE ALL NIGHT, RECREATING ENTIRE 19th-CENTURY NOVELS”

“When I bought The Sims 3,” said busty Maureen (39), “I thought it was going to be a game about nuclear families. That’s how it was advertised. I thought I was going to play a simple household with a nice nuclear family. Mum, Dad, two kids. Dad goes to work. Mum operates a daycare service for neighbourhood toddlers or gets a part-time job at the hair salon for a bit of extra cash. But it wasn’t long before it spiralled out of control.”

Bored with the limited stories about individual families that she could pull out of her own head, Maureen soon turned to intoxicating works of 19th-century fiction to fuel her gameplay. “At first, I chose the smaller, easier works of canonical literature to bring to life on the screen,” she said, pointing at a bookshelf stuffed with short novels by Flaubert and Stendhal. “They only have a few characters so it didn’t feel like a big step, simulating the household of a well-meaning country doctor and his unfaithful wife. But soon it wasn’t enough and I had to read bigger and bigger novels to keep me satisfied. On one terrible night, I stayed up until dawn re-creating the entire town of Middlemarch from George Eliot’s epic novel of 1871. It has 764 pages. I barely had time to go to the toilet.”

At press time, Maureen contacted our reporter to say that her addiction had plunged her into a new hell. “I have just read The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and I am considering simulating the predicament of Isabel Archer because I find it intriguing”, she sobbed. “In fact, I’ve just booked a week off work.”

DON’T MISS PART TWO OF OUR SHOCKING EXPOSÉ. More lives RUINED! “I pretended to be a border control guard in a troubled Eastern European country” and “I killed MILLIONS when I became a DISEASE”.

COMING SOON.