#feel free to ask me anything else btw! even if its about other ARGs!

[brittlebutch]

hey i'm sorry if someone's already asked this, but i'm curious: what are the marble hornets? and what about 'arg'? is it a webseries? what's it about?

I absolutely don’t mind you asking at all! Don’t worry!!

Ok, so ARG is short for ‘Alternate Reality Game’, which is a method of storytelling that involves presenting the events as if they were actually happening in real time! It usually involves some level of audience participation (though much Much varies from story to story - Marble Hornets had a lot of code breaking that the audience could do but Jay was mostly self-sufficient, but some like EverymanHYBRID had audiences actively going geocaching and being mailed packages that included details and information that helped push the plot forward) and tends to be spread out on multiple forms of social media (although this is not always the case; some like Petscop and TheSunVanished stay on their respective accounts almost exclusively if I’m not mistaken). So Marble Hornets is an ARG, but not the only one!

Marble Hornets itself starts out when Jay Merrick rediscovers some old VHS tapes from a film project he helped out on when he was in college. Alex Kraile, the director, had abandoned the project halfway through without warning and had plans to burn all of the involved tapes before Jay intervened and offered to take them instead. He recently found them again, and when rewatching them, started noticing some Strange things, which he started to upload to YouTube as a way to keep track of everything. Through the tapes you can see Alex’s strange behavioral changes while on set, evidence of a stalker that was following him constantly (The Operator*), and other really strange things that starts to get Jay concerned. He tracks down another person who worked on the project with them in college - Tim Wright - and tries asking him what he knows about everything that went down all those years ago.

From there, things start to devolve further. Jay is starting to feel sick constantly, and is becoming paranoid enough to film himself constantly in the same way Alex used to. He tries to hunt down Brian Thomas (another actor from the original project) and instead finds his abandoned house with dried blood in the sink and strange things that seem out of place there. Jay gets his own set of stalkers - another YouTube channel titled ‘totheark’ that uploads their own cryptic videos with encoded messages and vaguely threatening imagery; a pair of people who hide their faces with a mask and a hood respectively (cleverly named Masky and Hoody by audiences lol). Things are getting out of hand, and Jay knows it, but it doesn’t stop him from continuing forward with watching the old tapes and making new ones as he tries to find out where Alex has gone and get answers for everything that happened back then.

I won’t get too far into details with the plot and reveals, because I’m not sure if you want to watch the series for yourself and learn it all on your own! Here’s a YouTube Playlist with all of the videos - both Jay’s entries and totheark’s messages - and a link to the Marble Hornets twitter account (although it did start being used for a different ARG called ‘ECKVA’, so I’m not sure how far you’ll be able to get back into the old MH tweets :/). You can also find Explained videos on YouTube that might help you out with the timeline and the coded messages and whatnot (also might help with the twitter thing), or you could come ask me!

*wrt The Operator; it’s not technically slenderman; The creators of Marble Hornets were around when the first images of what would become slenderman were uploaded to the Something Awful forums, and used its design in their story, but the two are kind of separate? Even though Marble Hornets would contribute a shit ton to the slenderverse lore, just because it was the first to really run with the concept outside of short stories or photoshopped imagery, it does kind of help to consider them two separate things, imo. Also, Marble Hornets is - to me - kind of more about revenge than any horror, particularly slender-esque horror, so I don’t know if I really consider it to be the main antagonist