The Most Dangerous Video Game/Playing With

The Most Dangerous Video Game: A video game turns out to be actively malevolent.

• Straight: Hell Slaughter, a popular new video game at a local arcade, haunts players in their nightmares and kills them with heart attacks.
• Exaggerated: The Hell Slaughter machine escapes the arcade and starts destroying the city.
  • The video game destroys the entire world with meteors and cannot be stopped because of a Stable Time Loop.
• Justified: The man who programmed Hell Slaughter committed suicide when the publisher screwed him out of the royalties for his game. Now he haunts his creation, seeking revenge.
  • The programmer is a cultist who worship an Eldritch Abomination. Anyone with knowledge on the being know the meaning of weird runes and chanting-like music in the background, playing the game emulate the summon ritual with the player as sacrifice.
  • The game is designed by Evil Overlord Super Computer or Aliens who want to Kill All Humans.
• Inverted: The video game Angel Savior has the power to cure terminal illnesses and remove suicidal impulses.
• Subverted: A rash of mysterious deaths appears at first to be linked to Hell Slaughter, but it turns out a deranged Media Watchdog is killing people to strengthen his case that video games are evil.
• Double Subverted: The Media Watchdog was driven to kill by a malevolent force inside the Hell Slaughter machine.
• Parodied: Anyone who plays Let's Play With The Pink Fuzzy Bunnies is immediately driven to bash their own brains out against the game cabinet.
  • The monster in the video game is a simple Mook, beatable via Goomba Stomp.
• Deconstructed: As soon as the arcade owner suspects that Hell Slaughter is killing people, he has the arcade machine taken off the floor and destroyed - possibly exorcised, for good measure.
• Reconstructed: Hell Slaughter is a demon who's taken the form of an arcade machine. It doesn't take kindly to the owner's attempt to destroy it: the next day, Hell Slaughter is back on the arcade floor, and the arcade owner is found dead from mysterious causes.
• Zig Zagged: Hell Slaughter is killing people! No, the victims are proven to have already been suicidal. But how do you explain their hearts being torn out? A serial killer is responsible, using the rumors around the game as cover. However, he was driven to kill by the game! Actually, he was crazy to begin with and the game only provided him with an impetus...
• Averted: Hell Slaughter is unquestionably an incredibly, perhaps gratuitously violent game, but no one experiences any ill effects from playing it (apart from an intense need to throw up after seeing someone's intestines explode for the 200th time).
• Enforced: The work in question was produced by Media Watchdogs as part of a smear campaign to turn the public against the game industry.
• Lampshaded: "Why can't the world-destroying force of evil stay on the other side of the screen for a change?"
• Invoked: A character consciously avoids playing video games precisely because they're afraid of running afoul of an evil one.
• Exploited: A serial killer themes his killings after a popular video game, intending to use it as a scapegoat.
• Defied: The arcade owner has seen one too many late-night movies where deaths occur in the wake of a violent video game coming to town, and so buys Let's Play With The Pink Fuzzy Bunnies instead.
• Discussed: "Don't play it you fool! Hell Slaughter will kill us all!"
• Conversed: "The scene where the video game turned evil creeped me out." "Why did he keep playing it, then?"

---

GAME OVER! Continue?