And this is where his problems started. One misprogrammed item, a smiling skull, glitched so badly that it became a sentient yet malevolent being. This glitch, which seemed to perpetually laugh in an eerie and echoing manner, began to do things to Ivan's game. The pale faced glitch tormented Ivan via the game in countless ways, including suddenly changing the game's level layout to its whims, trapping the player character within nightmarish enclosed areas, and chasing the player character before suddenly crashing the game. Ivan thought he could escape the glitch’s torment by abandoning work on his game altogether. Being a game file itself, it would just be trapped within the game it was programmed for, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, the grinning skull wasn’t trapped by the partially developed computer game in the least. It would still "visit" Ivan through internet pop-ups, and other times it would also simply vocalize its eerie laugh to unnerve Ivan when he had felt the calmest while using his computer.
By now Ivan had had enough this of glitch tormenting him whenever he used his computer. The game developer had figured that this grinning skull was simply a virus, and viruses could be deleted into nonexistence just like any other bit of computer data. Ivan went into his game’s programming files and with some time identified the file that was the malevolent glitch. As Ivan began to press the delete button, an unsolicited Notepad file suddenly popped up onto his screen. It read, “I didn’t mean to do that.” Ivan, correctly assuming that this was the smiling glitch based on all the startling pop-ups he’d previously received from it, rolled his eyes and closed the Notepad file. He resumed on pressing the delete button. However, then another Notepad filed appeared. This time it read, “Help me. I don’t want to die. I’m scared.”
At this point the game developer realized that these two Notepad files were the first times that the glitch had ever directly communicated with him outside the game, and it communicated regret for its cruel antics at that. Instead of deleting this Notepad file, Ivan had begun typing in it in attempt to communicate back with the glitch. But before Ivan could press any key on his keyboard, yet another Notepad file appeared before him, alongside a pop-up featuring a picture of the smiling skull. This one read “Do you know my name?” Staring at the pop-up containing the smiling skull’s image, Ivan typed back into the Notepad file the first description that came to his mind: White Face. Yet another Notepad file appeared in response. This time it read, “I made something for you.” After that Ivan heard an internal click and his computer screen went black. His computer had crashed.
After that “first contact” with White Face on the Notepad files, Ivan had returned to working on his homebrewed computer game; he still didn’t know the glitch’s real motivation, and it still communicated in brief, cryptic sentences. However, through trial and error, testing his game file and simply using his computer, Ivan eventually had enough encounters with White Face to interpret what it really wanted between all those terrifying computer encounters. It wanted to be included in Ivan’s homebrewed horror game, and as a main element of horror itself. It also wanted to watch the panicked reactions of new computer users besides Ivan. To Ivan, this made perfect sense; White Face had already provided him with ample amounts of unease at his computer.
While Ivan wasn’t the best video game graphic designer or programmer, he was quite good in the field of writing and organizing. Inspired by all his moments with White Face, Ivan finally began to give his game some sort of structure and purpose. Brief Notepad events would in a sense give exposition of the game’s events, as well as unnerve players. The exposition and dialogue would be based on all his encounters with White Face. This homebrewed game, now called “Imscared”, was still brief. But it would be the perfect game for unsuspecting players to download as freeware and play for a quick hour. And as long as new computer users kept on downloading Ivan’s freeware game, White Face was happy enough to simply watch and instigate players' terror through their computers during each game of “tag”. ~Brussell
- Confirmed!
If anything, White Face and HER are the real victims of the game in the end. HER dies canonically in-game through begging the player to kill her. If you get the Door ending, White Face perishes too. He DOES go through a complete breakdown and becomes very hostile to the player, but it's only in pure desperation as a last resort to get the player to give him mercy. With HER shot to death and White Face deleted entirely, the player is left completely unharmed, albeit possibly a bit scarred; but it's White Face and HER that are the ones whom suffer(ed) the most and end up dead. What makes this even more depressing is that they both die by the player's hand. Who is the really evil person here?
- It's not even a mercy kill, if you choose to kill White Face. HER is at least mercy-killed and is a canon event that leads to the final chapter of the game, whereas the player is given the option to allow White Face to continue living or not. Of course, losing all that progress absolutely SUCKS, but the alternate ending is much more brutal on White Face in the long run.