“Change someone’s perception of reality, and they will act how you want.”
Ranboo, in a post-game debrief
Over sixty years ago the filmmaker William Castle released Mr. Sardonicus in theaters, telling the tale of a horrid wretch of a man whose face was frozen in a rictus grin. Over the course of the movie, audiences learn about the macabre sins that led to his initial disfiguration, and the heartless experiments he inflicted on others in an attempt to cure himself.
As the film concludes, William Castle himself shows up on screen and cheerfully informs the audience that they have the opportunity to decide if Mr. Sardonicus has suffered enough, or if he deserves worse. Audience members are instructed to hold up glow-in-the-dark cards to vote, and Castle makes a show of tallying the votes, before the chosen ending plays. No audience ever voted to save Mr. Sardonicus. And while Castle insisted that two endings were filmed, the general assumption is that he didn’t bother since no audience would make that choice, after seeing the film. Because of this unique feature, Mr. Sardonicus was advertised as “the only picture with [a] ‘Punishment Poll'”.
Alternate reality games are in large part defined by the agency they grant to players, promising participants a collective role in the events to follow. Your decisions will shape what’s to come. However, that agency doesn’t always have to be real – the illusion of agency is often enough to leave audiences empowered enough to feel responsible for the game’s progress, and culpable for their missteps.
Last year, the Twitch streamer Ranboo filmed a three part interactive horror series called Generation Loss: The Social Experiments that delivered a particularly compelling exploration of the nature of agency. In the process, it might just have unseated Mr. Sardonicus‘ claim as “the only picture with [a] ‘Punishment Poll'”. And while asking you to watch over four hours of livestreamed footage might be a bit much, Ranboo just released The Social Experiments: The Founders Cut as a slightly more condensed, cinematic retelling of events.
If you’d prefer to watch Generation Loss relatively unspoiled, now would be a good time to watch The Founders Cut, which provides the best streamlined entry point to the series currently available. However, a bit of context will likely help make the viewing process a bit easier, as the series takes some fairly dramatic tonal shifts that makes the first half hour in particular a misleading indicator of the full experience.
Generation Loss: A Campy Livestreaming Horror Event…On the Surface
Generation Loss: The Social Experiments starts off as a lighthearted variety stream, featuring streamers Ranboo, Slimecicle, and SneegSnag as over-the-top versions of their streaming personas, navigating a classic cabin in the woods “horror” scenario, through a series of simple games, with the action driven by audience vote. A door in the cabin is locked by three colorful deadbolts, and Ranboo needs to find the keys! Special guest Slimecicle emerges as a slime demon, and the only way to move on is to…do a cooking challenge using gross ingredients that shouldn’t go together, complete with reality show confessional booth cutaways.
On the surface, it looks like a highly produced variety livestream event, using the classic horror pastiche as light pretext for streaming guests to banter through an adventure, while letting the audience feel like they’re helping by voting on what Ranboo should do at every step along the way.
This makes a certain amount of narrative sense, as the leadup to the launch of Generation Loss framed this project as a streaming event by a company named Showfall Media. The show even explicitly frames this involvement through their mascot Squiggles, a cartoon who pops up in the corner of the screen to provide instructions for the interactive viewers at home.
During the first episode, there are relatively few signs that something is truly amiss. Ranboo seems a bit more disoriented and confused than one would expect from a main character in a streaming show, but that could be written off as a bit of awkwardness, adjusting to the unfamiliar format. The refrigerator has the ominous phrase “BEHIND YOU” spelled out in alphabet magnets, but that could just be there for spooky ambiance. And the few times Ranboo is left to their own devices, they make odd choices like going to sleep for eight hours while trying to escape the cabin.
The only thing that can’t be so conveniently explained away is when Ranboo finds a VHS taped to the back of one of the show’s assistants. The item is added to the show’s inventory system as a glitch, and when Ranboo plays the message he hears a masked figure offer encouraging ominous yet encouraging words:
Listen. There’s not much time. You probably don’t realize what’s going on yet, but you’re doing well. They’re entertained! Just keep going, okay? And don’t resist.
Hetch, the mysterious masked man
Sneeg’s character is eventually brutally murdered by an abomination of a monster with a shark for a head, a pickle jar for a body, and a lobster tail instead of legs (Frankenstein’d together by the audience before the stream, by popular vote), but it’s fine because it happens offscreen. Ranboo doesn’t really seem affected by it. Slime is defeated by getting absorbed into a towel,
Generation Loss: We Saw What You Did Last Summer
Things start to get a bit more surreal in the second episode, The Mastermind in the Warehouse. After exiting the cabin, Ranboo is drugged by a pair of rat-faced goons and thrown into a Saw-inspired adventure. While Slime was the villain of the hour for the first part, Jerma takes on the role of the Mr Robot-masked “Puzzler” for the second.
This phase of the experience takes on a more modern horror aesthetic, but still stays true to the show’s variety show roots, bringing in a larger batch of streamers to entertain Showfall Media’s viewers. Viewers are even relieved of the responsibility for Sneeg and Slime’s deaths in the prior episode, because both of them are back and in full health for the new episode. And yet, Showfall Media starts to show its cracks, and the show’s true horror starts to unfold.
During an early challenge, The Puzzler leads Ranboo to an operating table, where Slime is tied down to the table but fully conscious. “The person lying on the table right now has a key. In them. You need to find that key.” It’s fine, though, as Slime chats amiably with a thick surfer bro accent as Ranboo slices him open and sift through his green slimy innards to find the key. Until the interference returns, showing Ranboo elbow deep in blood while Slime screams in pain.
The rest of the episode’s special guests are introduced through a recreation of Saw VI‘s shotgun carousel trap. Ranboo is told they can save one of the streamers, while the audience votes to save another. Here, another crack shows once Sneeg is given his hat from the first part, triggering another glitch. He seems to become aware of what’s going on, and grows eerily silent before asking if he can go to the bathroom and making a break for it, only to be caught and pacified with a Showfall Media mask.
Audience choice in The Mastermind in the Warehouse is even less meaningful than in the first. The event starts out with Ranboo locked to a chair and he needs to choose a key from a comically large keyring to set himself free. The audience is presented with a grid of 20 different keys to choose from, and suspiciously manages to select the “correct” key on the first guess. The audience is tasked with navigating a pipe maze to guide Ranboo and friends through to the next location with a pipe rotation puzzle, but once a pipe is moved into the correct orientation it’s highlighted in green and locked in place.
The one choice the audience makes that really matters is which streamer to “save” in the shotgun carousel room. But ultimately, even that choice is cheapened when viewers realize that just meant they chose the first streamer to die. As Ranboo progresses through the variety show challenges, their companions die grisly offscreen deaths until only Ranboo is left standing. And this is where Generation Loss really comes into its own, as Ranboo seemingly escapes the boundaries of the show and tries to escape Showfall Media, making full use of an actual abandoned mall as the stage.
Generation Loss: When the Choices Finally Matter
The Mastermind in the Warehouse ends with Ranboo encountering the masked man once more, who offers an explanation of what’s really going on.
Has any of this made sense…the game? The warehouse? The cabin? Has any of it made sense…? This is a show. Some kind of twisted entertainment. You’ve been shielded from what’s actually happening. You’ve been their puppet.
Hetch, at the end of “The Mastermind in the Warehouse”
Nothing made sense for the previous episodes because Ranboo was turned into a puppet, for the audience’s entertainment. The torture and the death was real…but somehow, Showfall was able to bring the talent back for another run.
Largely abandoning the variety show format, the final installment is a darker livestreamed exploration through the abandoned mall where Showfall Media built the sets for the prior episodes. Ranboo is largely left to their own devices to explore the mall, revisiting the sets of past episodes and breaking into Showfall facilities to escape their clutches.
Generation Loss: The Choice adds a particularly poignant dose of reality to the stream. Ranboo’s adventures are periodically interrupted by clips from Slime reacting to a “viral color compilation”. During the live broadcast, Slime was actually streaming that mind-numbingly inane content to his channel…until Ranboo comes across a mall food court. Every fast food restaurant had been gutted to serve as the streaming setup for a creator servicing a different niche, with Slime operating out of a Charley’s Philly Steaks shop. Ranboo has to physically manhandle Slime and call him by his real name (Charlie) to end the stream and have him join in the escape.
With a metaphor this on the nose, it’s hard not to interpret Generation Loss as a social commentary on the state of modern streaming. Industry incentives make it all too easy for streaming creators to sacrifice their lives on the altar of content creation, streaming for long hours without breaks to make sure subscriber counts (and relevance) keeps growing. And because that aggressive schedule makes it harder to plan out content, sometimes streamers find themselves reacting to viral color videos to fill time.
During Generation Loss: The Choice, viewers are given relatively few opportunities to make choices: but unlike its variety show predecessors, the choices offered actually matter. Early on in the episode, Ranboo is trying to find the password to access Showfall Media’s servers. While exploring Showfall’s offices, they find four color-coded envelopes that serve as the rotating password. Viewers noticed that a stray flyer in one of the Showfall offices indicated today’s password was the Red envelope (alongside a Red/Green colorblind test that might have been helpful as Ranboo was slicing up Slime’s innards).
But when the audience told Ranboo to enter the Red code…they rebelled, and entered the Yellow code instead, setting off the alarms, and activating Showfall Media’s security systems. The audience’s choice finally mattered…but it was Ranboo who finally felt free enough to make a choice of their own.
Which brings us to the final choice of the show: just like in Mr. Sardonicus, viewers are asked to weigh Ranboo’s choices and preferences, and decide whether they live or die. And while the audience is weighing their options, a series of video screens show the results of Ranboo’s actions, and heard their pleas.
In Mr. Sardonicus, William Castle pulled out every trick in the book to convince audiences that their voice mattered, while creating a narrative arc that all but ensured that only one answer was possible. Generation Loss: The Social Experiments, on the other hand, dedicated the entirety of its run to convincing viewers that their choices don’t matter. Even in the rare case where viewers can actually get something “right”, that victory can be stolen away by someone else’s agency.
And yet, this choice did matter, and audiences weren’t manipulated towards a single foregone conclusion. In the end, the final result only won by a margin of three thousand votes. We as an audience chose whether Ranboo lived or died, and in part because so many of the prior choices turned out to be toothless, we are left with the consequences of that choice.
Generation Loss is Further Degrading: And there Might Be More to Come
Generation Loss as a streaming series is still available in video on demand (VOD) format on Ranboo’s stream archival channel (part 1 / part 2 / part 3). Most of the scenes were cut to make The Social Experiments: The Founders Cut a more streamlined viewing experience. Much of the filler content and banter that was inserted to leave space for audience members to vote were excised from the final cut, with overlays added to provide a more subtle way of informing viewers of the live audience’s choices.
However, many other choices feel more pointed and purposeful in nature, and might even imply that The Founders Cut‘s editorial vision came from an in-universe source. Certain elements of The Social Experiments have been sanitized, with much of the visual interference removed. In its place, audio static sometimes marks moments when Showfall’s influence over the perception of reality is weakening. The masked figure Hetch also refers to Ranboo as “Hero”, instead of their online handle.
The most notable difference, however, comes at the conclusion of the series. In addition to adding in a much appreciated “thank you” from Ranboo after the final votes are cast and they learn their fate, a new set of post-credits scenes are deployed. At the end of the streamed version of Generation Loss: The Choice, a gloved hand taking a VHS tape out of a VCR, and adding it to a shelf along with seven other tapes. Meanwhile, The Founders Cut introduces a transcript from an audio recording with Miss Roads, a woman coming in for therapy after having a series of disturbing dreams. She requests that the therapist call her “Zero”, a teaser for Chronicle 0, a Twitter account that seems to be somehow tied to the broader Generation Loss narrative.
It also concludes with a link to an unlisted “Reward” video explicitly addressed as coming from Showfall Media’s Founder, encouraging fans to buy a physical VHS of The Founders Cut, with a specific and directed challenge:
Thank You For Watching
The Founder
I Have A Gift For You All
My Beautiful Creation
From Mine to Yours
This Is Your Experiment Now
Communication is Key
You Will Need Eachother (sic.)
The Generation Loss site is selling a limited edition Founder’s Cut VHS, and the copy on the page reasserts that message, noting “this 4:3, 120 minute release of The Social Experiments is special, unique, and will bring you all together as a community with what it entails. Communication is key.”
Generation Loss: The Social Experiments may now be over, but Ranboo announced plans to continue on with the story through multiple iterations, with the current narrative serving as “Generation 1”.
The Generation Loss YouTube and Twitter accounts are viewed as in-universe, and Chronicle 0 may be returning to tell us a little more about Miss Roads. As for what’s next? Maybe it’s time to dust off your VCR and find out.
