As I mentioned in my previous post, The Battle for the Internet, I have been digitizing my decades of family home movies. I was excited to come across this piece from my CNN appearance in June of 2001, talking about something we didn’t yet understand, as it had yet to be called what we now refer to as Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs. This was such an exciting document to find, as it demonstrates the earliest attempt at understanding not just a new genres of games but a paradigmatic shift in how digital media can create new lawyers of pseudo-reality.
ARGs, as well defined on Wikipedia, is an “interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ ideas or actions.” In other words, back in 2001, I joined with others online to explore web sites, receive emails, call into telephone numbers, even meeting at local bars, and much more, participating in an interactive fiction driven as much by our decisions (all coordinated and documented by players online) as those of the unseen game designers. It was so exciting to unfold a real-time narrative that was temporally located not in the present but at a time in the future; a day in my life was also a day of progress in the future narrative. And our enthusiasm did not wane when we later learned it was all a creative approach to promoting Spielberg’s upcoming film, A.I. I ended up not only talking about it on CNN, but my early writing on it was cited by none other than Henry Jenkins in his important book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
Back then it was fun and an innovative way to explore a digitally-mediated augmented layer on the world. Today, it is something else. It is a way to understand how we all began to live in isolated media bubbles, each with our own filtered view of the world, increasingly distinct from each other’s. In addition, since last spring, it has become the go-to metaphor for understanding the rise of QAnon. Game designer Adrian Hon was part of the game I played in 2001, organizing players through one of its most popular forums; last August he made the connection between ARGs and Q-Anon (What ARGs Can Teach Us About QANON) and, from there, every few weeks I see the comparison in the news. First it was in the New York Times (Welcome to the R.N.C.’s Alternate Universe). Then in Wired Magazine (QAnon Is Like a Game—a Most Dangerous Game). A friend send one over to me just a few days ago. We are all trying to understand QAnon, and ARGs are so far our best shot at understanding the behaviors of networked humanity to engage in dangerous nonsense.
Adrain wrote “QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, ‘do your research’ leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.” ARGs were once a new way to understand the creative and ludic potentials of transmedia storytelling; they are now old enough to serve as a model to help us understand how rational people can be sucked into a psedo-reality so effectively they confuse it with the real one, even those trained to tell the difference (re: Today’s NYTimes article, “From Navy SEAL to Part of the Angry Mob Outside the Capitol“).
So check out this 2001 video from CNN. Watch it to soak in the liminal space we occupied trying to define something new. Or watch it with foreboding with the hindsight of what was to come.