The file deleting game was reportedly coded by a fine arts student called Zach Gage who developed the programme as part of his university thesis.

The Lose/Lose trojan game sees the player take on the role of a space captain on a "seemingly endless quest to destroy attacking aliens."

Each alien represents a file on your computer. Killing the alien means deleting that file.

"You have one life and if an alien touches you, you explode and the application will delete itself", says the game intro.

Describing the programme as "a videogame with real life consequences", Gage said that he tried to explore what it means to kill someone in a videogame.

On his website, the student said that while touching the aliens will lose you the file deleting game and killing them will get you points, the aliens in Lose/Lose don't actually fire at you.

"This calls into question the player's mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics", he said in his blog.

"Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?"

However exploratory, experimental or just interesting it seems, Gage said that users are warned several times before they download and before they play, that Lose/Lose will result in the permanent deletion of files from your hard drive.

Several IT security software vendors - including Intego, Sophos and Symantec - have issued warnings about the game, and are flagging it up as trojan malware.