Joseph Matheny learned the hard way what happens when this kind of thing works too well. His Ong’s Hat project, which started in the late 1980s as a collaborative fiction about renegade Princeton scientists who’d discovered interdimensional travel, is widely considered the first alternate-reality game. Matheny planted the story across the then-nascent web – and, perhaps to a great and fatal error, sent it to the conspiracy talk radio show Coast to Coast AM – embedding it in the texture of the real media ecosystem so that participants couldn’t easily distinguish the game from genuine conspiracy.
It worked, and then it kept working after he wanted it to stop. By 2000, true believers were showing up on his lawn demanding the truth about dimensional portals. He had to end the project in 2001, and even then, participants refused to accept his confession, accusing him of covering up the cover-up. Matheny has since said of QAnon that they’re using his methods “and I don’t like that,” which is about as concise a summary of the problem as I’ve come across.
Once you build a game that blurs fiction and reality, you don’t get to decide when people stop playing.
LINK: https://spectator.com/article/nancy-guthrie-and-the-gamification-of-crime/?edition=us
PDF Archive of the article
https://www.mediafire.com/file/07056rmsot83ohg/Nancy_Guthrie_and_the_gamification_of_crime.pdf/file
Joseph Matheny 