Kayla: This has been scoshed. I think it's still too loud.
Chris: Even after you scoshed it?
Kayla: Even after I scoshed it.
Chris: You might have to do additional scoshing. And you can scosh. And then, like, de scosh, you can kind of go back and forth in the scotch scale just to find the right scoshing.
Kayla: I'm stopping it. Recording.
Chris: I feel like I definitely have. I don't know, like, my brain gets into this slightly different mode. Like, I don't think I'm a performative person, and I don't think I'm really performative per se on the podcast.
Kayla: Please get to the point.
Chris: But I just like that. Like, I don't know if I would have done that in a regular conference. I don't know. I just feel like my brain slightly different. Yeah, yeah. I ham it up.
Kayla: You do.
Chris: That's not true. And it's slight. It's a scotch of performativeness.
Kayla: Just. Can you do the show?
Chris: Well, the first part of the show, actually, before we. Before we even banter. So we shouldn't even have been bantering there, because the first thing I wanted to do was just update us on where we are, because shouldn't we introduce.
Kayla: What the show is?
Chris: What? Cults are just weird. I'm Chris.
Kayla: I'm here. I'm Kayla.
Chris: You're Kayla. Ready to talk about cults and shit on this show? Cults are maybe not, and cults aren't even real, so we're very confused. But this is the show, so you.
Kayla: Guys know the deal at this point, right?
Chris: But before we go into. Like I said, into banter, I do want to talk about current events.
Kayla: We're not gonna banter after that, because.
Chris: We are absolutely gonna banter after that. Cause I have a piece of banter that has been sitting on my plate that I've been forgetting to banter with you about. So we're so gonna banter.
Kayla: So we're gonna do topic. Banter topic.
Chris: Yeah, we're gonna be all over. I just said that we're a confused podcast.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: Anyway, because we are talking about QAnon in this episode, in our previous two episodes, which stretched back to before the election, and in our next two episodes, we are basically dealing with a topic that is, like, changing rapidly by the day.
Kayla: Yeah. We either timed this perfectly or terribly stupidly or both.
Chris: I think it was both.
Kayla: Also, you just said the next two episodes. Yes, there's two more this, including this.
Chris: No.
Kayla: So, yeah, so we should tell our listeners. Didn't we say that last time, I don't know. We added another episode, y'all.
Chris: Yeah, it's too much stuff.
Kayla: It's gonna be a five episode series.
Chris: We said four initially, so we lied again, hitting it back on the confusion theme. We are confused.
Kayla: We're gonna close out the season by talking about QAnon.
Chris: Yeah, no, we had really planned on it being four. Like, we had a whole. I mean, I have the paper right here. We had this whole plan for what we're gonna do. And then as we dug into it, and actually, a lot of it had to do with, as we talked to the people that we talked to, were like, there's too much content. And not only is there too much, there was, like, enough thematic difference between the things that were getting right that we said, actually, this really, we're cramming too much stuff into one. We need to break it into two.
Kayla: We gotta keep going. We gotta stretch it.
Chris: Anyway, we are talking about all of this stuff as it's unfolding. So let's just do a quick update of where we're. Athena. It is currently Sunday, November 22, 2020. As we record this, the current state of the election is that it has been a few weeks since the race has been called semi unofficially, whatever you want to call it.
Kayla: For Biden, it's been called.
Chris: It's been called. There's dispute over. Oh, well, it's not official until the electors say it is. But literally, every time we have an election, when it becomes obvious enough, the normal communication outlets that we have in the media call it a certain way. And that has already happened, except that Trump has not conceded yet, and he is still making challenges in courts. I think as of today, his record was team Trump. His lawyers are two and 32 in his challenges. So two have gotten some traction, and 32 of them have been either dismissed or thrown out or dismissed with prejudice.
Kayla: There was one today with prejudice, which I don't really know anything about the law or the legal system, except for when I was in mock trial in high school. But apparently that's very rarely used.
Chris: Right. And, you know, Kayla and I want our elections to be safe and secure as much as anybody else does. But, you know, it's November 22 and there's been no evidence presented as yet. So that's where he is. And the way this relates back to QAnon specifically is that the QAnon community.
Kayla: Many in the QAnon community, the Q.
Chris: Munity, still think that Trump is going to win, and they still think that the storm is coming and that it's all part of the plan. It's all part of the 52 dimensional chess. He's just stringing people along to get them to commit to their voter fraud, and then he's going to have this big reveal where everybody is arrested and all these hundreds of thousands of votes are going. Some qanoners even think that he won all 50 states in reality.
Kayla: Oh, boy.
Chris: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a popular. A popular QAnon election map is an entirely red United States that is definitely not real, including California, New York, Massachusetts.
Kayla: Definitely not real. I also like the one where it's all of these court cases have to be lost and thrown out and whatever so that they can eventually get it to the Supreme Court.
Chris: Yeah. Although that, as far as I'm aware, that is actually something that the lawyer team, his lawyer team is saying. That's not necessarily a QAnon theory, although it's hard to distinguish now, it is.
Kayla: A theory that I have seen many in the Q community espoused. I'm not necessarily saying it originated there, but.
Chris: Well, that definitely came from a statement from Jenna Ellis I don't know much.
Kayla: About, again, law and legal system, one of his big, bad lawyers, but that also doesn't seem real to me.
Chris: Yeah. So that's where we are in that, and that's what QAnon thinks about it right now. And another thing that is very QAnon related is, again, you should go listen to the reply all episode country of liars where they talk about the identity of Q. Spoiler alert. Skip the next minute of chat if you don't want to know until you go listen.
Kayla: But, like, actually, huge spoiler alert.
Chris: Huge spoiler. But we kind of have to talk about it.
Kayla: We have to talk about it. But stop the podcast right now. Go listen to another podcast every single.
Chris: Time we tell people and then come back to our podcast. That's really dumb.
Kayla: But then we tell them to come back anyway.
Chris: Spoilers. Here we go. Jim Watkins, the person that owns and operates eight Chan or eight Kun now, is most likely Q. And they, or at least is the current iteration of Q, is almost certainly the current iteration of Q. It's impossible to know for sure, but they present an extremely compelling case and reply all. Anyway, he is being interviewed on OANn, one american news network.
Kayla: His son.
Chris: Oh, pardon me, Ron Watkins. Sorry, the other guy I keep getting.
Kayla: They work together. They.
Chris: Ron Watkins works with his dad, Jim Watkins, who is Q, although I think.
Kayla: He stepped down from eight Chan recently. He, like, left it.
Chris: I don't know. It's hard to keep up.
Kayla: Really hard to keep up.
Chris: But yeah, he's the president was.
Kayla: The president is retweeting clips from Oann, which.
Chris: He's done that before.
Kayla: Not a reputable news source.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: That, like, interview Ron Watkins, who literally, his pedigree is that he owned eight chan. That's it.
Chris: And his father is probably Q.
Kayla: His father's probably q.
Chris: And it's being retweeted by the president of the United States.
Kayla: He's being retweeted as like an elections expert.
Chris: Yes.
Kayla: He's not. You guys, it's not great. He's just Q Junior.
Chris: And he owns an asshole of the Internet forum website.
Kayla: But again, I think he stepped down.
Chris: He may have stepped down. His father certainly is heavily involved and is also a pornographer, so. And that's it for current events, is it? I think so. I mean, for us it is. We have to get to the actual content of this episode, Kayla.
Kayla: Do we?
Chris: Yeah, that's actually. That's it. That's our episode.
Kayla: The end. Bye, guys. Go listen to reply all.
Chris: That was easy. No, we're just an aggregator.
Kayla: Anyway, we've got a whole bunch of info for you today. Or at least I don't have any info. Mister over here has some.
Chris: Mister. Yeah. And I think this is where we'll put our. Live from Los Angeles. It's Sunday afternoon.
Kayla: Said already that, like, Q's basically been silent through all of this.
Chris: Oh, no. I don't know. I don't know if we have. Yeah. So there have been no Q drops, no Q posts. There's been one, sorry, one since the election. It was a few weeks after the election. It was very short. Okay, now, cold open. Now, I said that we had to do some banter and it's because I've been playing just the best game.
Kayla: I don't want you to talk about this.
Chris: I meant to banter about it the last two episodes, but I totally forgot. I've been playing hades, y'all.
Kayla: You're not getting any banter out of it, so good.
Chris: Why not? Why are you sick of it? You're not even playing.
Kayla: That's part of why. It's like when you. It's like when you're out in public and somebody's having a loud cell phone conversation.
Chris: Oh my God. Every single time I'm playing sheer part of it. And it's like I always ask, do you want me to turn the sound off? And you're like, no, it's okay.
Kayla: Not every single time. Only when I'm in bed because I need something to distract me when I'm trying to go to sleep. Otherwise, I think about all of the horrible things that are happening.
Chris: Then you have to stop complaining about the fact that you know exactly which musical pieces are associated with which characters, despite never having played the game anyway. It's really good. It's for those of you that are gamers, it's a rogue lite type of game where you sort of like, play until you die. And there's sort of like, no, almost no way of avoiding death. Eventually you will die, but it's just how far you can get. And then you learn and progress. And Hades has a lot of, like, outside progression mechanics as well, like where you can power up your character. It's all based on greek mythology. You're trying to escape the underworld. It's really cool. I love it. And I just really wanted to banter.
Kayla: About that because that's not banter, that's a plug. That's.
Chris: Well, secretly I wish that this podcast was just like a pop culture podcast anyway.
Kayla: And it's like, just make it a second podcast.
Chris: Oh, yeah, just make another content suck. Yeah, that's great.
Kayla: Is Hades a cult?
Chris: Almost certainly, because we've all been like, me and my friend group have been talking about it a whole bunch.
Kayla: Yeah, just you and your friend group. Literally the entire.
Chris: I know that. But I'm saying that it's. I'm just using that as an example that a lot of people talk about it.
Kayla: Huh. Good job. Like a game.
Chris: Of course. You know how we both do, you and I, when there's something that we really like, whether it's like a food or a tv show or a game, we like to do our own research.
Kayla: I immediately google anything I'm, like, doing.
Chris: So I went to Google apaties, of course, the other day to learn more about it. I went and checked out its Wikipedia page, learned a couple interesting things about its development. Then there was this hyperlink to the Wikipedia article for the actual greek mythological realm of Hades. So I was like, huh, I kind of want to know more about that. So I clicked on that, you know, as you do on Wikipedia, of course. Then of course, I was reading the article about the greek underworld and how could I not click on the link to christian views on Hades? How could I not click on that article?
Kayla: Yeah, no, of course.
Chris: So that article was fascinating. Of course, it talked about, among other things, the ways in which the christian views of heaven and hell are shaped by the greek mythology of Hades, how it diverged into the reward based heaven and the punishment based hell, for example. Super fascinating. Then I had to click on the link to read more about hell. So now I'm on the Wikipedia article reading about hell.
Kayla: It always goes. It always leads.
Chris: All roads lead back to this, which is also fascinating. All roads lead to hell. Yeah, and maybe you guessed it, but then that took me to another rabbit hole. Of course, the hell article talks a lot about Satan, so I'm like, now I kind of want to click the link to go learn about Satan. And in the article about Satan, of course, there is information about the character himself, Satan, but also cultural manifestations of the concept, which, don't, you know, one of those things is something called satanic ritual abuse. So I had to read about that. And as I was reading that, I clicked on a link that finally brought me today's topic, the topic we've been discussing the last two and next two episodes. Qanon.
Kayla: So you went on the Wikipedia for Hades, the video game, and you ended up on the Wikipedia for QAnon, link.
Chris: By link by link.
Kayla: Yep. It's a good game to play.
Chris: That was such a rush of satisfying my curiosity and following connections. It took me the whole night in front of a computer, but I was hella engaged. You ever done anything like that online or on Wikipedia?
Kayla: Yes, I have. I think I've talked about it many a time on this podcast. I have obviously stayed up all night, several times just clicking links on the Internet.
Chris: Of course, everyone has, all the time. It's like a thing. In fact, there's even, like, a game people play called a Wikipedia race, where they start at a random page, and the goal is to get to some page by the fewest links possible, which I think maybe I just won that with Hades and QAnon. I don't know.
Kayla: Pretty good.
Chris: And also, that whole experience is not a small part about what this very podcast is, right? We find something, and we're like, that's funny. And we follow it down a rabbit hole, experience the pleasure of discovering something crazy that we didn't know about, share it with our audience. That's how we do this very compelling hook. In our first two episodes about QAnon, my lovely co host Kayla here took us on a deep dive about the history of moral panics and nocturnal ritual fantasy, which is nearly synonymous, by the way, with satanic ritual abuse that I mentioned earlier. Ann walked us through what exactly QAnon is and how it was birthed on four Chan and later eight Chan. We also heard from conspiracy theory researcher and QAnon focuser Mike Rothschild.
Chris: And in today's episode, we're going to look at QAnon from a different angle, angle that's been a very popular topic of discussion lately. You don't have to squint too hard to make QAnon look like an ARG or alternate reality game.
Kayla: What's an ARG, Chris?
Chris: An alternate reality game, as concisely as I can put it, is a game that's played across multiple media formats, including websites, emails, and text, but also real world systems such as phone calls and physical notes and information. It's almost always a puzzle solving, conspiracy hunt style narrative, and it's intended to be solved by more than one player. In fact, most ARG's are designed such that you can't really solve them by yourself.
Kayla: Oh, I didn't know that.
Chris: Mm. But actually, don't take my word for it. Listen to these clips I pulled together from a podcast I like that has extremely sexy hosts, and you don't even.
Kayla: Have to leave to go listen to it.
Chris: I know. Check it out.
Kayla: Four chan is popular amongst a certain subset of Internet users, largely because it can be used fairly anonymously, and there are a few rules. And like Chris said, it's kind of. It can get a little dirty, it can look a little dark, and the text read, hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.
Chris: It's like that movie, the game, the Michael Douglas movie. A little bit. It's like.
Kayla: But it's not okay. Just going off what you said about the game. Like, there were a lot of early on guesses as to what this would end up being, and most people assumed that it was an arg or alternate reality game.
Chris: All right, so just to recap what we've done so far, so on this message board, on four chan, on this x message board was posted an image with some cryptic text about following some clues. And nobody could figure out until they actually looked at the code for the image. And in the code for the image was a URL, a link to another website.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And this other website had a picture of a duck. Got it. And so we can decipher them basically like a Dan Brown novel.
Kayla: Yup.
Chris: But online.
Kayla: Yup. And again, it's not that all theorists are bad. Like, I've watched multiple videos on YouTube about the crazier 3301 theories. Cause it's fun. It's fun to pretend.
Chris: It's fun to speculate and pretend. Sure. So did any of that sound familiar? No usual suspects there?
Kayla: No. Cause that happened in the before time. This was all pre Covid, so.
Chris: Right. So there are no histories. Pre Covid. It's all. But it's all oral. That's an oral history, though, because it's a podcast.
Kayla: That's what she said.
Chris: Hey.
Kayla: Oh, yes, of course I remember that. My favorite episode of this entire podcast. It will be my favorite episode until the end of time. Talking about Cicada 3301, the cryptic Internet puzzle that some folks believe is an ARG, or at least has Arg like elements. Definitely has that.
Chris: Like, by the way, you're not the only one. Several people have told me that is.
Kayla: They'Re also their favorite episodes because it's really great.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Cause it's interesting, right. It's fun to follow that stuff.
Kayla: It's fun to follow that stuff. And, like, it has all of those things that you mentioned. It has like, phone calls and emails and Internet sleuthing and you have to band together with other people to solve it and out in the real world. Plus, also on the Internet.
Chris: Yeah. And it's unsurprising that we've talked about something rog adjacent on the show before, right. Because we sort of, like I said, have this penchant for going down rabbit holes. That's kind of what we do here at cult are just weird. And we're not the only ones, as we will see. Now, I say ARG adjacent because Cicada 3301 may or may not be considered an ARG, depending on who you ask. The main sticking point is that we don't really know the purpose or the designers behind Cicada. If it was purely diversionary, then I think that we could solidly say that it was right. If somebody came out of the woodwork and was like, hey, I made cicada and it was just for funsies, then we'd be like, okay, that was an arg, but without that, it's kind of like it has similar elements.
Kayla: I think there's more evidence that it's not an arg than it is, but.
Chris: Definitely has similar elements.
Kayla: I agree.
Chris: I agree. And some of those elements, some of those characteristics. Transmedia. And transmedia basically means, like, across media, right? That's when we say, like, phone calls, emails, texts. That's what we mean. Massively crowdsourced, puzzle solving, mysteriousness and link following, as it happens to QAnon, also isn't intentionally diversionary, but also shares those four characteristics.
Kayla: Oh, shit.
Chris: So here's what we're going to cover on the show today. As a game developer myself, and in particular a developer with experience designing engagement mechanics and using analytics to drive decision making, I'll talk a little bit about game design in general and the difference between fun and engagement. Then I'll talk about a few of the more well known ARG's, and then just to make sure we're all on the same page. And also because I promised last episode, I've got some QAnon vocabulary to cover. And then I'll be talking about some of the expert analysis and testimony that I read and gathered for this episode. Turns out there's quite a few people out there that are talking about the similarities between QAnon and Arg's. So I guess what I'm saying is this episode's topic is a very lukewarm take.
Chris: I'm like the 73rd person to talk about this.
Kayla: That's fine. That's standard for us.
Chris: Yeah. But I also have some personal anecdotes, so that makes it okay.
Kayla: Ooh, from the time where you got involved with QAnon and went down the rabbit hole and became a believer.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. That's my personal anecdote. Anyway. Kayla, are you ready to start going with me down these rabbit holes and jumping from connection to connection until it all makes sense?
Kayla: Yes.
Chris: All right. So speaking of personal anecdotes, here's one that I'll share that will help illustrate what game design is all about, or at least what I think it's all about. One of my favorite stories that I tell about this is when I was still working at Blizzard. One of my friends was semi famous in the game community anyway, well known designer for Diablo three, and now he's worked on other Diablo games as well. So I said, okay, well, I want to learn more about game design because at the time I was working on the business intelligence team, so I had a lot of experience in analytics, not as much in design. I played a lot of games, but not as much experience designing them. So I wanted to say, like, where, you know, I have the access to this expert resource.
Chris: I'm gonna ask him, like, what should I do if I want to learn more about game design? So I sent him this email and he's like, oh yeah, cool. So here's what you should do. These are my favorite books on game design. And he sent me this long list of books, and none of them were about game design. I love that they were all about human psychology. They were all about human motivations and psychology. There was no, like, this is the game design 101 book. It was all that. And the reason this was so insightful to me, in case it's not clear, is that it really illustrated that a game designer's job isn't about coding or mechanics or spreadsheets. Fundamentally, it's about human psychology. There's no game design domain knowledge outside of that, which. Okay, that's a little reductive. That's not entirely true.
Chris: But this top 1% veteran game designer didn't feel like there was anything worth recommending outside of the psychology bits. So in the game design world, we talk a lot about psychological mechanisms and are kind of expected to know a lot about things. Like, for example, skinner boxes.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: For our audience, a skinner box is sort of a shorthand to talk about some of the behavioral studies conducted by one BF Skinner, a pioneering psychologist in the sixties.
Kayla: Now, is he like a Freud where we're like. Or is he like a what we all. Nudge, nudge. Elbow, elbow. We all know that he was bullshit. Is Bf Skinner one of those, like, is he like a zimbardo or is he like a. I don't know. I don't know.
Chris: Any legit. I kind of know what you're asking.
Kayla: So is he like, legit? Like, does his stuff. Hold up.
Chris: Freud. Freud was more of like a culture, just weird, where he just talked about shit and pulled stuff out of his ass.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Skinner, on the other hand, did empirical studies. So he actually would sit down and do studies.
Kayla: I'm saying do studies.
Chris: That doesn't mean be all and end all. I think so. His studies? Yes. I mean, certainly we talk about them a lot in the game design community.
Kayla: Like a skinner box isn't like the Stanford prison.
Chris: No, no, it's not. Yeah. It's not where it's like, oh, that's bunk bullshit. Which.
Kayla: That's what I was asking.
Chris: I understand your skepticism. Actually, almost certainly there are people that dispute some of the findings and conclusions, but it's not like the Milgram experiment or the Stanford experiment where it's like, that's not really valid.
Kayla: Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.
Chris: It's still considered. As far as I'm aware, it's still considered pretty valid conclusions. I think the most dispute I've seen with it is not along the lines of, was the experimentation valid, but more along the lines of, what does this say about human behavior? Because the experimentation was done on rats, and people were like, human brains aren't a black box the way, like, rats are, where they just, like, something, stimulus response happens, and other people are like, no, it totally is that. So that's the debate I've seen around Skinner. The Skinner box is famous enough that you've probably got some sort of idea floating around in your head about it already. So, again, as we just mentioned, it's the classic sort of rat is in a box, presses a lever, and gets a reward, right? He gets a little treat.
Chris: Skinner conducted a whole slew of variants on this basic setup, and there are a lot of different takeaways, but when game designers talk about skinner boxes, they're basically talking about this reward structure thing in their games. One of Skinner's findings, by the way, was that variable rewards were much more compelling to the rat than predictable rewards.
Kayla: This hurts me deep.
Chris: In other words, getting a reward every time the rat hits the lever, or every two times the rat hits the lever or whatever caused him to essentially hit it less often than when it was set up to be random, whether the rat got a reward or not. And this experiment is often used to explain why gambling is so addictive. Example.
Kayla: Yep.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: That's why I checked Twitter all the goddamn time, because there's not a notification every time I open it. But when there is, man, that little jolt of.
Chris: That's the thing.
Kayla: Serotonin is just like.
Chris: And the whole skinner box random reward heuristic is absolutely one that game designers refer to often as. Well. When we design reward systems, we say, okay, well, it would better to like. That's why, for example, when you're killing monsters in a game and loot drops, it's much more exciting to have something drop randomly than it is if you have. Every single time you kill the monster, you get ten gold. It's much more fun for it to be like, or at least much more compelling for it to be like, well, every single time you get one gold, but then sometimes it gives you 100 gold and a special sword.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: Anyway. Wow, that was quite the tangent, wasn't it?
Kayla: Oh, yeah. That has nothing to do with what we're about.
Chris: Following all those information bits down the tangent tree there, link by link. But the reason I talk about it is, aside from just giving our listeners a very brief game design primer, is because it leads me to the next link in the discussion. Engagement versus fun. Let's set aside the larger philosophical and biological discussions. The things that were sort of just talking about a second ago about whether human enjoyment and fulfillment are simply another brain reward mechanism. The fact is, even if enjoyment is just a reward mechanism, it certainly feels a lot different to a human being like myself than being just engaged. But what is that difference that I'm talking about? Well, Kayla, do you remember about a week ago when you were playing elder scrolls online, which, by the way, is basically the Skyrim Mmo for people that don't know.
Chris: Do you remember what you said to me?
Kayla: I think I said, this isn't fun.
Chris: Yeah. I walked out into the living room, you were sitting there playing it, and you're like, this game isn't fun. And this isn't like your. I don't even know how many nth hour of playing.
Kayla: Oh, God, I played so much of it, I can't wait to stop.
Chris: Well. And then I was like, well, why are you playing it?
Kayla: Did I say it's engaging? Or did I say I doubt you.
Chris: Use the vocab word?
Kayla: I think I said, I don't remember what I said, but what I feel is that it's not about having fun in the game. It's just about. It's literally about wasting time.
Chris: It's about the loop, right? I don't think you use the word loop, but that's what wastes your time.
Kayla: It's just like, okay, I got the quest done. Okay, now I don't, like, literally, I'm not even reading any of the. I don't read what the quests are about. Yeah, I don't read what the quest.
Chris: Yeah, a lot of people don't.
Kayla: I just click, click, click. Okay, next quest. Okay, I gotta go get this. Gotta go talk to this guy and then get this thing. Okay, now come back.
Chris: So you're caught in the engagement loop.
Kayla: And actually, they've already.
Chris: Designers call that. That's a very fundamental concept for game designers. They'll call it the core loop. Yeah, well, actually, it's a loop. There are many loops. One of them is, like, the core loop. Like, what is the core? I do something, I get rewarded for it. Rinse, repeat. Like, what is that about my game? And then the game can also have a bunch of others that are sort of fan out from there.
Kayla: But it's almost, like, too much in this game, because it's like every single quest storyline. Like, you'll do this intense, huge quest storyline, and then you'll go turn it in. You'll turn in, like, your 10th quest, and then it'll be like, okay, now go talk to this guy, rather than, like, ending it that it's like, that's kind of what's driving me away at this point. But, like, I.
Chris: It's like, it's keeping you in it, but then, like, there's a separate part of your brain that wants, like, a fulfilling, fun experience that's like, this sucks.
Kayla: I think the only reason why I feel that and, like, can tap into that is because I've played games like this a lot. And, like, I'm aware of this design mechanism.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: I'm aware of what's happening because I.
Chris: Work in the industry. Actually. You've worked in the industry in a writing capacity.
Kayla: Oh, yeah.
Chris: So, you know, based on a lot of knowledge that you have, you bring to that to bear, to sort of, like, self reflect. And so, you know, like, oh, I'm sort of being psychologically taken advantage of here.
Kayla: I can recognize I'm not feeling compelled to play this because it's so fun. I'm feeling compelled to play this because I'm feeling compelled to play this.
Chris: Right. And that's exactly what I mean when I talk about engagement versus fun. Are you enjoying yourself? Are you experiencing pleasure and joy, maybe fulfillment? Or are you just on a reward track that keeps you coming back for more and allows you to check out that? Now, depending on the game and the designer, you can have very different goals in the design of the game. And by the way, that's not necessarily a binary. It's more of a spectrum as things tend to be. But some games. Sorry, the binary spectrum thing that I'm talking about is the engagement versus fun thing.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Most games lie somewhere in between that. Now, depending on the game and designer, you can have very different goals in the design of the game. Some games and designers primarily care about giving their players an enjoyable experience. Something challenging or exciting or social or scary or triumphant or narrative or the list goes. Goes on. Typically you find this with games that have what we call a box pricing. I'm kind of getting a little bit in the weeds here, but it feels interesting.
Kayla: So that's what we're all about, baby.
Chris: There we go. Yeah, that's what we do is we go down these link tangents. Typically, you find a more like, I'm trying to deliver an enjoyable experience with what we call a box pricing model. In other words, you buy the game in a box, take it home and play it, and that's it.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: The more fun the game is, the more likely you are to want to buy it. And, you know, you'll read about it in Metacritic or whatever and say, like, I need to buy this game because everyone says it's fun. It's like Breath of the Wild, right? However, some games and designers primarily care about getting their players to play more, and this is what we call in the business engagement. The engagement terminology gets thrown around a lot with the business y and analytics types in game studios. And it's much more common with games that follow the free to play model in contrast to the box model. You don't just buy the game and then play it, you play it first, right? And then maybe spend money on it later.
Chris: You download it for free, you start playing it, and then maybe you make some microtransactions, you buy an in game item or whatever. With these games, the longer that a designer can keep someone hooked and playing, the more likely that person is to pay you more and more money over time. So these designers tend to only, or at least primarily care about engagement, not enjoyment or fun. As I said before, this is reductive, less of a binary, more of a spectrum. But you get my drift.
Kayla: I do get your drift.
Chris: And another aside, this is why mobile games tend to have kind of a poor reputation among non mobile players is because mobile games, for other reasons that we won't get into, except for maybe if we have another tangent that we go put on our Patreon, tend to be mostly free to play, which means they, on average, tend to have more psychologically manipulative mechanics designed to keep you playing rather than give you a pleasurable experience. Now let's come back out of that rabbit hole and tie it back. We touched on this whole thing ever so briefly last episode in our conversation with Mister Rothschild, and that is that QAnon research does not have to be fun to be engaging. In fact, it can even be deleterious. It can even be tedious and still be engaging. All that's required is a reward system.
Chris: And this isn't to say that QAnoners don't ever have fun or fulfillment when they're down their own rabbit holes. I'm certain that sometimes they do. It's just to say it's not a required part of the formula, right?
Kayla: Right. I feel like I've been there too, where it's like, obviously I think that researching weird and crazy stuff is fun. And also there have been times where I've just like, felt compelled to learn. Like, especially when, like true crime or like really just the really horrific serial killers.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: It's not fun to research, but it is certainly engaging.
Chris: Right? Right. And I mean, half the time when I'm down in Wikipedia rabbit hole. Like, yeah, this is fun to, like, learn stuff, but after a certain amount of time, it's like, whoa, what happened? Yeah, why is it 3 hours later? But.
Kayla: And why do I feel so bad?
Chris: We aren't comparing QAnon to mobile or PC or console games. We are comparing it to Arg's. So let's go over a bit of that history for a moment.
Kayla: So we're comparing it to Pokemon Go.
Chris: Pokemon Go is not an arg. Really?
Kayla: It uses augmented reality.
Chris: It's augmented reality, not alternate reality. Yes.
Kayla: Oh, shit.
Chris: It shares one or two elements in the fact that it happens in the real world and it involves real world physical locations. But aside from that, I wouldn't say it shares much more.
Kayla: Good. Pokemon Go shall remain untainted.
Chris: No, do not disparage Pokemon go. It's the last good thing I remember. Let's mentally travel back to the year 2001.
Kayla: No, that was so long ago.
Chris: It's March. And were about three months away from the release of a film called artificial intelligence.
Kayla: Do you wanna know what I just did in my head right there?
Adrian Hon: What?
Kayla: You said, let's go back to 2001. And I was like, okay, so 15 years ago.
Chris: Nope.
Kayla: No, 20 years ago.
Chris: You may or may not remember the movie itself. It's a Spielberg film, but other than that, it's fairly unremarkable. It has a 74 and rotten tomatoes.
Kayla: It'S got robots, and then it ends with aliens.
Chris: I don't even think I remembered that part.
Kayla: Yeah, because the aliens. I'm sorry, Mister Spielberg, I love you spoilers. The aliens are just shoehorned the fuck in at the end.
Chris: Really? Aliens?
Kayla: Yes, there's aliens.
Chris: Maybe I never saw it.
Kayla: The only reason I remember it is because of how angry my sister was.
Chris: What the hell?
Kayla: Because she was like, he always does this. There's always aliens.
Chris: I think I need to watch AI's research for this.
Kayla: Because he likes forever. And then, like, the aliens come because he's like a little AI. He like.
Chris: That is not what I would have predicted. That movie.
Kayla: It's got a weird ending. Sorry. It has nothing to do.
Chris: Okay, well, anyway, that's why it is a 74 and not a 80 or whatever. I don't know. There's one thing that actually was remarkable.
Kayla: About it, and it was the fact that Jude Law played a robot prostitute.
Chris: That's right. Sorry. Two remarkable things. What you just said. And also, if you were observant enough and reading the movie poster, you'd notice a strange credit listed with all the other normal credits. Doctor Janine Sala, who was the film's sentient machine therapist.
Kayla: What?
Chris: No, totally a job that will exist someday. I know Roko's basilisk will need like a whole team of therapists to help it cope with all the eternal torture.
Kayla: Well, and the Jude law sex worker character definitely needed some therapy for sure.
Chris: But this job didn't exist back in 2001. So if you went to your favorite search engine at the time, which was probably, but maybe not Google and search for Doctor Sala, you're gonna ask Jeeves, right? You go to ask.com or I. What was the one that I used? Search.com.
Kayla: Ew. What?
Chris: I don't even remember.
Kayla: Yahoo.
Chris: Jesus Christ. If you went and searched on whatever janky ass search engine you're using, you'd turn up the game's website. Well, hang on. Let me be clear. This wasn't an ad for the game. This wasn't a homepage for the game or a Wikipedia page for the game. Like, I was reading about hades. This was presented as real.
Kayla: God bless.
Chris: And it was just one breadcrumb in a series. The second breadcrumb, if you count the.
Kayla: Movie posters, the first breadcrumb, like, that's so inspired.
Chris: It is.
Kayla: For it to be 2001 and for you to have that level of, like.
Chris: Savvy, they got like a massive amount of, like, praise and, like, awards and stuff. Innovative. Innovative, yeah. So this series of breadcrumbs would lead players down many paths along their journey, which involved actually figuring out their goal and then reaching it. The goal, they found, was to solve the murder of one Evan chan, a character in the 21 42 world of the movie that this arg was promoting AI, artificial intelligence. And these many paths involve what we today call transmedia, which I've mentioned earlier in the show. So listen to all of the different media that the designers of this ARg use to deliver clues and puzzles and story to the players.
Kayla: No, because it's about to make me so excited.
Chris: Trailers, print ads, posters, telephone messages.
Kayla: Yes.
Chris: Live promotional events for the film, even graffiti and public restrooms in major cities throughout the United States. Online, the game was presented through numerous websites in text, photograph, video, and audio based formats.
Kayla: Oh, my God. Fucking Cicada 3000 one's a ripoff.
Chris: I know. Actually, a lot of them are. That's what I talk about in just a second. Rip off's harsh, though. This arg was nicknamed the Beast, and it's still known by that. Which aside the reason that it's called that, is that an early asset list for the project contained 666 files. Oh, which prompted the game's puppet masters to call it the Beast. And then that name also sort of stuck as a nickname with the players who made this. And another aside, puppet master, by the way, is another industry jargon name that means basically arg game developer. You want to know who made this?
Kayla: Yes.
Chris: Microsoft.
Kayla: Ew. I guess I shouldn't say that I've been employed by them in the video game sphere.
Chris: Well, also, like, there are, you know, Microsoft. There are huge, shitty corporations that do shitty things. And also corporations are larger agglomerations of many people, some of whom are extremely creative and intelligent.
Kayla: It's just when you say Microsoft, it doesn't matter what you're doing.
Chris: I know, it makes it sound like the evil entry.
Kayla: No, it just makes me think of nerd ass Bill Gates. And I'm like, ew, Bill Gates tying it back.
Chris: Bill Gates plandemic.
Kayla: I bet that he put microchips in all the people.
Chris: It was all. It was all started.
Kayla: I'm sorry, 666 files.
Chris: Exactly.
Kayla: Satanic ritual abuse.
Chris: That is a signal.
Kayla: Yep.
Chris: Because the elites like to send coded signals to each other.
Kayla: Yep.
Chris: Like the number of files in a game. Anyway, the entire purpose of the beast, this giant, complex puzzle, was, again to promote the Spielberg film AI. Artificial intelligence players did eventually solve the whodunit, but it was hard, and this is a key point, actually. It was far too difficult and complex to be solved by a single player.
Kayla: God, I love that.
Chris: Just like Cicada 3301, the only way to approach playing this alternate reality game was with crowdsourced community effort. We take crowdsourcing for granted now. It's part of our 2020 lexicon. But relying on this was a bit of a gamble. In 2001, the word crowdsourcing wasn't even coined until 2006, but the gamble paid off, and the beast was considered a massive achievement in game design, storytelling, and marketing, and it was hugely influential on the many aRG's that followed.
Kayla: It sounds like it was a better piece of art than the film itself.
Chris: Oh, not even close. Yeah.
Kayla: No shade to Haley Joel, no shade to Spielberg, but also is not, you know, middle of the road film.
Chris: AI was another movie. Yeah, the Beast was the first of a genre that. It's the type of genre, too, where you, unless you come up with it, you can't conceive of it.
Kayla: But, like, whose ideal was it? Like, who went, let's do this? Like, whoever was the marketing team, I hope that they're just like the heads of every studio.
Chris: They probably I hope that they have a very, like, fulfilling sense of their life's achievements.
Kayla: They probably don't even know. They probably don't even realize.
Chris: Yeah, who knows? Well, I mean, there's also a team, so I, you know, who knows where the idea came from? I feel like the idea came out of the room, you know, probably all.
Kayla: Working on candy Crush.
Chris: That's right. Yeah. Well, candy crush makes a lot more money.
Kayla: I play all the time. It's very engaging.
Chris: Oh, yeah. That is the poster child for engagement. Speaking of posters, anyway, I said it was hugely influential on the many Arg's that followed. One such arg that can be directly traced to influence from the beast was something called Perplex City.
Kayla: What?
Chris: Perplex space City. And the reason it can be directly traced from this is that some of the players of the beast, some of that community then went on to be ARG game designers themselves with some renown.
Kayla: Yep. That makes sense. Got it.
Chris: I won't go into the details of it on the show today, but I want to read you a quote from one of the amazing blog posts that I read for this episode, and I will definitely link all this stuff in the show notes. The author of the blog post is Dan Hahn himself, now a veteran of ARG development. Quote, in 2004, Perplex City, one of the ARG's I worked on with my brother, I'd write ostensibly private emails between researchers from another world illicitly using a portal to talk about shoes. Players would discover these emails by printing out the teaser website of our game, which would have entirely different content than what was shown on the screen. These clues led players to find a cache of emails that weren't meant to be discovered. End quote.
Kayla: I'm leaving you.
Chris: For you, Kayla.
Kayla: I'm leaving you, and I'm marrying these brothers.
Chris: And for those who have maybe listened to our previous two episodes, does this sound familiar at all?
Kayla: I don't know, because I got. I just. I, like, dissociated with how fucking awesome that was. What am I supposed to say? I really don't know.
Chris: Let me read the last sentence that I did.
Kayla: Please do, because I literally, like, that transported me.
Chris: I know you were thinking about playing the game.
Kayla: It got, like, soft lens.
Chris: Yeah, I know. I know. I get it. So here's the last sentence. These clues led players to find a cache of emails that weren't meant to be discovered.
Kayla: Oh, like the podesta emails, WikiLeaks, the DNC leaks, Russia. If you're listening, do something about it.
Chris: I want to take a second look at today's topic from like a thousand foot view, I think it's not enough to just say QAnon is like a game, because that's both sort of obvious at this point and well, tread territory. As I mentioned, I think the salience and usefulness of making that analogy is because it allows us to see where QAnon and other conspiracy communities like it tap into deep human psychology, tap into things hardwired in human brains. Sort of like the behavioral version of describing how a chemical addiction drug works. Looking at QAnon as a game allows us to see the mechanics of how engagement is generated, in this case, to a pathological degree. Okay, with that in mind, let's talk real quick about the power of the email drop. Actually, let's not talk about it.
Chris: Let's quote an expert that already talked about it. This is from an article written by Professor Molly, or I think they go by Mol Sauter. I'll be quoting them a couple times because, holy shit, the two articles I readdeze absolute intellectual gold. I think you saw me like, kind of like my eyes rolling back in my head when I was reading these earlier this week.
Kayla: You tend to do that anyway, short out when you have to read.
Chris: Yeah, well, that's true. I do hate reading, but as much as I hate words, these were excellent words.
Kayla: Oh yeah, you did. You literally were like. You had a hard time.
Chris: I was like, listen to this. Anyway, I'll obviously link them in the show notes.
Kayla: Couldn't play elder scrolls trying to get bringing me back.
Chris: So here's how they opened their article, enticingly entitled the Illicit Aura of Information. If a database, like an email database, is stolen or hacked by outsiders, as opposed to being leaked by insiders or extracted via the Freedom of Information act or other legal mechanisms, and unfiltered and uninterpreted on the open web, does that change the way the information is received upon its release? Would its origins and manner of release change the way the information contained within the database could be used, or the types of narratives that might be spun out of it? In this article, I said this is still quoting this person.
Chris: I suggest that when personal, private, secret or otherwise not public email databases are hacked and released onto the public Internet without the initial mediation of established journalistic entity, these databases become the ideal medium for the growth and dissemination of successful and tenacious conspiracy theories. This is due in part to what I've called after Benjamin. I'm not sure who Benjamin is. The illicit aura of stolen information, and the ways in which this aura cuts against norms of analysis, investigation, and interpretation. Norms with professionalized journalists had until recently been in a powerful position to defend, enforce, end quote. Souder goes on to expand on these concepts in detail in the article. I will try to clumsily summarize here. Basically, there are a few things that happen when an email database gets hacked, particularly when that database is both what satter calls professionalized and casual.
Chris: So professionalized means it's like work email, and casual means it's like, hey, do you want to go to lunch tomorrow with the blah blah?
Kayla: So you mean like in an email where they may be an email account where they may be talking about, like, high level election campaign stuff, and then also like, let's order some cheese pizzas.
Chris: Exactly.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: I mean, think of yourself. Think of all the private intra company emails you might have sent and received over the years. What characterizes them. It's full of in group jargon, shorthand, abbreviations, and banal casual social exchanges. Yep, when something like this becomes public, it's ripe for interpretation, quote unquote. Because of these factors, Souder also describes the importance of how an email hack tears down the distinction between private and secret. What once was simply private information is suddenly reinterpreted as hidden information. Private. What were they hiding? Look, they're speaking in code. They must have been hiding something. They're using all this jargon. And perversely, the more someone tries to further privatize their life in response to having parts of their life publicized, the more reaction becomes. See, they are hiding something. They must be part of the cabal.
Kayla: You don't got nothing to worry about if you got nothing to hide.
Chris: Exactly. This happened, for example, with Pizzagate. There were like bands that, I think you mentioned this in the previous episodes, bands that had played at Comet, ping pong, that kind of got tied up into the conspiracy theory, and they started getting harassed, and then they started like privatizing all of their instagram and everything. And then people were like, look, they're going private. That means they definitely are abusing children.
Kayla: I only sent them ten death threats.
Chris: Anyway, as I said before, I highly encourage you to read this article because Molly goes into more detail and talks about stuff that I'm leaving out. And actually, there's this whole really fascinating parallel they draw between Pizzagate and something known as climate gate. Seriously, go read it. I almost opened the episode with talking about climate Gate as if it was pizzagate because of all the parallels there are between those two email dumps. What's climate gate? I did not. We don't have time. Go read the article, or maybe we'll talk about it and put it on Patreon. All right, so let's see. We were talking about the beast. Then I mentioned Perplex City, and then Dan Hahn's description of using email dumps as game mechanics and that arg which led me to Molly Souder's writings about email dumps.
Chris: And then that led me to another article they wrote, this one entitled the Apophenic Machine.
Kayla: What's that?
Chris: Molly is very good at article titles. Apophenia is. Well, apologize for sledgehammering the subtlety here, but it's what I've been doing all episode. It is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
Kayla: Oh, I do that all the time.
Chris: Everybody does. The really neat insight that Souder makes in this article is that the Internet is a perfect home for conspiracies. Because conspiracies and the Internet both operate on the same principle. Linking the medium helps define the message. And the Internet doesn't use links. The Internet is links, and so are conspiracy theories.
Kayla: 666 the beast. Therefore, Bill Gates is a Santa crucial abuser.
Chris: Exactly. Remember my admittedly contrived story at the top of the show where I was, like, reading about Hades on Wikipedia and I wound up at QAnon? That is interneting right there. And it's only half a stone's throw away from what Qanoners themselves are doing when they, quote, do the research. So this apophenic machine article is also chock full of other awesome quotes and other insights, but I'll pick one to relate to here. Humans are storytellers, pattern spotters, metaphor makers. When these instincts run away from us, when we impose patterns or relationships on otherwise unrelated things, we call it apophenia. When we create these connections online, we call it the Internet. The web circling back to itself again and again. The Internet is an apophenic machine.
Kayla: The Internet is an apophenic machine. It's too good. I don't have anything useful to add.
Chris: I know. You really need to read this article. It's amazing. So let's retrace our steps back again, link by link. Molly Souder, Dan Hahn, arg design. The beast. Yes, the beast. The first arg. Well, first ish. It's important to keep in mind that arg esque activity has been something humans have been doing for a while. Dan Hahn, in his article, mentions something called epistolary fictions.
Kayla: I know what that is.
Chris: Which are stories written as a series of documents. I did not know what that was until I had read it in his blog post. Per Wikipedia, the usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. The word epistolary is derived from Latin, from the greek word epistole, meaning a letter, c, epistle. The epistolary form can add greater realism to a story because it mimics the workings of real life. It is thus able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the device of an omniscient narrator. So you may not have heard the term epicenter. Well, you have, but maybe our listeners haven't heard the terminal. I hadn't.
Chris: But you've definitely heard of some of the examples, which include Bram Stoker's Dracula, Bridget Jones Diary, and even something like World War Z, which was written as a series of post event interviews.
Kayla: I literally just read one from, I don't know, 2006 to 2008. That was all on the Internet, but it used different. First it was, here's a series of emails. Now let's link to this blog post, and then that blog post links to this other blog post, and then that links to this other thing. And it was a whole story told that way.
Chris: So that's beautiful. Not an arg, but it's like. You can see that it's like the egg of an ArG.
Kayla: Oh, yeah, for sure. Shout out to Eric Heiser, our incredible writer wrote a rival.
Chris: And some folks probably could do a killer arg. Sorry, no, I also love him. And some folks have even said that the marketing campaign and presentation of the Blur Witch project was sort of a proto arg.
Kayla: Oh, it totally was not.
Chris: Cause it was necessarily like an Internet puzzle goose chase, but because it was marketed with like an extremely heavy dose of verisimilitude. I personally would even argue that some guerrilla marketing techniques, which started gaining prominence as a thing in the eighties, had some very early Arg like elements. Guerrilla marketing is where you know, instead of just like, I'm gonna put an ad on television or the radio, it's like I'm gonna do a flash mob in the middle of Grand Central Station and it's gonna be promoting ace bandage drink.
Kayla: Ace bandage drink of champions.
Chris: Yeah. But I would argue that those, like, if epistolary fictions are the eggs of ARG's, then marketing, guerrilla marketing is the sperm spirit. I don't know.
Kayla: Did that get away from you a.
Chris: Little bit, but also not really. I kind of want to stand by it because there's. I mean, that's a lot of ARg's. There are a few ARG's that are self funded, but a lot of them actually are marketing.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: That's what the first one that we talked about, the beast was. It was marketing for a film.
Kayla: Oh, I got wrapped up in like, I've gotten wrapped up in ARg's that like, I did not realize were marketing.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, that's the one that I just discovered.
Kayla: The one that was from like 2004 that I just discovered like last month was a marketing thing.
Chris: Oh God. Which one?
Kayla: It was for some random book. This person only wrote like one book. And it was about like the government building like a submarine in the Amazon.
Chris: What the shit are you talking about?
Kayla: And it was this website that my friend and I found when were young teens. And it was this crazy website where it was like, I'm writing this from an Internet cafe. They are gonna try to figure out.
Chris: What year was it from?
Kayla: In 2004, maybe 2003.
Chris: Okay.
Kayla: No, it wasn't. It wasn't for anything big. This person wrote one book.
Chris: Okay. Okay.
Kayla: And it was like I found this camera in the middle of the Amazon and it has these crazy pictures on it that are gonna change the world and I'm gonna release these pictures on this website. It was in 2003, November 2003. And I remember being so freaked out by this as a kid and like going back and visiting the website and then I forgot about it. And then I never figured out what it was for until last month. And it was marketing for a book.
Chris: That is amazing that you went 16 years without figuring that out.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. So a lot of these end up being marketing. So you might have heard of. And I don't know, some of our audience might have heard of I love bees.
Kayla: Oh yeah.
Chris: Which was a famous Arg that was marketing for the video game halo two. There was one that I didn't know about this one, but it was called the Lost Ring and it was actually a McDonald's promotion.
Kayla: Is the Monopoly game an arg?
Chris: There's one. Oh God. Go. What? What was that one? What was the documentary we watched that.
Kayla: Was like dirty Arches. I don't remember.
Chris: I don't know. What was it on? Was it on HBO?
Kayla: HBO?
Chris: There's a really good documentary about the monopoly.
Kayla: I don't remember what it was called.
Chris: Anyway, there was one called potato Sack, which was marketing for portal two.
Kayla: McFrognosed was a better title.
Chris: Blizzard did one for a release of one of their Overwatch characters, Sombra.
Kayla: Oh, I remember that.
Chris: And there's a bunch of others. I won't list all of them.
Kayla: I mean, what a better way to create buzz than to get people all riled up.
Chris: Yeah, well, that's why I say guerrilla marketing. I think it's a type of guerrilla marketing. It's such an important and creative type that it's become its own thing. But I think you could categorize it as a form of guerrilla marketing. But sorry, I digress down a connection there about ARG history. Man, it's so easy to do that, isn't it?
Kayla: Just links after links. Links, links all the way down.
Chris: Before we go on, I did promise last episode that I'd translate some vocabulary for us.
Kayla: Necessary.
Chris: A translation session didn't really fit tightly into theme of this episode or the previous ones. But since we're starting to talk more about actual QAnon content now, and I. Not just its origins, it's kind of a good spot to do it.
Kayla: I mean, it does, though, because some of these arg's do utilize, like, in language like, yeah. Yes, we still don't know what Cicada 3301 is, but there's definitely, like, absolutely.
Chris: In language jargon there. We just talked about in language being an important reason for why email dumps from casual, professionalized sources have power. But let's talk about some of that in language for QAnon itself. And as we've talked about many times in the show before, in group language absolutely falls under the ritual umbrella. Hey, guys, it's a social signal.
Kayla: Remember that. We're going to evaluate this later.
Chris: And that couldn't be more than I know.
Kayla: Based on our criteria, that's going to.
Chris: Be our fifth episode. It's a cult. It's going to last like, it's going to be like a three second episode anyway. The reason that, like, the reason in group jargon is ritualized is a ritual is because it's a social signal. And that couldn't be more true with QAnon. So I'll try to go as quickly as I can through these. Obviously, there's a lot of jargon. We tried to only list a few that were pretty much QAnon specific. So the first one I have is called the storm.
Kayla: We've talked about that.
Chris: In some previous episodes. The storm is like this nebulous idea that sometime soon, TM, all of the satanic cabal elites will be arrested and executed, and it will usher in a new golden age of peace and prosperity.
Kayla: If you remember, it's because Donald Trump was taking a picture with some generals and was like, hey, guys, it's the calm before the storm. And everyone went, what does that mean? And he went, ugh.
Chris: It's a turn of phrase like any other.
Kayla: And then Q glommed onto it.
Chris: The next is great awakening. So I just mentioned the golden age of peace and prosperity. The great awakening is this golden age of peace and prosperity. Qanoners use terminology like, I woke up, or I am awake now to refer to their Q beliefs. And the great Awakening is a golden age partly because it's when everyone else also wakes up and comes to see what Qanoners have known all along.
Kayla: I think it's like, also, it's more referring to the process of getting there. It's like the great awakening is the process of everyone, right?
Chris: It's like an active, realized kind of thing.
Adrian Hon: Yeah.
Kayla: It's like once everybody realizes the truth that's been hidden from them, then we can move on past the storm into the golden age.
Chris: We also talked a little bit about in our last episode, adrenochrome. So this is an actual chemical produced by human adrenal glands. But to cue and honors it is also something that the sedanic cabal harvests from innocent children and then consumes to prolong their life and youth.
Kayla: And it's psychoactive effects. It's just a fun drug.
Chris: That's right.
Kayla: Funtime drug.
Chris: I forgot it was funtime.
Kayla: But it also makes you look really ugly and horrible.
Chris: It does everything right. It prolongs your life in youth, but also makes you look like a fucking wraith.
Kayla: Anytime somebody ages, it's like, oh, the adrenochrome. It's like, maybe they just have liver spots. Leave them alone.
Chris: Next is save the children. Speaking of children or save our children. Save our children. So save the children is a hashtag that was used on Twitter until they banned it. And for those of you that don't know Internet, a Twitter hashtag is just a word or phrase that you apply to a Twitter post, a tweet to help it be searchable for people searching for something like it. Anyway, Qanoners use the hashtag partly to identify themselves and their posts to each other, and also partly to foment discussion about what the supposed cabal trial trafficking and adrenochrome extracting ring is up to. Also associated with pizzagate. For reasons that are probably obvious if you listen to our last couple episodes, the next step is. I'm kind of combining two is patriot and digital soldier. Like save the children.
Chris: These are also hashtags used on Twitter and ways that Qanoners like to identify themselves. Qanoners see themselves as the only true patriots. And as we talked about with Mister Rothschild last episode, they believe that they are in a holy war for the soul of mankind. And the war they are fighting so far has been conducted online, hence digital soldier. It's also a way, like, you can't really, as Twitter, you can't ban hash. Patriot right. So it's a way for them to get around some of these bansite. Next up is breadcrumb. Breadcrumb is the jargon word Q and rs use to refer to Q drops, which, again, are posts that the original Q person makes on eight kun. Eight chan. Note how much breadcrumbs sounds like something an Arg player might also say.
Kayla: Do you know what QAnon researchers who interpret the breadcrumbs are then called?
Chris: Bakers, I believe.
Kayla: Bakers.
Chris: That's right.
Kayla: Analogy kind of falls apart. But, yeah, it's like they take these breadcrumbs and they bake them into something that has substance.
Chris: Shouldn't it be like crouton makers?
Kayla: I guess it's less about the baking.
Chris: It's like someone who sweeps the countertop.
Kayla: You take all the breadcrumbs and you mash them together to make.
Chris: I don't want to eat that bread.
Kayla: Like an eraser, like, you know, when you, like, mash the wonder bread.
Chris: Oh, yeah, yeah. Eraser makers.
Kayla: Pile of breadcrumbs.
Chris: Next up is something we've said a couple times on the episode today. Do the research. And we've mentioned it before as well. Do the research is kind of a perverted cousin of. Let me google that for you. Do the research as a common refrain that serves partly as, I don't have to provide any proof in my argument to an outsider and also partly as evangelizing. That is, they really do want you to go down that same rabbit hole that they did and become a believer. And so they say, do the research. Also part justification for beliefs.
Kayla: Yeah, it's like legitimizing what they have seen on YouTube as, like, evidence and proof. Like they did the research.
Chris: Right. Much like wearing a lab coat makes you feel like a smart scientist without having to do anything else. Using the word research, even if that's referring to bizarre YouTube videos and cryptic messages on eight chan, lends an aura and feeling of legitimacy. So it serves a whole bunch of functions.
Kayla: You're missing one.
Chris: Well, last but absolutely not least, it's my favorite one to say, which is wiggy wow.
Kayla: Nobody says that. That's not how it's pronounced. It's not even pronounced.
Chris: Come on, Kayla. We discussed this on a recent Gif versus Gif episode. I don't care what anything else. I'm gonna pronounce it the way wiggy.
Kayla: Wow is not even how it's written.
Chris: Well, that's, you know, Gif and Gif. That's not how that's written.
Kayla: You're just.
Chris: JPEG is not Jfeg.
Kayla: You're just adding a bunch of letters.
Chris: Whatever. I'm gonna call it wiggy wa as much as I.
Kayla: Why not wiggy wa?
Chris: Okay, so if you really wanted to.
Kayla: Pronounce it out, I guess it is wiggy wa.
Chris: No, it's wiggy wiggah.
Kayla: But it's also not wiggy.
Chris: So here's how it's spelled. Since, you know, our readers don't actually have anything in front of their eyes right now. Our readers, our listeners are not readers. So the acronym is WWG, the number one WGA. It's an extremely weird acronym because it combines letters and a number. But anyway, what it stands for is where we go one, we go all. Now, I don't know why they don't just say wwg o wga.
Kayla: Because where we go number one.
Chris: I know, but why it looks better.
Kayla: The way that they have it.
Chris: Yeah, that's true.
Kayla: It's very recognized.
Chris: It's kind of like when you brand something is like crazy glue, and you spell it with a k, and it's like, oh, that's a brand now. So here's the thing about that. It seems like a pretty basic statement of solidarity, right? So why did it turn into perhaps the most important, or at least the most widely used QAnon slogan?
Kayla: Because of Roseanne Barr.
Chris: She did actually tweet that out in 2018 about. Yep, yep. Anyway, I wanted to know a little more about that, so I asked a new friend that we will be hearing from next episode, who, let's just say, has some direct firsthand experience with Q. Here's what he had to say. Okay, this is in an email, by the way. I emailed him this question. Okay, so WWG one WGA is significant because it's the first kind of unique catchphrase that Q regularly used. If I recall correctly, he was responding to someone who was lamenting that all these people in the Q team, the Trump team, etcetera, were doing so much, and all he could do was post memes because he was too old and decrepit to be of much use.
Kayla: Oh, God.
Chris: That was a general feeling around the place at the time. So Q used the phrase to kind of console them and reaffirm that they were also helping. It also plays to the isolated social situation of many Q cultists who have been exercised from polite society and provides them with an air of comfort. So it's kind of a mix of all for one and one for all. And I. You are not alone. End quote.
Kayla: It's so nice and horrible.
Chris: I know, I know. It really speaks to the, like, the isolation and the hope that these people need.
Kayla: We all just have no meaning in our lives.
Chris: Well, just feel a little reductive, but.
Kayla: Yeah, that's what it is.
Chris: So the key thing to me here, that wwg one. Come on. I'm saying wiggy, I don't care. The key to me, though, is that it is fundamentally a statement of participation.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: According to my as yet unnamed source here, its very moment of birth was inspired by participatory sentiment. So, yes, QAnon is like other moral panics of the past. Yes, it revolves around nocturnal ritual fantasy, but it is also very different. Its an extremely Internet native phenomenon. It was born on the Chan boards just stated and spread on YouTube. And social media exists via links upon links, and it is fundamentally crowdsourced.
Kayla: Do you know where it actually came from?
Chris: Oh, no. Is that not true? Is that not where it came from? It didn't come from a Q post.
Kayla: He's referencing something.
Chris: What is he referencing?
Kayla: So it is often in Q communities misattributed as a JFK quote, as like a quote like that was on his boat or something.
Chris: Oh, okay. So he is saying where he gave me the actual truth of where it came from, but communities think that JFK said it.
Kayla: Oh, no, there's actually a place where it came from according to my research. And maybe it's not correct.
Chris: Do your own research, Kayla.
Kayla: It is. It is from the 1996 Jeff Bridges film White Squall.
Chris: What?
Kayla: And it's painted on the boat or something? Or it's like on the boat that rhymes with white.
Chris: Well, I think it's certainly possible that Q posted it based on. Cause Q, whoever is Q, which we said at the top of the show, loves his media, loves movies. Loves them. Loves movies. So I think it's highly likely that he watched white Squall and then said, ooh, that's good.
Kayla: 1996 Jeff Bridges film.
Chris: Yeah, I think that's.
Kayla: That's where it came from.
Chris: Pretty likely.
Kayla: Head Cannon, not JFK.
Chris: So, yeah, again, QAnon, born on Chan, spread on YouTube and social media links upon links fundamentally crowdsourced. And as I mentioned earlier in the show, people are starting to take notice of these aspects of it. Our take on QAnon being likened to an Arg is, again, lukewarm take at best. I'm just citing other much smarter people than myself, and a lot of people are talking about this aspect of it. I think the first place I read about it was a Washington Post article earlier this year by Alyssa Rosenberg. But there are a bunch of articles about this specific thing. Qanon is arg everywhere now. I read blog posts and articles by some well known game designers. As mentioned, Dan Hahn, someone by the name of Jim Stewardson. There was even an article in Wired.com.
Chris: Oh, and man, speaking of linking things together, Dan Hahn has a brother by the name of Adrian Hahnden, okay, who is even more well known in the ARG community and whose post about this very topic was, a, sent to us by a listener, and b, the insights in this post inspired a lot of the direction for this episode. In fact, I found it so insightful that I said, hey, we should get this guy in the show if we can.
Kayla: Oh, man.
Chris: So, without further ado, would you like to hear my interview with ARG game designer Adrian Hahn?
Kayla: Yes, please.
Chris: Let's get to it. First of all, thank you so much for doing this. I don't know. I really geeked out about your article and I really like your work, so it's just really cool to be talking to you. And I just wanted to say right.
Adrian Hon: Off the bat, you're welcome.
Chris: So, obligatory baseline question. If you could just tell me your name and a little bit about yourself and your background, and feel free to plug anything you've been working on.
Adrian Hon: Sure. So I'm Adrian Hon. I'm CEO at six. To start, we're a games company, and we're best known for making a smartphone fitness game called Zombies run, where you run in the real world and you sort of run to get fit. And it's kind of an audio adventure. And my background is in neuroscience and experiments and psychology, and I really got into games through alternate reality games as a player first and then as a game creator almost 20 years ago now. And so that's sort of my games part of the cv. I also do a lot of writing, and I just had a book come out called a new History of the Future in 100 objects by MIT Press. And so you can find that online.
Chris: So, yeah, actually, that was my very next question. You mentioned a little bit about your background as an ARG designer. How did you decide that you wanted to be an ARG designer? How did you get into that?
Adrian Hon: It was after playing what I would consider to be the first alternate reality game, which was a game called the Beast, or nickname the Beast. And it was a marketing promotion, really, for Steven Spielberg's movie Aihdenhe. And, you know, it's like, you know, why do you get into, why do you want to make movies? Why do you want to make video games? Because I played a game that I found just really fascinating and really exciting. And after playing it, I really wanted to see what I could do myself. And that wasn't super straightforward because for various reasons, alternate reality games are not. They're not big business, really. So there weren't a lot of companies hiring. You know, I kind of had to embed the position myself.
Chris: That's awesome. That was a part of your blog post I liked a lot where you sort of talked about your background with that and how you created the walkthrough and sort of that led to your time making perplex city. So can you tell me a little bit more about the ARG that you designed? Perplex City?
Adrian Hon: Yeah. So this was a fairly early argument of things from the early two thousands. And it was unusually, it wasn't like an advert for a tv show. It wasn't an advert for a movie or a game. It was a completely brand new story. And it lasted for about a year and a half. And basically, the goal, more or less, was to solve a whole set of puzzles that would lead you to a treasure worth $200,000 buried somewhere in the world. And we created this whole alternate reality Internet, like a portal to a world that was obsessed with puzzles, like a parallel universe that was obsessed with puzzles. And the way we made money through it was by selling puzzle cards, like, you know, like Pokemon cards that you would get in use agents or online, and each of those would have a puzzle.
Adrian Hon: And so it was a kind of unusual thing because as a self funding ARG, most ARG's are promotional campaigns, like I said. And so that was kind of my first job. You know, it was such a bizarre experience. And we gathered a really interesting group of players, and it was so it was pretty early on, you know, in the days of the Internet and social media. So, for example, when we posted a job adverts in code in a magazine, people thought were mi five because they just thought, wow, this is obviously like some code breaking task. And it was actually really easy. It was a really easy puzzle and. Yeah, so that was a project that I worked on for a while and it really just showed me how cuban disease could come together to process theories to solve puzzles incredibly quickly.
Adrian Hon: It was a very kind of exhausting game to make because unlike, you know, your usual console games where you sort of make it all and then you release it. We were making it as were releasing it in real time. And so I don't think I could really take more than a year and a half of baking. But, But people love playing it. That was how I cut my teeth.
Chris: On, on games, you know, until I said it out loud just a second ago, I, I didn't get the perplex. So for our listeners, it's Perplex Space City, as in like town. And I just got the connection that it's also perplexity. That's clever. I didn't get that till just now. I have to ask you about getting sideswiped by the Cicada 3301 conspiracy theorists, because we did an episode on our show last season about Cicada and it's like one of our most popular episodes. So would you mind telling our listeners that anecdote?
Adrian Hon: Well, we six to start my company. Before we started making zombies run, we used to do a lot of work for companies like the BBC and Disney and Channel Four. We would consult and design projects and even run games for them. And one of the games we did just before making zombies run was for a tv show, a documentary called the Code. And this was a three part show about how we can understand mathematics by looking at the natural world. So looking at things like the Fibonacci sequence and prime numbers and Golang triangle and things like that. And it was pretty conventional. We did a whole treasure hunt around it because the BBC really wanted to bring the documentary to a younger audience.
Adrian Hon: And one of the things that the tv show covered was prime numbers, and it was cicadas, because there's a sort of link between the gestation period of cicadas and prime numbers. And I have nothing to do with that. I mean, that's just something. It's a pretty obvious topic for a tv show to cover. And so I saw the script and I was like, oh yeah, that sounds good. Maybe we should reflect that in the game somehow. And I can't remember quite how it happened, but anyway, a few years later, people just drew the connection somehow between the fact that I was an alternate reality game designer and some people thought Cicada 3301 resembled an ARG, which it sort of does. I mean, in the sense it has puzzles and it's weird and no one really knows what it's about.
Adrian Hon: And I had made a game that contained cicadas, therefore. Sure, maybe Adrian designed Cicada 3301. And, I mean, that's not a lot of evidence, really. It's pretty spurious. But then this sort of documentary crew came over and they just wanted to talk to me about it and about alternate reality games. And they put it to me that, oh, well, it looks suspicious that you did this game. And, you know, at the time, this was, like, long before, you know, Trump and QAnon and stuff like that. I was like, that's. It's funny. You know, I'll go along with the joke.
Chris: Sure.
Adrian Hon: I didn't say I did it. I was just like, well, no, I didn't do it. But obviously now in 2020, people are more keen on drawing those connections where they didn't exist. And so, yeah, I fairly frequently, you know, I get DM's or emails from people saying, hey, do you know Cicada 3301? Did you make it? Do you know, Satoshi, you know, just when you start, if you make enough alternate reality games, people just assume you're involved in every conspiracy theory, which is, I know a lot of people in aigs, and I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
Chris: Yeah. Apologies in advance if mentioning it on the podcast here has any effect that makes. Makes it worse. Our audience is pretty rationally skeptical, though, so hopefully this won't exacerbate that problem. But I just thought it was a funny story, and it did seem a little bit like you mentioned just a second ago, Q drop ish. Right? People wanting to take this totally unrelated thing and then draw that connection to something that they're already speculating about. That's interesting. So speaking of QAnon, let's get into that.
Chris: The first thing I want to talk about is so it feels like QAnon and the Chan boards, more broadly occupy this weird sort of like Schrodinger's cat space where they're both serious and unserious, both real and unreal at the same time, which imparts a ton of plausible deniability power to them and also makes the content super compelling. So I really like the part where you talked about the power of Tynag. Am I pronouncing that correctly? T I n a g?
Adrian Hon: Yeah, I mean, I don't think we normally say it out loud, but Tinag, or Tynag. Yeah.
Chris: Tinag. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the power of that in Arg's?
Adrian Hon: So te nag stands for this is not a game, and it is this motto that is the players and designers. Some players and designers try to adhere to when playing a game and making a game, which is to say that the game should not acknowledge that it is actually a game. Right. And that's kind of true of most stories. Like, when you're reading a book or watching a movie, they usually don't break the fourth wall. I mean, like Deadpool, for example, it does break the fourth wall, and some books do break the fourth wall by addressing the reader. And if you. Jane Austen does that. But most books try not to do that. And I think with alternate reality games, because they were a new kind of entertainment, and they're using the Internet in a new way, they felt much more immersive.
Adrian Hon: So a good example would be the war of the worlds. When Orson Welles made his radio production, that was kind of like, this is not a radio show. You know, you tuned into it after the disclaimer at the start, you'd be like, oh, my God, it sounds so convincing. You know, aliens are invading New York, right? And he's trying to make it really immersive. And so similarly. And that worked, by the way, because radio was fairly new at the time, and people kind of weren't used to everyone just lying all the time or just making stuff up, just storytelling. And alternate reality games are storytelling using the Internet, using the real world. And it's more fun for everyone if you just pretend that this is not a game.
Adrian Hon: So if you sort of try and get on with it in the same way that if you're playing a Larp or if you're role playing in and MMO or in dungeons and dragons, you try not to sort of break out of character. You know, it is more fun if you do it that way. And I think the reason why that is relevant to QAnon is because QAnon is almost like, this is not. This is not a conspiracy theory, except you apply it all the time. Right, right. If that makes sense. You know, with alternate reality games, the game sort of balloons to being. Because you can get phone calls or you can meet actors, balloons the size of the entire world, maybe if the game is big enough, and so does QAnon.
Adrian Hon: And so while I think it might be more possible to sort of compartmentalize being into UFO's or being into aliens or whatever, and not having that really affect the rest of your life. You're not Qanon. It kind of does because it's so widespread and because people's interaction with social media is much deeper.
Chris: Right. And as you mentioned in your blog post as well, like, the stakes are so high with this that it compels people to action where it might otherwise not. And I think that, yeah, sort of the genesis of Q and on the Chan boards feels very. This is not a game to me.
Adrian Hon: Right.
Chris: Like the genesis of how the original posts were sort of. Is this real? Is this not really. There was, I mean, you know, was one of many of a sea of posts about whatever conspiracy theory or like, whatever crazy thing, and it was always a little tongue in cheek, right? Oh, no, this isn't real. Until it was right. And then. And then Q just happened to be the one that gained the momentum and then it took on this sort of like, this is not a game until it's completely like that. Like you said all the time. It's really interesting.
Adrian Hon: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it is really. I think it's easier than it sounds to slip from pretending something is just a game or treating something as a game and then having the incentive, you know, social incentive to treat it as if it's real.
Chris: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So on the show, we talk a lot about closed logical loops and motivated reasoning. So I really liked this section of your article. It was entitled, quote, it's like we did it on purpose, because I think that section had a lot of explanatory power, not only for QAnon, but also for cults in general. So can you talk a bit about how ARG developers are able to solve inconsistencies and mistakes by going through rather than around, so to speak?
Adrian Hon: Right. So when we're designing these games, we're often doing it in real time. Alternate reality games are so big and they last for so long, you can't really make all the content in advance. And it's better if you. If you try and be reactive to what the players like, in the same way that a good tv show or soap opera will notice that. Oh, wow, the audience really like these two characters. We should write them some more episodes. So we're writing this up in real time, and if you're writing in real time, you can just make more mistakes. And so we make mistakes and we get people's names wrong, we use the wrong name on a webpage, or we have the wrong solution for a puzzle. And because everything else is otherwise so kind of crafted in the world they've created.
Adrian Hon: And there are clues there. People just sort of assume that those mistakes we've made are, in fact clues or they're just real. And so rather than us coming out from behind the curtain, as it were, and saying, this is not a game and we messed up, and please, can you ignore this mistake we made on this webpage and just pretend we didn't do that or just replace it? We might go and say, oh, okay, then, well, I guess we'll go with what we made a mistake of, and we'll just rewrite this part of the story, and we'll try and get back on track as soon as we can.
Adrian Hon: And sometimes that is really annoying, frustrating, and sometimes it actually results in a better story than otherwise, especially when players come up with a theory of how the story should go, where we look at it and think, oh, yeah, that kind of does make more sense, or it's more exciting than what were planning to do. And so I think that, again, where that sort of becomes interesting for QAnon is that you can't really have, you don't really have kind of mistakes because there's enough writers, there's enough people in the community who can just write around it and say, oh, well, yeah, I suppose it's true that this event that we predicted didn't actually happen, but here's, like, 100 reasons why that didn't happen. And this is why I think it's really important for people to understand.
Adrian Hon: You can't really disprove this sort of conspiracy theory. You'd be like, saying, oh, well, you said that Trump was going to do XYZ or that Hillary Clinton was going to get arrested, and now he didn't. And so therefore, I guess you're going to stop believing in QAnon, and, like, that's not a logical position they got themselves into. And so there is, like, motivated reasoning to figure out why, to sort of preserve the wider belief.
Chris: Right, right. Yeah. It's really interesting how I never tied that, actually. I guess I didn't really know about that part of ARG development before I read it in your blog post about how you fix those mistakes by writing around them and incorporating them and then drawing that parallel was really interesting because QAnon. Yeah, it feels like it's this, and other conspiracy theories and cults in general feel like they have sometimes this self healing mechanism. Right. It's like this self healing tapestry of story, and any mistake is always just explained as, oh, that's even more proof of the conspiracy theory, because listen to why it happened. I found your conclusion about Q and honors being sort of like an infinite source of their own content fascinating. Would you say QAnon is to develop ARG's, like what Wikipedia is to curated encyclopedias?
Chris: Like, is it just 100% user generated ARG, or is that oversimplifying?
Adrian Hon: I don't think it's oversimplifying. I mean, I think there are parallels, but I wouldn't call QAnon an ARG because it, you know, because it's not. It's not really the designed as entertainment, even though it sort of is, you know, and it doesn't have a single author, whereas every other alternate reality game does have a single author. But the way in which people consume it and the way in which people solve it, I think, are similar. What is unique about QAnon is that so much of it is user generated, but there's different tiers of users. As for Wikipedia, I mean, it's not like the 20 million editors of Wikipedia. There's like a billion people who read it, but there's a very small number of people who actually create substantial amounts of content.
Adrian Hon: And similarly, with QAnon, most people are experiencing it through memes or just links that are shared through social media. They're not sitting there writing a thousand words a night. There are some people, obviously, who are making really elaborate videos, a pandemic or whatever, or they're making memes or they're doing podcasts or things like that. But that's a very small proportion, I think, of the QAnon community. And that's a similar thing of the Internet, like the sort of 80 20 rule of creators or the pyramid of creators. And so I think that it is, though.
Adrian Hon: I think it's more a case that the tools that we use to create ARG's and for people to play ARG's effectively, these are tools like wikis, user generated wikis and mailing lists and social media and Google sheets and things like that have now been democratized to the extent where they can be used by casual believers and conspiracy theories. Right? And so these tools existed, but they're quite hard to use 20 years ago, and now they're really easy to use. And so that's why you're saying, I always thought that's why you're seeing conspiracy theories and other things using these tools. I mean, it's not, like, super sophisticated. Let's be clear. If you look at the memes, it's just videos and just forums and stuff. They're not using augmented reality or virtual reality or something. It's just Internet stuff.
Adrian Hon: But even those tools provide a very different experience and manifestation of conspiracy theories, which are kind of scarier, I guess, in their novelty than they have been before, certainly faster. And I think it really goes to the heart of the future is here. It's just not equally distributed. Like William Gibson said with Arg's, the future was here. Just most people didn't have it now. And now everyone kind of does have it, and everyone's playing conspiracy theories.
Chris: Right, right, yeah. And then the way that. That allows the community to solve that content problem. Right. The eternal thirst for content problem, by being entirely user generated, is interesting. It gives it sort of an infinite Runway.
Adrian Hon: Yeah. I mean, QR one is interesting because it has absorbed all other conspiracy theories. I mean, that's sort of when I was, like, a teenager. I don't want to make this sound, like, condescending, but when I was a teenager, I was into conspiracy theories. I was like, wow, what if UFO's and aliens were real? I was on BBS's and downloading weird faqs, and I even got the heaven's gate stuff before that all hit. And it's just interesting. It's just kind of. It's a cool story to believe. It's true, and it's cool to sort of think that you have access to secret information. But the thing was with those conspiracy theories is that you read the faq or the text file, and then you'd be like, all right, well, I'm done now, because that's.
Adrian Hon: There's no more, you know, no one's making more of their stuff. Right, right. They're not discovering aliens every hour, whereas with QAnon, it is about the world, and it's about the media that we can all see. And there is enough media out there that looks slightly weird. Or you can easily, doctor, that you can be part of the living, breathing conspiracy theory with new information every minute of every day. In the same way that cable news went 24/7 conspiracy theories can go 24/7 it just took a little bit longer.
Chris: Yeah. Right. And so that segues me a little bit to the next question. You talked a bit about how QAnon thrives in sort of this environment where there's, like, a lack of information and trust in certain institutions. And you combine that with this age of Google where everything feels like it should have answer immediately. And when it doesn't, then it creates this sort of vacuum where people want to go in and create those answers or go in and quote, do the research and find that. Can you talk a little bit about the environment, the sort of lack of trust, lack of information environment?
Adrian Hon: Well, I think that's a really good juxtaposition you presented there where people are used to using search engines and by that it's really Google to just type in what is the capital of Malaysia? Getting the answer straight away, what is 500 ML in fluid answers, you get the answer. And I think people aren't very comfortable with uncertainty or nuance. And that's not new. That's always been the case. And normally we just haven't really had to deal with it because we haven't been exposed to it. You could see that with Covid-19 now where people are like, well, should wear masks? They don't work perfectly, so therefore I'm not going to wear them. And it's like, well, it's complicated. You know, they're better than nothing, but they're not going to stop the virus 100% on their own. And I think that people want those answers.
Adrian Hon: And I think also when it comes to trust, the truth is that we know the governments have, there have been government conspiracies, I mean, real government conspiracies, you know, there have been cover ups and there have been governments doing awful things. And I'm sure a lot of them haven't been revealed. And a lot of them are frankly kind of more awful than QAnon. You know, that the british government covered up evidence of massacres, you know, in the colonies. This is, it's an awful tragedy. And so in that context of the fact that we know that, you know, authorities have covered up things and they still aren't really admitting to it is easy for people to think, well, if they've covered that up, then maybe people in Washington DC are doing child trafficking because they don't have that trust.
Adrian Hon: And so I'm not saying that, therefore, well, go with God and believe everything you hear. What I am saying, though, is that of course, people, there are some people out there who just simply blank, simply just don't trust what the government says at all, or authorities. And I think that is understandable for politicians wanting to kind of save their own skins. But, you know, the erosion of trust in governance and authority, you know, not even authority institutions, you know, as a whole, is just really damaging because it means that people just don't believe anything, right? And so I think that, and this is a pretty common refrain, I think that the only way you really get around issues, you know, like conspiracy theories, like QAnon, is by trying to restore trust institutions and, you know, I guess authorities.
Adrian Hon: But these are hopefully these are democratic authorities, right? You know, hopefully these authorities or institutions that has somehow elected rather than just, you know, some dictatorship.
Chris: Right? Yeah, yeah. And I've seen that stated elsewhere, too. Wherever I. Folks that get into conspiracy theories don't get out of them by presenting information. They get out of them by their situation changing. And by situation, I mean, like, getting a different friend group or connecting with people more or having more trust in XYZ. And then, like, that's the thing that turns them around much more than saying, like, oh, well, adrenochrome's not real. Duh. You know, like, that won't do it, but changing their situation will. So you mentioned in your article a bit about gamification for good. You mentioned, like, the COVID tracking project, which we will link to in our show notes. What makes a community like that? Or, you know, we mentioned Wikipedia. What makes those communities good and reliable curators of information and QAnon? Nothing.
Adrian Hon: Well, I think that with COVID tracking project and Wikipedia, to an extent, there is a deep commitment to showing your work openly and showing your sourcing very clearly and having that be documented in a really transparent way. It's probably the most important thing, and to a fault almost, in Wikipedia, where it's a citation needed. I mean, that's a joke. Wikipedia, you can't write anything there without saying, well, here's where I got it from. And that doesn't mean where you got it from is perfect. It's more just like, well, we could try and track it back, and that's a difference. So anyone can edit Covid tracking? Well, that's not true of COVID tracking, but anyone can edit Wikipedia.
Adrian Hon: Covid tracking project, you can volunteer to be part of that and help input data, and you can probably try and falsify data there if you wanted to. But it would be really easy for people to find out if you were doing that because it would be tagged against your user, and people will be able to look back and say, okay, well, let's revert this person's changes. And similarly, in Wikipedia, and you could find that out, whereas in QAnon, there's a much greater degree of full anonymity, which is different from pseudonymity. You don't need to be in Wikipedia, you don't need to provide your real name, but you do need to have a stable identity. You can't just be like some completely anonymous user all the time, or you can, but it seems a bit pointless and it wouldn't go well.
Adrian Hon: And so, QAnon, there's not really accountability for your claims, right. And also there's not really a culture, I think, of saying, well, here is the clip that I got from CNN at timestamp 314 on this day, and you can see that it is exactly the same clip. And I did not doctor it.
Chris: Right?
Adrian Hon: Right. Which is not to say that not, I'm sure not everything that is in QAnon is adopted. I'm sure there's just weird video clips anyway. But that is really at the heart of these citizen journalism projects. If you are going to let everyone contribute, which is really good, because I think a, you get a lot more work done if you have more people pulling. But also it's sort of, it's fulfilling. People like contributing, people like being valuable. Even if that's. Even if I'm working on Wikipedia and I only contribute ten words and this other person has contributed 10,000, I still feel like, oh yeah, I did something, I'm a Wikipedia contribute contributor. And so that's really important, you know, to the project.
Adrian Hon: And that's why I think that even though it might, on the one hand, you kind of think, well, do we really need Covid tracking projects? Should we just get the government to do this? And then we don't have to worry about all this tracing stuff? It's like, no, it's a good thing for people to be involved. I think it results ultimately in a better product. It might require more work, but it makes people happier because people want to do things and they want to feel valued, and they feel valued as part of QAnon, which is not a great place to be, but they also feel valued as part of Wikipedia, although Wikipedia has its floppies as well, with the whole scots Wikipedia thing. But anyway.
Chris: Sure, yeah. Actually we just mentioned the Scotts Wikipedia thing. Last question I have for you is totally optional. We just ask everyone this. Is there anything we didn't cover that you want to talk about, you'd like to say to our listeners? Doesn't even have to be about QAnon or ARG is just anything you'd like to say.
Adrian Hon: Well, I'm part of this whole blog post that sparked this off is because I'm writing a book about gamification, which it probably won't come out for at least another year or two, but I'm really interested in the way in which companies and government and people are creating games that try and govern our lives, and some of them are to kind of make your life better. We try and make fitness games to make exercising more fun. And some games are made by companies like Amazon or Microsoft or Uber or call centers to basically make you work harder for less money, fundamentally. And some games are made by governments as propaganda or as sort of control. And people are thinking about the world in terms of games. They sort of talk about experience points and leveling up.
Adrian Hon: And so I think the culture of games has really seeped into everything we do. And so that's something that I'm really interested in. That's part of why I wrote this post comparing QAnon to an ARG. And I think there's a lot more other comparisons out there that I really hope to get into.
Chris: I'm fascinated by gamification and human motivation and just the whole, obviously, as a game designer myself. So I'm really looking forward to your book, I guess, is what I'm saying, because I find that all. I'll keep an eye out, and so should our listeners. In the meantime, you should also. Our listeners should also go download zombies run, because zombies run is very cool, and it's an example of what you were just saying, sort of a gamification of fitness. So, again, I really appreciate your time. I just loved your blog post, and I loved it. And I went back and read the Twitter thread and everything. So it was just. It was very, like one of those things where after you read it, you're like, oh, yeah, of course. But it's like, still, I hadn't thought of it that way, but yeah, of course.
Chris: It was very insightful, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. I'll stop gushing now, so you can leave.
Adrian Hon: Okay. Thanks a lot.
Chris: So the blog post that we mentioned a whole bunch of times at this point now is called what ARG's can teach us about QAnon by Adrian Hahn. We'll definitely link it in the show notes, but if you want to go search for that right now, go for it.
Kayla: Go read the. Go stop the podcast. Go read this blog post, unsubscribe from our podcast, and then listen to another podcast and then watch a movie, go watch white Squall, and then come back.
Chris: No. Yes. What args can teach us about QAnon. So if you want to go find it. So, Kayla.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: What do you think Arg's can teach us about QAnon now that we have listened to that together?
Kayla: Well, I don't feel the need to answer that question because I feel like that question has been thoroughly answered by Mister Adrian Hahn. However, I just want Tinag is I love it. My favorite thing.
Chris: Yeah, it's like I've used it like a whole bunch now, ever since the first time I. Right, we live together. First time I read about it was actually in his blog post, which is surprising because I like ArG's and I am a game designer, but maybe I'm not quite the fanboy as you are a fan girl, since you love Cicada so much.
Kayla: I've never heard that phrase either. I've encountered it in the wild for sure, but I've never heard that acronym.
Chris: Yeah, and I think it's so apt for.
Kayla: Or is it Tinaj?
Chris: Oh God, why do we keep referencing this, the fucking GiF episode? To me, it's so because it's, as you were saying this in your, I think, 1st second one of your episodes, I lose track. One of the previous two episodes, you were saying how the way QAnon started was it was in this milieu of other posts that was happening on fourth Chan at the time that was like CIA Anon and other guy Anon. And it was all just sort of this weird, oh, we're playing pretend here. We're talking about top secret stuff, and QAnon was just. The Q post was just part of that. And then it kind of took on a life of its own.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: And, you know, I talked about this with Adrian, but it's also interesting how when you shine a light on this stuff and you ask somebody about it, there's always this weird element of like, oh, well, I mean, you don't take that seriously, do you? Like, I don't know. I thought you did like, I mean, not. Yeah, not all of, you know, so there's always this weird duality.
Kayla: And I think that duality is part of what's so compelling. Like, it's something that does come up with us over and over, where it's like, you know, we talk about some of the crazy beliefs that these various groups have, not just QAnon, but like, these various cult beliefs, and how we talk about, like, it's fun. It's fun to think those things. And like, that's what I. Like, that's what I see. Like, I see tinnag in places that aren't just QAnon and aren't just arg. Like, it's a really big part of the no sleep subreddit. Like the no sleep subreddit. It's where people write scary stories, and there are some incredible scary stories. Again, Eric Heiser got to start there. Shout out to a really great writer.
Chris: This is the Erichizer episode, but there.
Kayla: Are some incredible stories on there. And one of the rules, quote unquote, is that everybody is coming to know sleep. You're bringing to it the, like, not tongue in cheek, but like, the tin ey. Like, all of these stories, you're kind of supposed to read them as if they are true, while we all know that they're fictional stories.
Chris: Right. And it's like, Fargo, the tv show, does that. Like, every episode they start with, this is 100% true. And for a while, it, like, wigged me out. I'm like, is it? But it definitely gives it just, like, an extra. It's like an extra little spice on the.
Kayla: It's the character of Michael Scott. It's like when that character.
Chris: You're just saying that because you're watching the office.
Kayla: Yes.
Chris: But also, speaking of engagement, by the way, how many times have you watched that? A lot.
Kayla: It's definitely an addiction. It's like when there's a character who you're like, I can't believe that this character's real. And then they have a moment of acknowledging that they also aren't real. It would happen in on becoming a God. Like, that's a really, there's something that is really engaging about that concept to people. And I think really, it's just because I think it creates fun, not engagement.
Chris: Yeah. Not necessarily engaging. It puts your brain in a different. A different mindset. Like, it puts you in a different mindset of consuming the content.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: If I were to read ghost stories from no sleep, and in the beginning of every ghost story, somebody said, disclaimer, this story definitely didn't happen because ghosts aren't real. And you're dumb if you think ghosts are real. Anyway, enjoy. Then I would be like, I don't enjoy that now. So there's, like, there's certain stories or certain things where it's like you kind of have to have that element of suspended disbelief.
Kayla: It's part of why urban legends are so powerful. I mean, literally, while were taking a break from recording this episode, I was on Reddit reading, oh, of course. That's why I brought it up. I wasn't reading no sleep, but I was reading a thread of, like, what's scariest true story that, like, happened to you? And of course, as I'm reading it, nobody's saying, like, this is an urban legend or this is just something I'm making up, but there's a ton of stories where I'm like, okay, this is clearly fake, but it's way more fun to believe that they're true.
Chris: Right? I mean, that we talked about Blair Witch earlier in the episode, right. That was a huge deal. When Blair Witch came out was. It was supposed to be like, oh, my God, this is. This actually happened.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: This is found footage. And now found footage as a genre.
Kayla: Right. And there's something about, like, for all of our skeptic brains, that even when it's like, okay, I know this is fake, but what if.
Chris: Right, right.
Kayla: That's also.
Chris: There's, like, this way to compartmentalize that. Yeah.
Kayla: Like, what? It could be true, right?
Chris: What would it be like if it was? I thought it was also interesting he talked about his psychology background.
Kayla: Yeah, of course.
Chris: We mentioned that earlier in the show, and that very much tracks with the list of recommended books I got from my friend. I thought it was also interesting when he talked about how people were like, man, they just made the connection that I talked about cicadas once, and I'm an ARG designer, and that, oop, it connected. That's exactly what we're talking about in this episode, is that. That's apophenia right there.
Kayla: That's literally finding those connections that do not exist.
Chris: Yeah. And then I also thought that his, like, citation needed example was kind of. Obviously, everything he talked about was salient, but in this, it was about. It feels like citation needed is almost the, like, weird converse of do your own research. So if you're going on Wikipedia, it's like, you can't say a damn thing without saying, here's exactly where I got it right. In this weird, perverse converse, opposite mirror universe way, when a Qanoner says, do your own research, that's also them saying, I'm not citing my sources. Go find it yourself. Like, if Wikipedia said that, like, here's. I'm gonna say all this stuff, well, what's your source? Go find it yourself.
Kayla: But, like, what?
Chris: That would be a lot less compelling.
Kayla: At what point are you not compelled to cite your sources? You know what I mean? Like, at what point? Like, when does do your own. Like, when does citation needed turn into. Let me google that for you?
Chris: I mean, I. This is a whole other rabbit hole, so I don't want to talk about it too much. But I think the whole, like, let me google that for you thing is. Is a hard question. I think that. Yeah, there's like some gray area there. And sometimes things are one side of the line. Sometimes something isn't. I do think that I frequently do have a problem with that statement.
Kayla: Bitch, you're the one who's always saying, let me google that for you.
Chris: Yeah, because I'm an asshole. Look, I'm not saying it's never right to say that. What I am saying is if somebody says, okay, we'll prove what you're saying. And I say, well, let me google that for you, then. I haven't done my job to convince them. Right. If I actually want to change your mind, I need to cite my, I need to say, here is why what I am saying is true.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: That's just, that is a logical rhetorical thing that has been always, like, from the beginning of time. Like, I need to prove my assertion to you. So, you know, I know that it's weird because we're in this Internet age of, like, if I make an assertion on Twitter, I can't explain to 5000 people who all say, like, prove it. I can't explain it individually to each one of them. So I understand the let me google that for you stance, but I don't know. I also think that sometimes it's inappropriate and. Well, it's not that it's inappropriate. It's that if you're saying that to me, then you haven't done your job to convince me and I don't have to believe what you have to say.
Kayla: So it's not that, like, if you make an assertion on Twitter, you are automatically obligated to prove it. But if you don't do that, and if you choose not to do that, which is valid, it is then also not the person. The person asking for the proof is also not obligated to believe.
Chris: Exactly. You, as the explainer, don't owe me proof, but I, as the listener, don't owe you belief. That's what it comes down to. To me.
Kayla: You hear that Q and honors Covid.
Chris: Tracking project also, I just want to say is super glorious. I know Covid is horrible and everything is horrible, but it's the COVID tracking project. Like, Wikipedia is a real achievement in what motivated, smart, crowdsourced, correctly crowdsourced people can do. It's sort of like an anti QAnon, right? It's really awesome. So I'm glad he brought that up too. Yeah. Anything else about my little chat with Mister Hannah?
Kayla: It's a pretty good chat.
Chris: Thanks. Oh, the other thing I wanted to say here, which maybe this is kind of tying us into the rest of the episode, is how he talked about QAnon is not a game, but the tools are the same.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: And that was something we've sort of already mentioned, like I said in this episode, and I kind of want to close with talking about that a little bit, too. The purpose of this episode is not just to say that QAnon is like an ARG, but to say that QAnon uses a lot of the same psychological tools that games do, and especially games like ARG's, which, like QAnon, live on the Internet. And like, some games, apps and facebooks, which I won't mention here, QAnon is not alone in being an extremely unhealthy engagement activity. We all know about the Facebook algorithm problem, right? We all know about how apps try to keep you on their app by using these psychological techniques. So this is like a very ubiquitous Internet 2.0 age problem that we have.
Chris: And QAnon, as shitty as it is only one thing that suffers from it.
Kayla: Right? And I feel like the only way to healthily use some of these things is to not use them. Like, I think the only healthy way to use Facebook is to not use.
Chris: Facebook is to get it out of your life.
Kayla: I think the only healthy way to use Q and A.
Chris: Well, I mean, unless you're following culture. Just weird. That's healthy.
Kayla: Very healthy.
Chris: Otherwise, nothing else is, really.
Kayla: No.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: I deleted my Instagram.
Chris: Yeah, get off Facebook. Just listen to our show. Don't follow us on Facebook.
Kayla: You can follow us on Facebook. You can follow us on Instagram.
Chris: You can if you want.
Kayla: I deleted my Instagram. You know what I saw Instagram did recently?
Chris: What did they implement? Tweets. Because Twitter implemented Instagram.
Kayla: They. Twitter implemented fleets. I saw somebody post an image, and I didn't verify this because I don't have Instagram anymore. Somebody posted an image of the Instagram update and where the like button used to be. So you're scrolling Instagram and you can hit, like, hit the little heart to, like an image. The new update has moved the heart image and where the heart image used to be. Where the. Where the like button used to be is a shopping icon.
Chris: Oh, that is so wrong. Again, example of exploiting a psychological thing that people are used to interacting with your UI in a certain way. And, oop. Now, accidentally, I'm going to push the buy something button.
Kayla: I'm going to shop.
Chris: So, anyway, clearly, QAnon is not the only thing that is competing nefariously for our attention online. It is a complex problem with complex solutions. And we'll talk about some of those. I think Mister Hahn talked a little bit about that restoring trust is one of those. One of those multifaceted. One of those facets of the multifaceted solution that we'll need to stuff like this. But hopefully with this episode, we've at least gotten another angle on understanding the complex problem today.
Kayla: Sounds good.
Chris: My name is Chris.
Kayla: No, no, wait.
Chris: It's not.
Kayla: It's not.
Chris: My name is. What is my name?
Kayla: I just wanna react to that.
Chris: You cannot react, Kayla. That is not your. Oh, it's literally your job.
Kayla: Well, actually, I guess I just wanna have a postscript.
Chris: Oh well, go ahead and ps me.
Kayla: Since we opened this episode with an update of the current state of affairs. Oh, I feel like it's important that we state that we have some breaking news that updates are.
Chris: We're gonna turn into like a 24 hours news cycle podcast.
Kayla: Oh, just cause I'm pretty sure you mentioned her by name at the very beginning of the podcast.
Chris: I mentioned Jen Ellis. I didn't mention Sidney Powell. No, mate. Maybe you did. I don't know.
Kayla: One of us did.
Chris: That was so long ago. That was 3 hours ago.
Kayla: One of the lawyers, a member of the legal team that is levying these lawsuits against various states to have various votes challenged in the election, blah blah. One of those. That legal team member Sidney Powell, has since been distanced from the campaign.
Chris: Yeah, they made the last statement basically saying like she's doing her own stuff. I don't know what's going on because.
Kayla: Apparently she made too many like crazy claims.
Chris: But it's like so bizarre because the statement says we don't. It's basically like, I don't know who this person is. Like, if you read the statement, but like the past two weeks she's been like appearing with Giuliani and the whole crew and their. It's like.
Kayla: It's gaslighting.
Chris: What do you mean you don't know who this person is? There's a tweet from the national GOP.
Kayla: There's a tweet from the president committee.
Chris: That says like, good job, Sidney Powell. We get him. Like it's. It's just all you talking about.
Kayla: It's all part of it. It's all part of the storm.
Chris: There's receipts from like a week ago.
Kayla: It's like what. What Mister Hahn talked about in the interview. There's no mistakes, there's just right to write through.
Chris: No exactly. Yeah, that's exactly all clues. That's exactly what it is. It's like. Oh, yeah. That's part of it.
Kayla: So it'll be interesting to see what this little clue turns into. Turns out to be. And we'll give you that update next time, man.
Chris: I mean, between now and two weeks from now, though, a million things will happen, so I don't know.
Kayla: True.
Chris: Thanks, 2020. I'm Kayla, and I actually am Chris. And this has been cults or just weird.