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“I’ve spent a lot of my teenage years and now my 20s on the platform — I think that’s true for the majority of people who play our games,” Nylund said. “YouTube has been with me the whole journey of making games and one of the ways I originally found players to play them.”
Though it may take place in a future dystopia, the YouTube parody component makes the game feel strikingly present-day. There are other hypermodern aspects, like a cage creature that forces people to fill out a Captcha if they want to escape and a feature that mimics livestreams, complete with fake commenters reacting to the clips.
While Content Warning does not have an official story mode, there is subtle lore. The concept, which was created by Nylund, is that players live in a cloud society because the air in the “Old World” became dangerously polluted. They must wear diving suits to submerge themselves in the diseased olden world to get footage for pseudo-virality.
The theme is partly skewering overoptimistic solutions to climate catastrophe, Nylund said: “The whole idea that, ‘Oh well, it’s all fine, we can mess up the Earth and then just build our way out of it and continue on the same way as before.’”
The stakes in Content Warning are much lower. Getting zero views could make a real-life YouTuber irrelevant, but the game can simply be turned off after a bad round. “There’s a nice catharsis to it,” Cardenas said. “You’re not actually losing anything.”
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