(2020-08-06) Hon S08e18 Qanon Looks Like An Alternate Reality Game

Dan Hon: QAnon looks like an alternate reality game.

In the months after The Beast, when I’d be working on these games myself and designing them, I’d learn about Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of player types, a 1996 paper based on research on people who play multiplayer online games. Bartle suggested that there were four archetypes players would fall into: killers, achievers, socializers and explorers. His research would also be one of the elements feeding in to the early 2000s trend of gamification

I’d refer to Bartle’s framework again and again over the next 20 years throughout my career, applying it not just to games but using it to understand and think about online behavior in general

Players love to be the first person to do something. They love even more to tell everyone else about it. It’s like Crossfit.

I brought up Bartle’s four player types earlier, and I see them represented amongst QAnon adherents, too... QAnon has killers. The killers here are, well... charged with murder for actually, horrifically, killing people. And, as in the games world, they’re griefing (trolling and making life horrible for) people who aren’t doing QAnon properly and, crucially, trolling the people who aren’t even doing QAnon in the first place. Like the socializer meme-makers, the killers are spreading QAnon. Unlike most ARGs, QAnon has an in-game sense of enemies: people who don’t even have to be playing the game or aware the game exists, to be considered opponents.

The problem is, I don’t see how QAnon ends. QAnon is a meme-directed game in the Dawkins sense. It can be understood as a game about an idea that doesn’t really have anyone running it.

What it can do is just keep going and going and going, consuming more links and more information into one giant morass.

The internet is links, so if there’s something that doesn’t conveniently exist in the real world would otherwise connect your two pieces of red string, you just… make that content exist, and now it’s linkable.

*...the reasonable question about QAnon is whether, in its own language, it’s an “op” — a weaponized, intentionally designed propaganda operation. And through this lens, could it be possible if the people who started it had a history in designing or playing ARGs?

I don’t think the answer to that question is necessarily helpful or relevant.*

Representatives from DARPA allegedly attended ARGFest, a festival for designers and creators of ARGs in Seattle, in 2013.

because QAnon isn’t a game— there are just parts of it that look very, very game-like—, it can do things no game can do, or chooses to do, either.

Games don’t let you have a shot at running for congress, for one. On July 3rd, Cameron Peters at Vox wrote an explainer about the QAnon supporters winning congressional primaries

And our media ecosystem means that achievement translates into social success, too: there are news networks ready and waiting to heap praise and spread their message, from the traditionally problematic Fox News to horrifically unpatriotic upstart One America News Network.

I used to have a provocative question for my fellow game designers: wouldn’t it be great if there were a rom-com ARG?

Now, after reading what others have written and thinking more about QAnon and conspiracy theories on the internet, I’m not sure if ARGs would ever really work outside the conspiracy theory genre.

QAnon isn’t a game - but when looked at through a lens of alternate reality games, maybe there’s a sort of anti-game we can design to stop it? Or we could use game design techniques to slow the players down, divert them, distract them or render their activity safe.

I worry that pretty much all tactical interventions won’t work. Because deep down, I think the drivers for QAnon are environmental and systemic. Elizabeth Svoboda at Discover wrote recently about why COVID-19 is turning so many people into conspiracy theorists.

Put more clearly: you’re in a dead-end job (if you even have one, in our pandemic times). The job prospects in your area aren’t even that great to begin with.

But you could be a winner at this game.

I think there are two ways of looking at what to do about QAnon, and they deal with two separate but related issues. The first is that QAnon is merely the latest in a long line of conspiracy theories, and in this way is a symptom of a wider malaise and hurt in our societies.

The second is the medium of the internet and how it encourages or enables certain innately human behavior. Broadly, I don’t think there’s much the internet can do, directly, about the first issue of the horror of inequitable, indifferent, late-stage capitalism. But there is much that can be directly done to the issue of limiting the metastasizing of conspiracy supporting, harmful group behavior.

What we need, ultimately, is to create safety for people

You could try to fight QAnon with a game designed with benevolent ideas

Arguably, there are not-a-games that do just this, like citizen journalism efforts or, in a very wide sense, the collaborative editing of Wikipedia. But my gut feel is that those experiences are too righteous in their rewards, and not as visceral.

I think the best way to fight QAnon, at its roots, is with a robust social safety net program.