Haphead: a near-future videogame subculture webseries by Jim Munroe - Kickstarter
Ten years from now, videogames are so immersive that teenagers learn lethal skills just by playing. They're called hapheads.
Maxine is a quiet teenage girl working at a factory that's manufacturing new haptic cable inputs. After she steals one, her favourite rabbit-ninja game gets a whole lot more punishing, with the haptic feedback loop beating skills into her muscle memory.
But it's just a game... until a fellow haphead causes her father's death. Then she starts to apply her new deadly abilities to finding out why.
For more of the story, check out our original proof-of-concept trailer that we made earlier this year to get our production funding.
From the creators of Ghosts with Shit Jobs, which I hope you've seen.
Yes, because #gamers can totally be trusted with deadly skills.
You should write a strongly-worded letter to your Congressman.
Ah, an Existenz remake. Good.
So video game culture is basically streetfighter culture. I buy it.
I went through a stage of being interesting in learning some of these skills. Reading the writing of people who have done it, the culture seems to be made up of headcases who mostly do not put their fantasies into practice. Of those who do, the ones who gain some psychological insight become professionals (bodyguards, law enforcement), or quit, and the ones who don't gain that insight, or don't care, become criminals.
The psychological insight, of course, is mostly about just how much of it is pure fantasy (spoiler: almost all). Tech fantasies, training fantasies.... The fact that most of what people want to do, or think they can do, or train to do, has little or nothing to do with reality and would get them badly hurt or dead if they tried it is much less interesting (and important) than the deeper psychological questions of what leads a person to repeatedly fantasize about this kind of thing (and sometimes go on to ruin their lives in reality).