Lose/Lose2009

Lose/Lose is a shoot-’em-up and art video game developed by Zach Gage and released in 2009 for Windows and MacOS as part of his master’s thesis show, “Data”, at Parsons School of Design’s MFA program. Styled after games like Galaga, the player controls a spaceship and can shoot at aliens in their path, each representing a random file on the player’s computer. Destroying an alien causes the file to be deleted, potentially corrupting the player’s operating system, while dying causes the game itself to be deleted. The aliens do not attack and only act as dangerous obstacles.