Only winning move original version

A few years ago I wrote this original version of the script. It started as a good idea, then ran out of steam. But I didn't stop. I started making things up.
I was toying with the idea of making it into an April Fools Day video. I didn't. Is it funny? I don't know. But here it is.

Cheers,

Mr Wendal.

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 Load up Jesse Venbrux’s freeware game Execution and you’re greeted with this. There’s no other interactions available and one obvious thing to do. Pull the trigger.

The game will tell you you’ve lost.

Close and restart the game, and the prisoner will still be dead. Many players interpreted this as a commentary against the impermanence of gaming, where everything is just a reload or a restart away. But what struck me was that the game’s intended right choice was to refuse to do anything at all.

The only way to beat the game is on your first and only try, by pressing the escape key.

Sometimes the best course of action in life is inaction. But in gaming, a medium *of* interactions, to give up your choice is a rare thing, most often punished. (MASS EFFECT)

One of the shining examples was the very last puzzle in the 1995 adventure game Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity. Spoilers, but you, playing Picard, are given two choices by an all-powerful artifact called the Unity Device. You can either destroy the borg heading for the alpha quadrant and earth, or destroy all borg everywhere throughout the entire galaxy. The only correct solution, the only way to beat the game, is ignore both choices, do nothing, and simply not use the device at all.

Oxenfree, a game mostly about conversations, let players respond to every dialog, every statement, every question with complete silence. And doing so turned it into the most realistic teenager simulator in all of gaming.

In Papers Please, you’re a customs and border agent tasked with following the insane and inhumane laws of your state. Either let people in, or deny them entry. These two choices often boil down to doing what you’re told and having enough money to keep your family warm, fed and healthy, or taking the moral high road, getting your pay docked, and watching as your family members die one by one from cold, hunger and disease. But the third option, doing nothing, is the only way to get the game’s secret best ending. If you never accept or deny a single person, refusing to do your job in a peaceful protest, then you’ll be executed - but the populous will see you as a martyr, rise up against their corrupt government and make Arstotzka a democratic utopia.

The Sims makes the point of doing nothing quite elegantly. Play it properly and you find yourself doing endless trivial and monotonous tasks. The only way to have fun with the game is to do nothing, and let the sim just stand there until they shit themselves.

But it’s the game that took The Sims’ idea and ran with it that changed all the rules and set the bar higher than any game before or since. It was the groundbreaking, genre-defying, auteur adventure game Don’t Shit Your Pants.

In it, you’re tasked with the almost impossible action laid out for you in the game’s title. You’re given complete freedom to interact with the game in any way you want, but the least rewarding thing you can do is pull down your pants and take a dump in the toilet. Don’t do that. Don’t play their game. Well, I mean, load it up. But don’t play it. Just let nature take its course.

Video games have always pushed us to do things, to make decisions, to be proactive. Don’t. Don’t touch the keyboard. Put your controller down, and don’t get up from that computer, ever. Just sit there.

And shit yourself.