About ‘Gamer’

Spoiler Alert – read “Gamer” first on Reddit

This story draws heavy and explicit inspiration from a fascinating (and horrifying) 1960’s psychological experiment: the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures. The game store owner is named after Stanley Milgram.  I’m delighted that a very high percentage of NoSleep readers realized the connection.  It makes me think I’m among my own people.

I changed the parameters considerably. The original test was designed to gauge a person’s obedience to authority.  Subjects were told to “teach” a fellow subject (who was actually an actor) by administering an escalating series of electrical shocks whenever the actor answered a question incorrectly.  The actor sat in another room and communicated over microphone/speakers.  The actor continually answered questions incorrectly and the real subject had to administer shocks for each wrong answer.  The real nature of the experiment was to see how far the subject would continue when told “the experiment must go on” by an authority figure in a white lab coat.

The game store owner’s experiment is intended to test “traditional morality” (whatever that is) after a subject has played too many video games over several months.  But of course, the experiment is rigged! The game play mechanism that means you basically have to choose whether you or your opponent will be shocked to death.  I did this partially because I didn’t think people would find the ACTUAL results of the experiment believable. It doesn’t seem right that a kid would keep shocking another kid until they die UNLESS there was some lethal consequence dangling over his head.

But in reality, 65% of people in Milgram’ experiment continued shocking their fellow participant until finally administering the lethal level of shock.  Most did so while repeatedly questioning the nature of the experiment.  This is a horrible result.  But the experiment itself is also horrible.  I wanted my story to capture the horror and violation that those subjects must have felt as they continued to administer (what they believed to be) lethal shocks to another human being.

Real horror exists.