Spoiler Warnings

Something that's bugged me for quite a while not just with video games, but with any form of entertainment and medium and that's spoilers. It's very easy for an excited fanbase of a new game or series to want to start telling everyone around them to go and check it out but in doing so quite a lot venture on almost spoiling aspects of it. Whether it's revealing plot points or merely telling some of the jokes that will appear, having little things like this told in advance sort of takes away from the first time experience when someone checks it out for themselves.

 Now this isn't something new. Spoilers have been an issue for all forms of medium like movies and books. The issue with games however is sometimes even describing how it plays can be somewhay of a spoiler when part of the experience is to figure out the game for yourself and how it functions. Some games even realise what these expectations of figuring out how it functions, perhaps even placing in a joke or do the exact opposite of what the player would expect to do. If a players first instinct in a platformer game is to try and jump ontop of on enemy only to find out that you're supposed to attack them from underneath instead them that would be pretty funny and rather unique, but if the player is already told this is the case it somewhat ruins the surprise.

 When watching a movie the actual act of looking at the screen and eating popcorn can't really be spoiled but for something interactive as a game even knowing which button does what in advance can throw off the developers intentions. One game to recently struggle from spoilers exploding all over the internet is th popular indie game Undertale. Undertale is essentially an RPG game that likes to mess with the players expectations of RPG games with regards to everything from reading in game signs, talking to NPC's, using items and fighting enemies. Now I'm not going to give away how it does this. The game has a lot of meta humour but it can only truly be appreciated as the developer intended by essentially playing the game with as little prior knowledge to it as possible. Due to how popular the game became, fans trying to convince others to give it a try often spoiled some of the games best jokes, mechanics and plot points to try and make it sound more interesting. In doing so however, they give new players expectations of it or end up simply ruining a lot of the experience for others if they are able to predict and know what is going to happen in advance.

This of course may not always be the case in other games depending on it's style, type of gameplay and if it has a major narrative or not. Players need to be more careful in the fast paced internet age to dodge these kinds of spoilers for games where not having it spoiled is much more crucial to it's enjoyment.

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