#ur telling me hundreds of people come together to create hundreds of thousands of individual drawings through elaborate

[fr3ckl3z]

I’ve always hated it when my animation teacher said knowing how animation works ruins the magic. Since fucking when has making moving pictures out of light stopped being magical?

[jlf23tumble]

Ud be top teir fic hustler bet lolol. As far as the rec maybe I'm asking for more than 1 thing? So on the one hand for hl canon or au doesn't matter just some fics where they're exploring kink; being inexperienced and working through that? Then fics that give that vibe/air, like wankerville (Hush is in my top ten so good) but yes def fics like that too. To be fair any pairing is fine I can always nope out but as this point I trust ur opinion so if you like it, I prolly will too xo

Holy smokes, this is a lot to pack into one ask, but I can definitely answer it/provide some stuff! I feel like a lot of these are going to cross over, so look for some detailed notes below!

Okay, let’s start with authors who have a specific tone to their writing that’s absolutely dreamy and swoony, who elevate text to literal works of art, and funnily enough, who are ALSO some of my faves because they tend to do the best with kink exploration and negotiation, my GOD, I could wax on about this topic all the livelong day. Ahem. Anyway, here are ten authors to absorb because they’re a hashtag mood (in no particular order):

wankerville

objectlesson

blake

eleadore 

mediaville

HappyPrincess

glasscushion

14hrflight

TheCellarDoor

vondrostes and tomlinzn (this last one is a cheat of a double up because most of their individual works are not on ao3; Terran = patreon, Hima = tumblr)

Now let’s look at some kink exploration fics. NOTE: I would literally rec everything Phoenix/objectlesson has ever written because she’s so brilliant at this particular theme, ditto everyone else on that list, too, so just assume the list below includes everything from the people up above as well. I literally think I could rec thousands, or that I have??? But I’ll pull it in, lmao:

Lay So Still, by yougotmetieddown, 3k words, E. Harry’s almost there but he needs Louis to push it further, just a bit further. Because it’s good, it’s damn near perfect but there’s still something missing, and Harry’s not above begging, never has been when it comes to Louis. (Harry likes being used; this is the first time)

like poison coursing through me, by orphan_account, 4k words, E. Louis loves it when Harry’s desperate. Or, the one with copious dirty talk, Daddy Louis, and Harry wetting himself in the shower. (yeahhhhh for multiple kinks!! but mostly desperation, and it’s lovely how Louis gets Harry on board with this one)

it’s warmer from worlds away, by sarcasticfluentry, 4k words, E (needs ao3). It turns out that searching the word ‘pump’ mostly returns videos like “tight ass pumped hard by black cock,” which is not what Harry’s looking for, at least not today….or, Harry discovers a new kink while Louis isn’t home. (one of my fave authors, and the way Louis’s involved over the phone is a chef’s kiss moment)

Your Serve, by larrymylove, 4k, M.  The one where the boys take up playing ping-pong back stage, and the image of Louis with a paddle is making Harry’s life difficult; even more so when he comes home to find Louis’ bought a ping-pong table of their own. (here for Louis being oblivious for a good long while)

Only Thing That Can Quench My Thirst, by eyesofshinigami, 6.5k words, E.  Louis wouldn’t exactly call it a thing, his newfound fascination with the curly trail that starts below Harry’s bellybutton and disapears into his skinny jeans. It’s definitely not a thing. It’s just… Alright, maybe it’s a thing. And that’s okay. (internal screaming, this is the fic that launched the pubefest…and I actually got to chat with the author the other day about it, dreams can come true!!!!)

I May Be Crazy, Don’t Mind Me, by ShapeOfLou, 8.3k words, E.  The one where Harry keeps seeing things that make him want to try something new in bed, but he worries about how to tell Louis or how Louis will feel about it. (mpreg kink? yes PLEASE)

horizontal like a quarter to three, by orphan_account, 8.7k words, E.  The worst part is that Louis just wants to get really rough with him. He’s wanted it right from the start, and it doesn’t make sense, because Harry’s always been so gentle and understanding and sweet, and yet all Louis wants to do is fuck him up. (stumbling together into some bdsm dynamics)

into another (another) serotonin overflow, by mercutionotromeo, 11k words, E. Harry wants this year to be different - wants it to be the year that he finally gets over this stupid crush. He’s going to uni, he needs to decide what he wants to do with his life. Instead, he’s deciding what he wants to do to Louis Tomlinson (this is so hot and sweet all at once, lots of kinks explored)

sweet harmony series, by colourexplosion, 12k words, E (needs ao3 account).  louis leaves his laptop open on his bunk. harry finds it. and his porn. (more desperation and exploration of pee kink, yer welcome!)

Make a Dime Go One Hundred, by screwstyles, 17.8k words, E. “Hey, Haz,” he says, encouraged in equal parts by the weed and the cocoon they seem to have created around themselves. “Do you think you could trust anyone enough to have full control over you?” he asks into the night, hoping his sentence won’t break their bubble. It doesn’t, if the way Harry’s eyes meet his is any indication. (Harry volunteers to help Louis experiment with bondage. Things don’t go exactly to plan)

Make Tea, Not War, by adventuring and howdoyouwhisk, 20k words, M. “Hopeless, hopeless flatmate. Would you rather be with one of these guys?”“ Nope!” (Louis attempts to become a better flatmate, much to Harry’s dismay)

precious little thing, by mercutionotromeo, 21k words, E. There’s a slow, steady inhale, and a low voice purrs, “Hi, sexy.” Jesus - this guy has barely said two words, and both of them have made Harry’s cock twitch in his jeans. (god, I am such a sucker for the phone sex operator trope, you don’t even know, and this is one of the best…multiple kinks explored, too)

Come Out and Play, by dinosaursmate, 29k words, E.  Harry smiled softly. “Say it, Lou.” “I have this fantasy,” he repeated. “Of… all five of us.” “All five of us,” Harry exclaimed. “Gosh.” Or Harry and Louis discover a new kink in their relationship, and it brings all the boys closer than they could have ever imagined. (I hope people read the poly fest…some great works in there!!)

we’re still going, eight in the morning, by noelgallagher and yoursongonmyheart, 31k words, E.  It takes Harry about two weeks to notice. It takes that long because he’s busy in the mornings. While he’s aware of his surroundings, most of his focus is on the flat boxes carefully piled in the boot of his Range Rover. (where Harry’s a baker and Louis’s a DJ, and kinks are explored remotely)

Small Doses series, by QuickedWeen, 45k words, E.  Louis and Harry continue to clash all while Harry is trying to move his way up the ranks in Manchester’s amateur boxing circuit, but they can’t seem to stay away from each other. (lots of kinks explored here)

[shirlleycoyle]

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon

This story was originally published on mssv.net by Adrian Hon (@adrianhon)

The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. Last week, it was 5G cell towers, this week it’s Wayfair; who knows what next week will bring? But QAnon’s followers always seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done my research.”

I’d heard that line before. In early 2001, the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, A.I., had just begun. YouTube wouldn’t launch for another four years, so you had to be eagle-eyed to spot the unusual credit next to Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, and Frances O’Connor: Jeanine Salla, the movie’s “Sentient Machine Therapist.”

Close-up of the A.I. movie poster

Soon after, Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) posted a tip from a reader:

“Type her name in the Google.com search engine, and see what sites pop up…pretty cool stuff! Keep up the good work, Harry!! –ClaviusBase”

(Yes, in 2001 Google was so new you had to spell out its web address.)

The Google results began with Jeanine Salla’s homepage but led to a whole network of fictional sites. Some were futuristic versions of police websites or lifestyle magazines; others were inscrutable online stores and hacked blogs. A couple were in German and Japanese. In all, over twenty sites and phone numbers were listed.

By the end of the day, the websites racked up 25 million hits, all from a single AICN article suggesting readers ‘do their research’. It later emerged they were part of one of the first-ever alternate reality games (ARG), The Beast, developed by Microsoft to promote Spielberg’s movie.

The way I’ve described it here, The Beast sounds like enormous fun. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a doorway into 2142 filled with websites and phone numbers and puzzles, with runaway robots who need your help and even live events around the world? But consider how much work it required to understand the story and it begins to sound less like “watching TV” fun and more like “painstaking research” fun. Along with tracking dozens of websites that updated in real time, you had to solve lute tablature puzzles, decode base 64 messages, reconstruct 3D models of island chains that spelt out messages, and gather clues from newspaper and TV adverts across the US.

This purposeful yet bewildering complexity is the complete opposite of what many associate with conventional popular entertainment, where every bump in your road to enjoyment has been smoothed away in the pursuit of instant engagement and maximal profit. But there’s always been another kind of entertainment that appeals to different people at different times, one that rewards active discovery, the drawing of connections between clues, the delicious sensation of a hunch that pays off after hours or days of work. Puzzle books, murder mysteries, adventure games, escape rooms, even scientific research—they all aim for the same spot.

What was new in The Beast and the ARGs that followed it was less the specific puzzles and stories they incorporated, but the sheer scale of the worlds they realised—so vast and fast-moving that no individual could hope to comprehend them. Instead, players were forced to cooperate, sharing discoveries and solutions, exchanging ideas, and creating resources for others to follow. I’d know: I wrote a novel-length walkthrough of The Beast when I was meant to be studying for my degree at Cambridge.

QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.

In other words, maybe QAnon is… fun?

ARGs never made it big. They came too early and It’s hard to charge for a game that you stumble into through a Google search. But maybe their purposely-fragmented, internet-native, community-based form of storytelling and puzzle-solving was just biding its time…

This blog post expands on the ideas in my Twitter thread about QAnon and ARGs, and incorporates many of the valuable replies. Please note, however, that I’m not a QAnon expert and I’m not a scholar of conspiracy theories. I’m not even the first to compare QAnon to LARPs and ARGs.

But my experience as lead designer of Perplex City, one of the world’s most popular and longest-running ARGs, gives me a special perspective on QAnon’s game-like nature. My background as a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist also gives me insight into what motivates people.

Today, I run Six to Start, best known for Zombies, Run!, an audio-based augmented reality game with half a million active players, and I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification.

It’s Like We Did It On Purpose

Perplex City “Ascendancy Point” Story Arc

When I was designing Perplex City, I loved sketching out new story arcs. I’d create intricate chains of information and clues for players to uncover, colour-coding for different websites and characters. There was a knack to having enough parallel strands of investigation going on so that players didn’t feel railroaded, but not so many that they were overwhelmed. It was a particular pleasure to have seemingly unconnected arcs intersect after weeks or months.

Merely half of the “Q-web“

No-one would mistake the clean lines of my flowcharts for the snarl of links that makes up a QAnon theory, but the principles are similar: one discovery leading to the next. Of course, these two flowcharts are very different beasts. The QAnon one is an imaginary, retrospective description of supposedly-connected data, while mine is a prescriptive network of events I would design.

Except that’s not quite true. In reality, Perplex City players didn’t always solve our puzzles as quickly as we intended them to, or they became convinced their incorrect solution was correct, or embarrassingly, our puzzles were broken and had no solution at all. In those cases we had to rewrite the story on the fly.

When this happens in most media, you just hold up your hands and say you made a mistake. In video games, you can issue an online update and hope no-one’s the wiser. But in ARGs, a public correction would shatter the uniquely-prolonged collective suspension of disbelief in the story. This was thought to be so integral to the appeal of ARGs, it was termed TINAG, or “This is Not a Game.”

So when we messed up in Perplex City, we tried mightily to avoid editing websites, a sure sign this was, in fact, a game. Instead, we’d fix it by adding new storylines and writing through the problem (it helped to have a crack team of writers and designers, including Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Dan Hon, Jey Biddulph, Fi Silk, Eric Harshbarger, and many many others).

We had a saying when these diversions worked out especially well: “It’s like we did it on purpose.”

Every ARG designer can tell a similar war story. Here’s Josh Fialkov, writer for the Lonelygirl15 ARG/show:

“Our fans/viewers would build elaborate (and pretty neat) theories and stories around the stories we’d already put together and then we’d merge them into our narrative, which would then engage them more. The one I think about the most is we were shooting something on location and we’re run and gunning. We fucked up and our local set PA ended up in the background of a long selfie shot. We had no idea. It was 100% a screw up. The fans became convinced the character was in danger. And then later when that character revealed herself as part of the evil conspiracy — that footage was part of the audiences proof that she was working with the bad guys all along — “THATS why he was in the background!” They literally found a mistake – made it a story point. And used it as evidence of their own foresight into the ending — despite it being, again, us totally being exhausted and sloppy. And at the time hundreds of thousands of people were participating and contributing to a fictional universe and creating strands upon strands.”

Conspiracy theories and cults evince the same insouciance when confronted with inconsistencies or falsified predictions; they can always explain away errors with new stories and theories. What’s special about QAnon and ARGs is that these errors can be fixed almost instantly, before doubt or ridicule can set in. And what’s really special about QAnon is how it’s absorbed all other conspiracy theories to become a kind of ur-conspiracy theory such that seems pointless to call out inconsistencies. In any case, who would you even be calling out when so many QAnon theories come from followers rather than “Q”?

Yet the line between creator and player in ARGs has also long been blurry. That tip from “ClaviusBase” to AICN that catapulted The Beast to massive mainstream coverage? The designers more or less admitted it came from them. Indeed, there’s a grand tradition of ARG “puppetmasters” (an actual term used by devotees) sneaking out from “behind the curtain” (ditto) to create “sockpuppet accounts” in community forums to seed clues, provide solutions, and generally chivvy players along the paths they so carefully designed.

As an ARG designer, I used to take a hard line against this kind of cheating but in the years since, I’ve mellowed somewhat, mostly because it can make the game more fun, and ultimately, because everyone expects it these days. That’s not the case with QAnon.

Yes, anyone who uses 4chan and 8chan understands that anonymity is baked into the system such that posters frequently create entire threads where they argue against themselves in the guise of anonymous users who are impossible to distinguish or trace back to a single individual – but do the more casual QAnon followers know that?

Local Fame

A Beautiful Mind

Pop culture’s conspiracy theorist sits in a dark basement stringing together photos and newspaper clippings on their "crazy wall." On the few occasions this leads to useful results, it’s an unenviable pursuit. Anyone choosing such an existence tends to be shunned by society.

But this ignores one gaping fact: piecing together theories is really satisfying. Writing my walkthrough for The Beast was rewarding and meaningful, appreciated by an enthusiastic community in a way that my molecular biology essays most certainly were not. Online communities have long been dismissed as inferior in every way to “real” friendships, an attenuated version that’s better than nothing, but not something that anyone should choose. Yet ARGs and QAnon (and games and fandom and so many other things) demonstrate there’s an immediacy and scale and relevance to online communities that can be more potent and rewarding than a neighbourhood bake sale. This won’t be news to most of you, but I think it’s still news to decision-makers in traditional media and politics.

Good ARGs are deliberately designed with puzzles and challenges that require unusual talents—I designed one puzzle that required a good understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—with problems so large that they require crowdsourcing to solve, such that all players feel like welcome and valued contributors.

Needless to say, that feeling is missing from many people’s lives:

“ARGs are generally a showcase for special talent that often goes unrecognized elsewhere. I have met so many wildly talented people with weird knowledge through them.”

If you’re first to solve a puzzle or make a connection, you can attain local fame in ARG communities, as Dan Hon, COO at Mind Candy (makers of the Perplex City ARG), notes. The vast online communities for TV shows like Lost and Westworld, with their purposefully convoluted mystery box plots, also reward those who guess twists early, or produce helpful explainer videos. Yes, the reward is “just” internet points in the form of Reddit upvotes, but the feeling of being appreciated is very real. It’s no coincidence that Lost and Westworld both used ARGs to promote their shows.

Wherever you have depth in storytelling or content or mechanics, you’ll find the same kind of online communities. Games like Bloodborne, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Animal Crossing, Eve Online, and Elite Dangerous, they all share the same race for discovery. These discoveries eventually become processed into explainer videos and Reddit posts that are more accessible for wider audiences.

The same has happened with modern ARGs, where explainer videos have become so compelling they rack up more views than the ARGs have players (not unlike Twitch). Michael Andersen, owner of the Alternate Reality Gaming Network news site, is a fan of this trend, but wonders about its downside—with reference to conspiracy theorists:

“[W]hen you’re reading (or watching) a summary of an ARG? All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together. Living it, though? Sheer chaos. Wild conjectures and theories flying left and right, with circumstantial evidence and speculation ruling the day. Things exist in a fugue state of being simultaneously true-and-not-true, and it’s only the accumulation of evidence that resolves it. And acquiring a “knack” for sifting through theories to surface what’s believable is an extremely valuable skill—both for actively playing ARGs, and for life in general.And sometimes, I worry that when people consume these neatly packaged theories that show all the pieces coming together, they miss out on all those false starts and coincidences that help develop critical thinking skills. …because yes, conspiracy theories try and offer up those same neat packages that attempt to explain the seemingly unexplained. And it’s pretty damn important to learn how groups can be led astray in search of those neatly wrapped packages.”

“SPEC”

I’m a big fan of the SCP Foundation, a creative writing website set within a shared universe not unlike The X-Files. Its top-rated stories rank among the best science fiction and horror I’ve read. A few years ago, I wrote my own (very silly) story, SCP-3993, where New York’s ubiquitous LinkNYC internet kiosks are cover for a mysterious reality-altering invasion.

CITYBRIDGE/NYC

Like the rest of SCP, this was all in good fun, but I recently discovered LinkNYC is tangled up in QAnon conspiracy theories. To be fair, you can say the same thing about pretty much every modern technology, but it’s not surprising their monolith-like presence caught conspiracy theorists’ attention as it did mine.

It’s not unreasonable to be creeped out by LinkNYC. In 2016, the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote to the mayor about “the vast amount of private information retained by the LinkNYC system and the lack of robust language in the privacy policy protecting users against unwarranted government surveillance.” Two years later, kiosks along Third Avenue in Midtown mysteriously blasted out a slowed-down version of the Mister Softee theme song. So there’s at least some cause for speculation. The problem is when speculation hardens into reality.

Not long after the AICN post, The Beast’s players set up a Yahoo Group mailing list called Cloudmakers, named after a boat in the story. As the number of posts rose to dozens and then hundreds per day, it became obvious to list moderators (including me) that some form of organisation was in order. One rule we established was that posts should include a prefix in their subject so members could easily distinguish website updates from puzzle solutions.

My favourite prefix was “SPEC,” a catch-all for any kind of unfounded speculation, most of which was fun nonsense but some of which ended up being true. There were no limits on what or how much you could post, but you always had to use the prefix so people could ignore it. Other moderated communities have similar guidelines, with rationalists using their typically long-winded “epistemic status” metadata.

Absent this kind of moderation, speculation ends up overwhelming communities since it’s far easier and more fun to bullshit than do actual research. And if speculation is repeated enough times, if it’s finessed enough, it can harden into accepted fact, leading to devastating and even fatal consequences.

I’ve personally been the subject of this process thanks to my work in ARGs—not just once, but twice.

The first occasion was fairly innocent. One of our more famous Perplex City puzzles, Billion to One, was a photo of a man. That’s it. The challenge was to find him. Obviously, we were riffing on the whole “six degrees of separation” concept. Some thought it’d be easy, but I was less convinced. Sure enough, fourteen years on, the puzzle is still unsolved, but not for lack of trying. Every so often, the internet rediscovers the puzzle amid a flurry of YouTube videos and podcasts; I can tell whenever this happens because people start DMing me on Twitter and Instagram.

This literally came a few days ago

A clue in the puzzle is the man’s name, Satoshi. It is not a rare name, and it happens to be same as the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. So of course people think Perplex City’s Satoshi created bitcoin. Not a lot of people, to be fair, but enough that I get DMs about it every week. But it’s all pretty innocent, like I said.

More concerning is my presumed connection to Cicada 3301, a mysterious group that recruited codebreakers through very difficult online puzzles. Back in 2011, my company developed a pseudo-ARG for the BBC Two factual series, The Code, all about mathematics. This involved planting clues into the show itself, along with online educational games and a treasure hunt.

To illustrate the concept of prime numbers, The Code explored the gestation period of cicadas. We had no hand in the writing of the show; we got the script and developed our ARG around it. But this was enough to create a brand new conspiracy theory, featuring yours truly:

My bit starts around 20 minutes in:

Interviewer: Why [did you make a puzzle about] cicadas?

Me: Cicadas are known for having a gestation period which is linked to prime numbers. Prime numbers are at the heart of nature and the heart of mathematics.

Interviewer: That puzzle comes out in June 2011.

Me: Yeah.

Interviewer: Six months later, Cicada 3301 makes its international debut.

Me: It's a big coincidence.

Interviewer: There are some people who have brought up the fact that whoever's behind Cicada 3301 would have to be a very accomplished game maker.

Me: Sure.

Interviewer: You would be a candidate to be that person.

Me: That's true, I mean, Cicada 3301 has a lot in common with the games we've made. I think that one big difference (chuckles) is that normally when we make alternate reality games, we do it for money. And it's not so clear to understand where the funding for Cicada 3301 is coming from.

Clearly this was all just in fun – I knew it and the interviewer knew it. That’s why I agreed to take part. But does everyone watching this understand that? There’s no “SPEC” tag on the video. At least a few commenters are taking it seriously:

I am the “ARG guy” in question

I’m not worried, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a touch concerned that Cicada 3301 now lies squarely in the QAnon vortex and in the “Q-web“:

Here’s a good interview with the creator of the “Q-web”

My defence that the cicada puzzle in The Code was “a big coincidence” (albeit delivered with an unfortunate shit-eating grin) didn’t hold water. In the conspiracy theorest mindset, no such thing exists:

“According to Michael Barkun, emeritus professor of political science at Syracuse University, three core principles characterize most conspiracy theories. Firstly, the belief that nothing happens by accident or coincidence. Secondly, that nothing is as it seems: The “appearance of innocence” is to be suspected. Finally, the belief that everything is connected through a hidden pattern.”

These are helpful beliefs when playing an ARG or watching a TV show designed with twists and turns. It’s fun to speculate and to join seemingly disparate ideas, especially when the creators encourage and reward this behaviour. It’s less helpful when conspiracy theorists “yes, and…” each other into shooting up a pizza parlour or burning down 5G cell towers.

Because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of “SPEC” tags. In their absence, YouTube has added annotated QAnon videos with links to its Wikipedia article, and Twitter has banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, among other actions. Supposedly, Facebook is planning to do the same.

These are useful steps but will not stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums. It’s not something we can reasonably hope for, and I don’t think there’s any technological solution (e.g. browser extensions) either. The only way to stop people from mistaking speculation from fact is for them to want to stop.

Cryptic

It’s always nice to have a few mysteries for players to speculate on in an ARG, if only because it helps them pass the time while the poor puppetmasters scramble to sate their insatiable demand for more website updates and puzzles. A good mystery can keep a community guessing for, as Lost did with its numbers or Game of Thrones with Jon Snow’s parentage. But these mysteries always have to be balanced against specifics, lest the whole story dissolve into a puddle of mush; for as much we derided Lost for the underwhelming conclusion to its mysteries, no-one would’ve watched in the first place if the episode-to-episode storytelling wasn’t so strong.

The downside of being too mysterious in Perplex City is that cryptic messages often led players on wild goose chases such that they completely ignored entire story arcs in favour of pursuing their own theories. This was bad for us because we had a pretty strict timetable that we needed our story to play out on, pinned against the release of our physical puzzle cards that funded the entire enterprise. If players took too long to find the $200,000 treasure at the conclusion of the story, we might run out of money.

QAnon can favour cryptic messages because, as far as I know, they don’t have a specific timeline or goal in mind, let alone a production budget or paid staff. Not only is there no harm in followers misinterpreting messages, but it’s a strength: followers can occupy themselves with their own spin-off theories far better than “Q” can. Dan Hon notes:

“For every ARG I’ve been involved in and ones my friends have been involved in, communities always consume/complete/burn through content faster than you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game. This content generation/consumption/playing asymmetry is, I think, just a fact. But QAnon “solved” it by being able to co-opt all content that already exists and … encourages and allows you to create new content that counts and is fair play in-the-game.”

But even QAnon needs some specificity, hence their frequent references to actual people, places, events, and so on.

A brief aside on designing very hard puzzles

It was useful to be cryptic when I needed to control the speed at which players solved especially consequential puzzles, like the one revealing where our $200,000 treasure was buried. For story and marketing purposes, we wanted players to be able to find it as soon as they had access to all 256 puzzle cards, which we released in three waves. We also wanted players to feel like they were making progress before they had all the cards and we didn’t want them to find the location the minute they had the last card.

My answer was to represent the location as the solution to multiple cryptic puzzles. One puzzle referred to the Jurassic strata in the UK, which I split across the background of 14 cards. Another began with a microdot revealing which order to arrange triple letters I’d hidden on a bunch of cards. By performing mod arithmetic on the letter/number values, you would arrive at 1, 2, 3 or 4, corresponding to the four DNA nucleotides. If you understood the triplets as codons for amino acids, they became letters. These letters led you to the phrase “Duke of Burgundy”, the name of a butterfly whose location, when combined with the Jurassic strata, would help you narrow down the location of the treasure.

The nice thing about this convoluted sequence is that we could provide additional online clues to help the players community when they got stuck. The point being, you can’t make an easy puzzle harder, but you can make a hard puzzle easier.

Beyond ARGs

It can feel crass to compare ARGs to a conspiracy theory that’s caused so much harm. But this reveals the crucial difference between them: in QAnon, the stakes so high, any action is justified. If you truly believe an online store or a pizza parlour is engaging in child trafficking and the authorities are complicit, extreme behaviour is justified.

Gabriel Roth, editorial director for audio at Slate, extends this idea:

“What QAnon has that ARGs didn’t have is the claim of factual truth; in that sense it reminds me of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoir wave of the 90s and early 00s. If you have a story based on real life, but you want to make it more interesting, the correct thing to do is change the names of the people and make it as interesting as you like and call it fiction. The insight of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoirists (I’m thinking of James Frey and Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris) was that you could call it nonfiction and readers would like it much better because it would have the claim of actual factual truth, wowee!! And it worked! How much more engaging and addictive is an immersive, participatory ARG when it adds that unique frisson you can only get with the claim of factual truth? And bear in mind that ARG-scale stories aren’t about mere personal experiences—they operate on a world-historical scale.”

ARGs’ playfulness with the truth and their sometimes-imperceptible winking of This Is Not A Game (accusations Lonelygirl15 was a hoax) is only the most modern incarnation of epistolary storytelling. In that context, immersive and realistic stories have long elicited extreme reactions, like the panic incited by Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds (often exaggerated, to be fair).

We don’t have to wonder what happens when an ARG community meets a matter of life and death. Not long after The Beast concluded, the 9/11 attacks happened. A small number of posters in the Cloudmakers mailing list suggested the community use its skills to “solve” the question of who was behind the attack.

The brief but intense discussion that ensued has become a cautionary tale of ARG communities getting carried away and being unable to distinguish fiction from reality. In reality, the community and the moderators quickly shut down the idea as being impractical, insensitive, and very dangerous. “Cloudmakers tried to solve 9/11” is a great story, but it’s completely false.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for the poster child for online sleuthing gone wrong, the r/findbostonbombers subreddit. There’s a parallel between the essentially unmoderated, anonymous theorists of r/findbostonbombers and those in QAnon: neither feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes:

“There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on. The feeling that all information is available online, that reality and truth must be captured/in evidence somewhere”

There’s truth in that feeling. There is a vast amount of information online, and sometimes it is possible to solve “mysteries”, which makes it hard to criticise people for trying, especially when it comes to stopping perceived injustices. But it’s the sheer volume of information online that makes it so easy and so tempting and so fun to draw spurious connections.

That joy of solving and connecting and sharing and communication can do great things, and it can do awful things. As Josh Fialkov, writer for Lonelygirl15, says:

That brain power negatively focused on what [conspiracy theorists] perceive as life and death (but is actually crassly manipulated paranoia) scares the living shit out of me.

What ARGs Can Teach Us

Can we make “good ARGs”? Could ARGs inoculate people against conspiracy theories like QAnon?

The short answer is: No. When it comes to games that are educational and fun, you usually have to pick one, not both—and I say that as someone who thinks he’s done a decent job at making “serious games” over the years. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it’s really hard, and I doubt any such ARG would get played by the right audience anyway.

The long answer: I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification. Come back in a year or two.

For now, here’s a medium-sized answer. No ARG can heal the deep mistrust and fear and economic and spiritual malaise that underlies QAnon and other dangerous conspiracy theories, any more than a book or a movie can solve racism. There are hints at ARG-like things that could work, though—not in directly combatting QAnon’s appeal, but in channeling people’s energy and zeal of community-based problem-solving toward better causes.

Take The COVID Tracking Project, an attempt to compile the most complete data available about COVID-19 in the U.S. Every day, volunteers collect the latest numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every state and territory. In the absence of reliable governmental figures, it’s become one of the best sources not just in the U.S., but in the world.

It’s also incredibly transparent. You can drill down into the raw data volunteers have collected on Google Sheets, view every line of code written on Github, and ask them questions on Slack. Errors and ambiguities in the data are quickly disclosed and explained rather than hidden or ignored. There’s something game-like in the daily quest to collect the best-quality data and to continually expand and improve the metrics being tracked. And like in the best ARGs, volunteers of all backgrounds and skills are welcomed. It’s one of the most impressive and well-organising reporting projects I’ve ever seen; “crowdsourcing” doesn’t even come close to describing its scale.

If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like Bellingcat, an an open-source intelligence group that discovered how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly-available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade in Kursk, Russia. The Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.

Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of trust. Today, people don’t trust authorities because authorities have repeatedly shown themselves to be unworthy of trust – misreporting or manipulating COVID-19 testing figures, delaying the publication of government investigations, burning records of past atrocities, and deploying unmarked federal forces. Perhaps authorities were just as untrustworthy twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, but today we rightly expect more.

Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, believes it’s that lack of trust that leads people to QAnon:

“Q’s [followers] … are starving for information. Their willingness to chase bread crumbs is a symptom of ignorance and powerlessness. There may be something to their belief that the machinery of the state is inaccessible to the people. It’s hard to blame them for resorting to fantasy and esotericism, after all, when accurate information about the government’s current activities is so easily concealed and so woefully incomplete.”

So the goal cannot be to simply restore trust in existing authorities. Rather, I think it’s to restore faith in truth and knowledge itself. The COVID Tracking Project and Bellingcat help reveal truth by crowdsourcing information. They show their work via hypertext and open data, creating a structure upon which higher-level analysis and journalism can be built. And if they can’t find the truth, they’re willing to say so.

QAnon seems just as open. Everything is online. Every discussion, every idea, every theory is all joined together in a warped edifice where speculation becomes fact and fact leads to action. It’s thrilling to discover, and as you find new terms to Google and new threads to pull upon, you can feel just like a real researcher. And you can never get bored. There’s always new information to make sense of, always a new puzzle to solve, always a new enemy to take down.

QAnon fills the void of information that states have created—not with facts, but with fantasy. If we don’t want QAnon to fill that void, someone else has to. Government institutions can’t be relied upon to do this sustainably, given how underfunded and politicised they’ve become in recent years. Traditional journalism has also struggled against its own challenges of opacity and lack of resources. So maybe that someone is… us.

ARGs teach us that the search for knowledge and truth can be immensely rewarding, not in spite of their deliberately-fractured stories and near-impossible puzzles, but because of them. They teach us that communities can self-organise and self-moderate to take on immense challenges in a responsible way. And they teach us that people are ready and willing to volunteer to work if they’re welcomed, no matter their talent.

It’s hard to create these communities. They rely on software and tools that aren’t always free or easy to use. They need volunteers who have spare time to give and moderators who can be supported, financially and emotionally, through the struggles that always come. These communities already exist. They just need more help.

Despite the growing shadow of QAnon, I’m hopeful for the future. The beauty of ARGs and ARG-like communities isn’t their power to discover truth. It’s how they make the process of discovery so deeply rewarding.

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[interfaithconnect]

So seeing as this a cool interfaith blog, I think it fun to ask: Are all paths, at their core, the same path but seen through different "lenses?"

Salvē, Anon! I hope it’s ok with other mods if I jump in here, since this was a major issue in my interfaith work and peer ministry in college.

The “all paths up the same mountain” idea sounds comforting but ultimately fails to see the sharp differences in the ontological and teleological stances of various religions. It also fails to grasp that some religions are about orthodoxy (“correct belief” - think of Protestant Christianities) and others about orthopraxy (“correct practice” - e.g., Gardnerian Wicca, Roman polytheism). In short, religions are way too different to arrive at the “all paths, one mountain” conclusion while being intellectually honest. While controversial, Stephen Prothero’s book God is Not One tries to explain the problems with that idea.

This view also implies that there is ultimately “one goal” or “one god,” and that any culture or religion that doesn’t agree with that view is backwards, unenlightened, and therefore does not deserve a place at the interfaith table. Furthermore, this idea has roots in imperialism, raising the voices of certain privileged monotheists over indigenous polytheistic cultures that are less likely to agree.

What interfaith movements seem to be moving away from is the whitewashing of our traditions to be fundamentally all the same, and moving toward honoring our differences while utilizing our similar values to achieve real-world positive change. The Better Together college program exemplified this by putting most of its focus on interfaith volunteering and other social justice projects.

- Mod Evodije

For me personally, I view religion as a way for people to feel connected to the universe, be a part of something bigger, while expressing a part of their individuality. My religious beliefs, while Christian in essence, are rooted in the fact that my religion does not know the ultimate truth; Deity is incomprehensible. To answer your question, I believe every religion walks different paths, with each person holding a piece of divine light. To quote the Gospel of Philip:

“The names of worldly things are utterly deceptive, for they turn the heart from what is real to what is unreal. Whoever hears the word “God” thinks not of what is real but rather what is unreal. So also with the words “Father,” “Son,” “Church,” and all the rest, people do not think of what is real but what is unreal, though the words refer to what is real. Do not be deceived. If words belonged to the eternal realm, they would never be pronounced in this world, nor would they designate worldly things…

Truth brought forth many names in the world for us, and no one can refer to Truth without names. Truth is one and many, for our sakes, to teach us about the One, in love, through the many.”

- Mod Lydia

I think some religions have common roots in similar/the same books or teachings, such as the Abrahamic roots that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share. I feel that, regardless of your stance on similarity between faiths, all paths should be respected and treated with as much value as the one you follow. My family is interfaith and regardless of the different teachings and lessons that Judaism and Catholicism each emphasize, my father always taught us to be good people, no matter where our faiths/belief systems ended up landing. I don’t think it’s possibly to quantify the multitude of faiths that are out there as “the same”, and I think that everyone looks at the world through their own eyes, so the whole concept of lenses is hard to quantify, too. Everyone practices religion in their own way.

As far as how the Jewish learners of old saw this issue, it all comes back to Torah: the whole premise behind the Torah is that we mere mortals have only a finite amount of understanding - we can’t totally wrap our heads around the concepts that the divine presents to us. The Torah itself is a paragon of diversity - it is something both unifying to all who embrace its teachings and deeply individual to each learner who delves into learning from it.

“The divine reality is singular, whereas we inhabit a reality that is characterized by multiplicity and diversity; Torah, however, embraces both realities.”

- Mod Elana

Great question! With the disclaimer that there’s no single definitive answer, and that none of us will ever know for sure anyway, I personally don’t think so. I believe that every religion is correct in its own way, and that all paths and practices are right for those who practice them. For example, I believe that all gods exist and are separate beings, but I also don’t think people who believe in a single, all-encompassing divine power are wrong. That may seem counterintuitive, or like a cop-out, but the way I explain it is that everyone lives in a slightly different “layer” of reality – Christians in one (and maybe separate layers for particular denominations), Hellenic pagans in one, Buddhists in one, and so one – and every religion is “true” in the layer in which it exists, and for the people who ascribe to it. These “layers” aren’t set in stone, and people can move between them or exist simultaneously in several at the same time, but every person is subject to the rules of the religion in which they believe.

In other words, the power of our belief creates our own reality. I can’t tell you how exactly that works because I don’t know, but I also think it’s not something humans are supposed to, or capable of, knowing. I think that all religions are equally valid and have truth within them even where they seem to contradict one another. Any theory that a living person could come up with is probably not the whole story, nor entirely wrong, just because God/the gods are so much bigger than we are and exist beyond us in a way that’s outside of our understanding. I don’t think there’s any way to say that our personal reality is the same as everyone else’s, let alone the same as our god’s/s’.

I’ve seen far too many wonderful and loving people who believe and worship differently from myself to think that any of us could be wrong, but I also don’t think the richness and fullness of history and culture should (or can) be simplified to “we all believe the same thing anyway”. I mean, perhaps on some level that is the case (and the majority of religions certainly share similar values), but I myself don’t agree that all paths are ultimately the same.

- Mod Kal

I don’t think all paths are same path in that each is a distinct separate entity in itself, with important cultural differences that need to be respected/honored, and not basically the same thing in a different pair of glasses. But I do believe each religious/spiritual practice is a desire to move towards something greater, more awe-invoking than ourselves as tiny existentially inclined people. It depends on what feels right and good to the person themself. So, while other mono/poly/atheistic spiritual traditions may be reaching out to something different than I am, we’re all seeking some sort of Thing(s) to give us a sense of being in this life as well as the next (if the latter is ur thing!).

As the Muslim scholar, Ibn-Arabi wrote, “Beware lest you restrict yourself to a particular tenet [concerning the Reality] and so deny any other tenet, for you would forfeit much good, indeed you would forfeit the true knowledge of what [the reality] is. Therefore be completely and utterly receptive to all doctrinal forms.” [x]

- Mod Neha

The Sikh faith was built on the principle that no one religion holds the Truth. Sikh scriptures freely admit that Divinity — Waheguru — is utterly beyond comprehension, and any attempt to know or describe the Divine will fail. According to Sikhi, the only entity that holds the answers is the Divine, and those answers are not accessible to the human intellect. Even Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, could not claim to know the answers to questions of the Divine. In Japji Sahib, the very first composition of Sri Guru Granth Sahib — the Sikh scriptures — the Sikh Gurus describe Waheguru in terms of mystery and unknowability, humbly admitting to their human limitations. Japji Sahib references Hinduism and Islam to highlight the limitations of human intuition and celebrate the diversity of forms through which humanity has attempted to understand the Divine. Without claiming to know the Truth, Japji Sahib humbly records the following passages:

      By thinking, Waheguru cannot be reduced to thought, even by thinking hundreds ofthousands of times.        …        Some sing that Waheguru seems so very far away        Some sing that Waheguru watches over us, face to face, ever-present        There is no shortage of those who preach and teach        Millions upon millions offer millions of sermons and stories        …        Waheguru is Shiva, Waheguru is Vishnu and Brahma; Waheguru is Parvati and Lakshmi.Even knowing Waheguru, I cannot describe Waheguru; Waheguru cannot be described in words.        …        The state of the faithful cannot be described        One who tries to describe this shall regret the attempt        No paper, no pen, no scribe        can record the state of the faithful.        Such is the Name of the Immaculate Divine.        …What was that time, and what was that moment? What was that day, and what was that date?What was that season, and what was that month, when the Universe was created?The Pandits, the religious scholars [of the Vedas], cannot find that time, even if it is written in the Puranas.That time is not known to the Qazis, who study the Qur’an.The day and the date are not known to the Yogis, nor is the month or the season.Only the Creator who created this creation — only Waheguru Themselves knows.How can we speak of Waheguru? How can we praise Waheguru? How can we describe Waheguru? How can we know Waheguru?O Nanak, everyone speaks of Waheguru, each one wiser than the rest.Great is the Master, Great is Waheguru’s Name. Whatever happens is according to Waheguru’s will.O Nanak, one who claims to know everything shall not be decorated in the world hereafter.

The Sikh answer to your question, anon, is that there is no answer. It would be foolish of me to claim knowledge of the Divine, and any answer I provide will inevitably fail to describe Waheguru’s infinite majesty. I cannot tell you if every faith is the same, nor if they are different, because I do not believe that any faith — not even my own — is entirely True. I believe that nothing short of Waheguru can understand Waheguru’s nature, and to that end, it would be hubris for me to answer one way or the other as if I have an inkling of understanding. To Sikhs, it does not truly matter whether or not all faiths are “the same”, for no one truly knows what Divinity is. To Sikhs, as long as one lives a kind and compassionate life, performs service to others, and pursues justice and betterment for all human beings, it doesn’t matter which religions are true and false and which are the same and different. In the words of Guru Gobind Singh: Manas ki jat sabhe ekai pahicanbo. Recognize the human race as One.

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕਾ ਖ਼ਾਲਸਾ, ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕੀ ਫ਼ਤਿਹ ।

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.

- Mod Lily

In Hinduism, that is probably a semi-accurate statement. I say ‘semi’ because there is still a group of us who view it otherwise. As for me, I would think it’s fairly accurate.

In Hinduism, there are many forms of worship. During Thaipusam, millions of devotees pierce needles through their body to carry a kavadi and walk from a temple to temple. While that is one way to show devotion, others carry milk pots on their heads and walk instead. So you see in Hinduism itself there are alternatives to certain things that are done.

Generally all faiths teach us to be good human beings. The difference lies in how to achieve the greater divine and be united with our creator again.

In conclusion, Hinduism believes that all paths lead to God.

“Whatever you do, do it as a dedication to God. This will bring you the tremendous experience of joy and life-freedom forever.” - Bhagavad Gita

- Mod T