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Communities of reality: game design, narrative and political play

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Communities of reality: game design, narrative and political play

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COMMUNITIES OF REALITY:

GAME DESIGN, NARRATIVE AND POLITICAL PLAY

By

Justin A. Bortnick

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2022

Copyright 2022 Justin A. Bortnick
ii

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments,
by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists
by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the
listener.
- Phillip K. Dick

Gamers have had enough of reality.
- Jane McGonigal

iii

For Jeff Watson,
without whom this project could not have happened,
and who will not have the opportunity to see it completed

iv

I would like to acknowledge the aid and contributions of the numerous individuals who have
aided, supported and guided me through the process of writing this dissertation, and whom I
thank wholeheartedly for the time, effort and energy they have expended on my behalf in seeing
this project through to completion:

My family, especially my mother Janet and my brothers, Blake and Griffin, for their lifelong
support and encouragement.

My dissertation committee, chaired by Alice Gambrell and also comprising Joseph Dane and
Richard Lemarchand, in addition to Jeff Watson, who passed away before the project’s
completion. Additionally, Devin Griffiths, who served as my initial advisor as well as on the
committee for my qualifying examination.

Gord Hill, who worked for me with years on the Red Pages Podcast project and other sundries as
part of Allfather Productions, and whose contributions and efforts made much of that research
archive possible.

A number of academics from outside of the University of Southern California graciously lent
their time and energy to speaking with me about the project, and their thoughts and suggestions
greatly enhanced my thinking about the questions I pursue below. Chief among them were
Adrianne Massanari, A. M. Darke, Celia Pierce and Frank Lantz.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph ......................................................................................................................................... ii

Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... iii

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... iv

List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. vii

Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... viii

Introduction .....................................................................................................................................1
Games and Stories .............................................................................................. 1
Project Justification, Framing, and Literature Review ...................................... 2
Project as Personal History ................................................................................ 7
Methodology and Content ................................................................................ 10
Design as Practice ............................................................................................ 18

Chapter 1: Gaming Communities, Online Spaces and the Politics of Development ................... 24
On the Origins of the Red Pages Podcast Project ............................................ 24
Red Pages Methodology and Theory ............................................................... 25
Terminology ..................................................................................................... 29
Context ............................................................................................................. 29
Content ............................................................................................................. 31
Online Communication and Gamergate ........................................................... 50
Lessons on Community Building ..................................................................... 56
Conclusions ...................................................................................................... 60

Chapter 2: Frog Fractions 2, Alternate Reality Games and Participatory Propaganda .............. 64
Alternate Reality Games .................................................................................. 64
Joining Frog Fractions 2 ................................................................................. 70
Communities: Early Days of the Frog Fractions ARG and Unfiction ............ 73
Communities: Steam Sale Detectives and the Eye Sigil .................................. 79
ARG Content and Development ...................................................................... 81
The Dark Side of ARG Development .............................................................. 91
Final Lessons ................................................................................................. 100

Chapter 3: Play and Misinformation: How America’s Conspiracy Culture
Became Gamified ......................................................................................................103
Conspiracy in Popular Culture ....................................................................... 103
Framework for Conspiracy Development ...................................................... 106
Conspiracy as American Folklore .................................................................. 109
Psychology of Conspiracy ............................................................................. 114
Historical American Conspiracy .................................................................... 119
QAnon and the Appeal of Conspiracy ........................................................... 124
vi

Design Complicity ......................................................................................... 131

Chapter 4: ARGs for Good? Reclaiming Design and the Future of Democracy .........................136
ARGs for Democracy? ................................................................................... 137
ARGs for Education? ..................................................................................... 160
Uniting the Systems ....................................................................................... 170

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................174

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................182

Appendices ...................................................................................................................................203
Appendix A: Frog Fractions 2 ARG Collaborators .............................................................203
Appendix B: Red Pages Podcast Interview Subjects ...........................................................204

vii

List of Figures

Chapter 1

Fig. 1: The Red Pages Podcast homepage as archived May 2014 ................................................26

Fig. 2: The Red Pages Podcast homepage in September 2021 .....................................................26

Fig. 3: Example 1 of Gamergate rhetoric on Twitter .....................................................................30

Fig 4: Example 2 of Gamergate rhetoric on Twitter ......................................................................30

Chapter 2

Fig. 1: Image Capture of “The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown” by G. K. Chesterton .66

Fig. 2: Screen Capture of the now-defunct Unfiction forums, sometimes called the “Unforum” .72

Fig. 3: Eye Sigil .............................................................................................................................79

Fig. 4: Image Capture of Team Zander website landing page ......................................................92

Chapter 3

Fig. 1: Screen capture from Robotics;Notes Elite .......................................................................105

Chapter 4

Fig 1: Screen capture from The Evolution of Trust ....................................................................147

Fig. 2: Screen capture from Zoombinis ........................................................................................161

Fig. 3: Bonsignore et al.’s Unified Metaliteracies Framework. ..................................................163

Fig. 4: Wong, Kevin. Reality Ends Here Playing Cards used to create a simple deal. .............168

Conclusion

Fig 1: Key art from University Magician’s Society ....................................................................175

Fig 2: Title screen capture from Harmony Square .....................................................................178

viii

Abstract

This dissertation examines communities that form around games, especially alternate reality
games. Beginning with an ethnography of game designers drawn from an archive of interviews
conducted by the author between 2014 and 2021, the research moves into a discussion of video
games, alternate reality games, and the design principles and methodologies used by those who
create them. This discussion extends into a conversation about how these games are played, the
formation of communities of players, and how these players interact with one another and game
designers in order to produce collaboratively authored narratives which manifest within the
games themselves. From there, discussion turns to how these design methodologies and player
communities alike be co-opted and catalyzed for political ends. The author traces a long history
of conspiracy theory and propaganda in the United States of America to explain how game
design has become influential in modern day information wars, especially in the hands of far-
right political actors looking to subvert liberal democracies. The author also includes several
case study examples of ways to push back against antidemocratic efforts using these same design
tools, explaining how games and game-like thinking can extend the authorship of participatory
narratives past entertainment and help build twenty-first century systems of education and
government.

1

Introduction
Games and Stories
In 2014, I was interviewing Ed Del Castillo, the game designer best known for producing
the Command & Conquer series of real-time strategy video games. I was relatively new to
interviewing game developers; we had were recording Episode 10 of the developer-interview
podcast Red Pages Podcast. Posing a question to my cohosts and I, Eddy asked whether we
were the sort of people for whom the graphics of a game were fundamentally unimportant. This
led to a discussion of the value of increasing graphical fidelity and our concerns over game-
playing audiences becoming increasingly siloed and segregated into consumer bubbles where
they only play games that fit within a narrow spectrum of brand loyalty, which Eddy said he had
seen occur years ago in the tabletop role-playing game space, and led to what he perceived as a
narrowing of consumer acceptance for what might be possible within the medium.
The conversation lasted over four hours, and ranged across many subjects, coming
around to a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of bespoke narrative content in a game
versus the procedural generation of content by the computer, and the advantages and
disadvantages of both approaches. Eddy came out strong in support of the former over the latter,
noting that “when you look at a movie, you don’t see the same fight scene two times. You don’t
ever see any fight scene two times. It’s always different” (Allfather, “Chatting with Ed Del
Castillo). Drawing upon the fight choreography of a Steven Seagal film, he argued that
repetition isn’t fun. Later, we discussed the difference in narrative delivery between games such
as like Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, 2010), Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013), Chain
World (Jason Rohrer, 2011), the “Twitch Plays Pokémon” social experiment and World of
Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). In response to a question from one of the podcast’s
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listeners about a perceived trend towards procedural generation, Eddy claimed that “I believe
that most people want to be told a story. I believe that that story, leaving it up to a random
number generator is dicey” (Allfather, “This Can’t Be Teletype!”). This comment set off for me
a curiosity that in many ways evolved into this dissertation project – I had been interested in
games and stories before, but I became more fascinated by understanding the mechanics of
narrative delivery – not just what stories were being told, but how those stories were told, and
how meaning was created within an interactive digital space. Although his comments were
made within the context of a discussion about business practices for multimillion-dollar
entertainment franchises, it cut for me to something more fundamental about games and the ways
that stories exist in digital spaces. It is likely that without having that conversation with Eddy in
2014, this dissertation would have taken a radically different form, and may not have existed at
all. This dissertation is ultimately about game stories. It’s about a lot of other things too: game
design, worker and labor rights, the politics of video games, conspiracy theories, American
elections, global democracy in the 21
st
century, educational methodologies, and more. However,
the thing that unites all of these disparate threads is that they are all framed via the lens of game
stories, how games tell stories, how those stories are authored, and the types of things that people
are compelled to do by stories.

Project Justification, Framing, and Literature Review
Early in the writing process – before I had really begun to write, in fact – I was advised
by several people that one of the largest challenges I would have to overcome in my work on this
dissertation was to convince people within what is (ostensibly) my own field (English) that this
project makes sense coming out of their department, as opposed to a range of other departments
3

that might have produced it. Otherwise, it might be seen as a better fit for departments such as
Film, Games and Interactive Media, Political Science, American Studies, or somewhere else. I
was also advised that, even if I overcome this hurdle, this project might be befuddling for a more
conservative English Department – one professor (not from my institution) related a story to me
about how, when he included a sampling of digital scholarship in his tenure review portfolio, he
was asked by a member of his review committee what they were meant to do with it.
Of course, I believe that this sort of project is exactly the sort of work that an English
Department should be proud to produce. In response to such concerns, I would point to Hannah
Arendt, whose work informs one of the chapters of this project and whose work straddled history,
journalism, political science and philosophy, and thus fit neatly into no single discipline. This is
to say nothing of Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, where the meaning of a sentence is
ambiguous to anybody not playing the “game” of speaking the language being used and
understanding the context of the usage. Furthermore, game studies shares significant overlap in
interest with the traditional concerns of an English department, especially when it comes to the
interrogation and analysis of narrative form. Indeed, narrative concerns formed the basis for one
of the field’s early scholarly conflicts. Two decades ago, Henry Jenkins published Game Design
as Narrative Architecture discussing this academic squabble. He laid out a sort of academic holy
war that according to him had consumed the discourse, dividing scholars into two more-or-less
diametrically opposed groups. The first, ludologists, believe that the mechanics of play in games
hold a place of utmost primacy – and that everything else is extraneous, even potentially
deleterious. The other, the narratologists, believe that storytelling is a meaningful “framework
for thinking about games” (Jenkins, 119) – an idea which the ludologists, of course, roundly
reject. By laying out this argument plainly, Jenkins was searching for a way to defuse this
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argument and redirect thinking towards a focus on the “architecture” of a game and the
navigation thereof.
Jenkins’ characterization of this disagreement was itself controversial. The
characterization of the field as described by Jenkins (and others, such as Rune Klevjar) has come
under fire by those who have been categorized as ludologists (or, as Miguel Sicart would call
them, “Proceduralists.” Sicart argues that “we then may be tempted to consider this theory as a
continuation of the formalist work laid out by the original ‘ludologists’. Proceduralists though
did not claim any contentious approach to the narrative possibilities of computer games”).
Gonzalo Frasca claims that he cannot figure out which scholars would be considered
narratologists at all, writing that “This lack of narrativists really confuses me: it would seem as if
they never existed.” Espen Aarseth acidly noted that the fact that his writing “has been mistaken
for a ban on the use of narrative theory in game studies is nothing less than amazing, and perhaps
goes to show that humanist academics are often less astute readers, scholars and interpreters than
their training gives them occasion to presume. It could also be suspected that anyone who echoes
Jenkins’ misleading nomenclature of ‘ludologists’ vs ‘narratologists’ simply has not read the
literature itself” (130).
Despite these protestations, however, Jenkins is not wholly off-base – as can be seen as
recently 2017, when Ian Bogost published “Video Games Are Better Without Stories” in The
Atlantic. Bogost held that because games will never be the “best” form for narrative delivery,
they should abandon trying and focus on “more ambitious goals” where games can excel.
Perhaps of greater interest is the fact that, to those who are producing the works being debated,
this argument seems irrelevant and short-sighted (and mostly settled.) When asked about it,
acclaimed interactive fiction writer Emily Short said “I have the sense that the received wisdom
5

is this issue is over. (Whether or not it's actually over is another matter)” and when I made
inquiries of others I received largely the same response (and as Flourish Klink noted,
“Ludologists definitely don't say that narrative theory isn't useful in talking about games, for
Lord's sake! If they did how could it possibly be the case that nickm [Nick Montfort] and Ian
[Bogost] have collaborated on like a billion books?”) This is all to say that there is a consensus
that even if this argument did happen in the past, by today things have moved on – while salvoes
are still occasionally fired, scholars have either entrenched themselves within their various
schools of thought and continued to publish on the subjects that most interest them, or opened
themselves up – either way, having reached a resolution of sorts.
As for questions of scholarly legitimacy as regards games research, that appears nothing
more than a misunderstanding of the future of academia. While USC has a dedicated Interactive
Media and Games division, most institutions of higher learning do not – such expertise might be
housed in Computer Science, or Media Studies, or Film, or wherever a professor might find
themselves fortunate enough to find an appointment. However, there is a strong tradition of new
disciplinary growth from within English – the prevalence of Film and Cinema Departments
across the world is a testament to that fact. Indeed, the path to the academy traversed by games
is somewhat comparable to that previously traveled by cinema – both in how the mediums were
received by academics, and the creative challenges encountered by practitioners. By way of
example, I will briefly trace the history of the Cinema Department.
Beginning in 1919, the Moscow Film School was the first school in the world to offer a
course of study dedicated to cinema. It was not for another ten years, in 1929, that USC
established the first school for cinematic arts in the United States – decades after the invention of
the motion picture camera in the late 19
th
century. The courses of study at these early schools
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focused primarily on production more than critical engagement with filmic material – much as
the modern games department does today. Only with the development of film studies and the
acceptance that film could be evaluated critically in the same fashion as art was the modern film
department born. Part of the reason the critical apparatus used by other fields took so long to
import was due to the early years of film studies wrestling with fundamental questions of form.
Lev Kuleshov demonstrated the ability of an audience to derive meaning from the juxtaposition
of sequential, unrelated images; Sergei Eisenstein introduced the montage as a technique for
condensing information in a comprehensible way. Thus, technical challenges involved with
building a coherent language of film consumed much of the early years of cinema’s time in
academia, and additional technical challenges continue to emerge as digital cinema assumes
primacy. As David Rodowick reminisces on the transition of cinema’s form from film to digital,
“[in the past] those of us who ran film societies could talk for hours about the location,
provenance, and comparative conditions of various prints with a level of connoisseurship
rivaling that of the most demanding art historian. The materiality of the cinematic experience
was tangible” (26). This is no longer the case – and, while not as converted to a near-entirely
digital form as cinema has been, the vast majority of games produced for commercial
consumption have likewise taken on digital form. As the fundamental questions about how to
make films have meaning receded, new questions and critiques have emerged, asking questions
about what defines cinema and engaging with ideas as far-ranging as gender studies, literary
theory, semiotics, and more.
Games too are now subject to the same kind of academic conversations described above.
Many scholars have brought expertise from a host of other intellectual disciplines to bear on the
subject; for example, John Sharp’s critique and discussion of the difference between “art games”
7

and “game art,” drawing upon from his background in the visual arts; Bogost’s marshalling of
his background in comparative literature in philosophy to argue that “a practical marriage of
literary theory and computation would not only give each field proper respect and attention from
its counterpart, but also create a useful framework for the interrogation of cultural artifacts that
straddle these fields” (Bogost 2008, ix.); and Soraya Murray utilizing her expertise in visual
representations of globalization and postcolonialism to discuss the “visual politics of race,
gender and space” (iii). This small sampling reveals a thriving field of study which can leverage
a wide variety of disciplinal knowledges to synthesize exciting results. Thus, any skepticism
about the value of this work to an English department should be allayed; to not conduct this kind
of research risks leaving our field behind as other departments race to collaborate on a research
of the future.
Project as Personal History
Sasha Costanza-Chock writes that “all knowledge is situated in the particular embodied
experiences of the knower” (9). Furthermore, games themselves have repeatedly shown the
power and value of relating personal narratives from their creators (see examples such as Cybele
(Star Maid Games, 2015) and Mainichi (Mattie Brice, 2012)). In order to place this dissertation
within my own specific context of knowing, I will sketch out some background information of
my personal history, education, and life experience. I am a male-presenting person of primarily
white Belorussian Jewish heritage, born in 1990 in the United States of America. I was born in
Philadelphia and raised in a fairly well-off upper-middle-class suburb on the Main Line, to
parents who were both trained as lawyers, where my mother stayed at home as a full-time
caretaker. I attended a private kindergarten, a public primary school and then moved back to
private institutions beginning in the fifth grade. My socio-political education and ideological
8

grounding came both at home and in school; I had a fairly comprehensive civics education in
primary school, the private schools I attended thereafter were run by Quakers and leaned
strongly liberal in their practice and environment. I attended half of middle school and all of
high school at Friends’ Central School, a college preparatory institution in Wynnewood,
Pennsylvania, and then Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania for postsecondary education.
My college education was funded by a combination of student loans and parental assistance.
I completed a double major in English and Classical Civilization and moved back to my
mother’s house to take graduate classes in English at the University of Pennsylvania. While at
Penn, I worked part-time in the Kislak Center of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, processing
archives and cataloging donated items for researchers to use. I enrolled in two English graduate
courses a semester, funded in part from my own savings and supplemented by a parental loan.
My coursework, combined with the letters of recommendation from Penn’s professors, allowed
me to gain entry into a doctoral program. I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in English at
the University of Southern California in 2015, and I moved to Los Angeles. This document is
one required component of the completion of that degree.
During my time at Lafayette, I attended a small gathering for players of a popular
independent game, of which I had been an avid player of since 2005. This game strongly
informed both my early sense of humor and my understanding of game design. Eventually, I
become fairly well-known in the game’s community and took over the management of the
webpage that hosted the game’s wiki. With my in-game notoriety as a calling card, I was able to
befriend the game’s developers, socializing with them in person at various game-related
gatherings and events despite an age gap of about a decade. At these events I observed firsthand
the sort of blurred lines and power differentials that can occur between creators of popular media
9

works and their fans, especially when alcohol was involved, though I personally never negatively
impacted by any concerning or abusive behavior. This friendship lasted until 2019, when it was
revealed that the game’s creator had used his power as the leader of the game’s community at in-
person meetups to facilitate a pattern of violent abuse and grooming of young female fans. This
discovery horrified me, and, combined with his disappointing responses to revelations, led to the
disintegration of my association with this individual.
Despite our lack of continued contact, it is clear that as a result of this former friendship,
for many years I received the unique privilege of a long-term firsthand look into professional
independent game production, mentoring and professional development, personal introductions
to many established industry figures, free lodging for industry events, and social invitations
which directly led to job offers and career advancement, including my first commercial game
development job working on the game Frog Fractions 2. I later learned that these opportunities
had been afforded to me in part because of my gender, and had I presented as a woman, it is
highly likely that my experience would have significantly differed. Although stories of abuse in
the games industry were not new to me, and had been discussed as part of the archive of research
I was building (as elaborated below), due to the closeness of our mentor-mentee relationship
these events landed far closer to my personal life than any I had heretofore been told about or
read about. As this relationship of almost a decade dissolved, the secondhand exposure informed
and nuanced my perspectives about abuse in the games industry.
The next major question I wish to address is that of audience. Who is this dissertation
for? There are a few ways to answer this question, but I hope that broadly, this work is “for”
everybody interested in games as a medium. It is for academics, likely the most traditional
audience for doctoral research and publication, who will look to this work for a firsthand
10

perspective on the video game industry, primary source quotations from developers and other
creative individuals who produce games, connections across disciplinary fields that can inspire
new research, and more. It is also for working game developers, who will benefit from hearing
the voices of their peers address real-world concerns that directly impact their workplaces and
production methodology. For these individuals, I raise multiple red flags regarding how our
systems of making games and game content are compromised, and I suggest multiple pathways
towards repairing and strengthening them against future abuse. Finally, the dissertation should
appeal to any layperson who is curious about how video games are made and how they in turn
have shaped the culture of the United States and beyond in the 21
st
century. I have tried to avoid
using excessive jargon or particularly dense language, and when I do, I have offered explanation
and clarification in the interest of making this work as open and accessible to all readers as
possible.
Methodology and Content
My methodological grounding in this dissertation is based primarily upon the technique
of interview. I conducted dozens of interviews in the lead-up to this dissertation, largely
between 2014 and 2021, and almost all of them with game developers or those involved in the
production of video game software in some capacity. Many of these interviews were conducted
before I ever conceived of the dissertation project, and before I ever entered commercial game
development. Taken together, the interview archive serves as a type of ethnography of the video
game studio, ranging in scale from the solo designer all the way up to production houses with
thousands of employees. The value of these interviews to the project as a whole is manifold:
although I have firsthand experience in commercial game development, my own experience is in
no way representative of the vast swath of people currently working in what is the largest
11

entertainment industry in the world. Thus, by adding their voices to my own, I can paint a
picture of commercial video game production and the industry and interests that surround it in
the words of those who were there and saw its development firsthand. The specific
methodological implementations are discussed in further detail in the first chapter, which is
briefly summarized below.
The above interviews are present throughout the entirety of this project, but they are most
heavily concentrated in Chapter 1: Gaming Communities, Online Spaces and the Politics of
Development. In this chapter, I lay out the origins of the interview process via the podcast Red
Pages Podcast, alongside the reasons and motivations that led me and my cohosts to begin the
project, and in many ways outlines the big picture not only for that podcast but for this
dissertation as well, as the roots of this project can be directly traced to that one. I situate the
Red Pages project within the larger academic context of interviews as a research technique, and
explain how the project served as a unique type of ethnographical exploration of the video game
industry. Subsequently, I place Red Pages within the broader historical context of the online
hate movement Gamergate, which the project anticipated several months in advance and was a
direct attempt to counteract before it began. I explore the origins of Gamergate and, by drawing
upon the words of those who were directly involved in making and marketing games during this
period, I discuss how, especially at the largest and most profitable game development studios,
capitalist decisions made out of these corporations’ fear for their profits led to the fomentation of
dissatisfaction and toxicity amongst their consumers, ultimately leading to the dehumanization
and harassment of the developers making the very products that these selfsame consumers
purported to love. This segues into a debate about the degree games are (or should be) political
in their content, once again drawing heavily upon the words of those directly involved in their
12

production and development. Questions such as “how are games political?”, “what does it mean
to make a political game?”, and “is there a difference between making a political game and
making a game politically?” are just some of the questions which I look to answer in this chapter.
I also highlight several games with explicitly political content and dig into the reactions, both
critical and commercial, which these games received as part of the larger discussion about how
explicitly political content impacts a game’s reception in the marketplace. I look at large games
produced by major studios, such as Bioshock and The Division 2, alongside smaller independent
works such as Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and Papers, Please.
The next section of the chapter looks at what happens when large game companies
become embroiled in controversies that are tied to politics, viewed through the lens of
Activision-Blizzard, a company that is both one of the largest producers of video games on the
planet and has also repeatedly found itself in controversial political waters. I focus on two
specific incidents, the first in 2019 when the company found itself thrust into an unwelcome
spotlight over their handling of Chung Ng Wai, a player of their digital card game Hearthstone
(2014). Chung had endorsed the cause of protestors in Hong Kong, who were campaigning
against governmental overreach by the Chinese Communist Party. Activision-Blizzard’s
punitive response to Chung’s statements was seen in the United States as politically cowardly
and received condemnation from the press, players, and even sitting United States
congresspeople. The second incident, which took place in 2005, involved Steve Bannon, the
then-future chairman of Breitbart News and political advisor to Donald Trump during the early
period of his presidency. Bannon was part of Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), a business
venture that took place within Activision Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online role-playing
game World of Warcraft (2004). IGE’s business model involved the exploitation of Chinese
13

labor to generate real-world profits by selling virtual goods to western players. Bannon’s
experience with IGE inspired him more than a decade later when he used Breitbart to fan the
flames of a developing Gamergate movement.
The chapter concludes by offering thoughts about how communities of game players can
influence, for better or worse, both the development cycle of the games which they consume and
the everyday lives of the developers who make these games. This broad writing about
communities becomes more refined in the second chapter, which draws upon my specific
experience as both a community manager and a designer, to discuss more deeply ways in which
games and politics intersect and influence one another.
Chapter 2: Frog Fractions 2, Alternate Reality Games and Propaganda examines the
form of the ARG as a transactional and often commercial exchange, dating back to the earliest
prefiguration of the form, and discuss the position of the ARG within a marketplace, both literal
(as a tool for selling another product) and figurative (within a marketplace of ideas). This
chapter has three main streams of investigation, which flow and merge into one another as it
continues. The first of these follows my commercial work designing games, most heavily the
development of two specific projects: Frog Fractions 2 and Dared My Best Friend to Ruin My
Life. I walk readers through large chunks of the history and design process that produced the
Frog Fractions 2 ARG, from my initial hiring on the project through its conclusion. I explain
multiple specific puzzles, their implementations, and their solutions, alongside my thinking and
design philosophy and how these evolved throughout the project. Subsequently, I explore the
production of the ARG for Dared, a project which came with pressing and (for me)
unprecedented moral and political concerns. If Frog Fractions 2 served as a formative
experience for my work as a professional game designer, Dared heavily shaped my conception
14

and understanding of much of the subsequent political material in this dissertation. Whereas the
tone and subject matter of Frog Fractions was playful and comedic, intent on providing players
with entertaining and surprising experiences that would delight them, Dared’s content was
darker, less fictional, and more urgent in the topics it addressed and how it reflected ongoing
real-world events of the time. Dared’s director had a message that he felt the public was in dire
need of hearing and envisioned the film not only as entertainment but as a tool for public
education about the risks of internet communities and technology in the 21
st
century. The story
that he wanted to tell carried a danger wherein we could have ended up birthing the very sort of
toxic community he had hoped to decry, and this ethical concern, alongside other similar risks,
drove many of the choices made in designing the ARG.
This chapter’s second stream of discourse revolves around online communities, how they
develop, and lessons that I learned from my time managing online communities and message
boards beginning in the mid-2000s into the present as part of my work designing ARGs. The
ARG form naturally draws people together into tight-knit groups as players collaborate on
solving the mysteries of the game and unraveling narrative secrets. However, it is very easy for
online communities to fall into destructive patterns that create toxic or even dangerous groups.
Furthermore, the internet has evolved in such a way that a group can now easily wreak
significant havoc on people’s lives, inundating the targets of their harassment with death threats,
releasing their personal information to the broader internet, or even sending SWAT teams to the
homes of their targets by filing false emergency reports in a practice known as “swatting”. I
explore how the communities in which I was involved, both directly as a participant and
indirectly as a designer whose work these communities were following, dealt with problems that
cropped up within their ranks, and catalogue both success and failures of management and
15

moderation. I also consider the relationship between a designer as a sort of author of a game
project, and their community of players as co-authors, examining both theoretical and legal
answers to the ways in which authorship can become snarled or distributed, as games are, unlike
film or literature, often a constant, ongoing dialogue between designers and players that,
especially in the era of update patches and downloadable content, continues to evolve even after
a game’s initial release.
Despite the divergence in tone and content, both Frog Fractions 2 and Dared were
critical to shaping much of the material in this dissertation. As I worked on (and subsequently
considered my work on) both of these projects, especially in light of the time I had spent as a
type of community manager, I realized that much of the design work that I had done could be
repurposed outside the realm of entertainment as a form of social engineering, and from there I
realized that not only could this occur, but that it already had. In the last of the three streams, I
synthesize the prior two streams to explore how the design methodologies and tools that have
been used to produce games have been co-opted by far-right political actors to produce a new
kind of propaganda, one that mimics grassroots movements and cleverly obfuscates its origins.
Chapter 3: Play and Misinformation: How America’s Conspiracy Culture Became
Gamified extends the work begun in Chapter 2 and begins looking at the conspiracy theories
within the popular culture of the United States of America. It is clear that within American
entertainment, the conspiracy plot is a perennial favorite, with uncountable books, films, games,
and more all utilizing a conspiracy as part of their central narrative. What is it about conspiracy
that is so compelling to the American mind? How long has conspiracy held such a central place
in the everyday life of American citizens, and what are the consequences of its primacy? In this
chapter, I introduce a framework that describes how games or game-like projects can grow and
16

morph from entertainment into conspiracy theories and finally into full-blown political
revolutions. In examining the thinking of designers like Joseph Matheny, creator of long-
running proto-ARG Ong’s Hat, and Adrian Hon, designer of similarly long-running ARG
Perplex City, I place them in dialogue with one another to unspool the unintentional ways in
which ARG design has influenced the practice of modern propagandists. I also draw upon the
work of social psychologists to explain what makes a conspiracy theory so appealing, which
leads to an overview of the place of conspiracy within the long span of American history. This
enables me to examine American conspiracies, both real and imagined, from across history and
popular culture, ranging from 1828 election of Andrew Jackson and the 1858 slave revolt led by
John Brown to modern examples like Pizzagate and QAnon to works like The X-Files. This look
at the cultural history of American conspiracy and conspiracy theory is critical in explaining how
the paranoia of the 19
th
century laid the ground for an early version of fascist thinking that
continues to manifest in the 21
st
century in events such as the Unite the Right rally of 2017 in
Charlottesville, Virginia. Marshalling all of the above, I ultimately argue that the leveraging sort
of design that is popular in ARGs is precisely how malicious, far-right extremists were
successful in using propaganda, entwined with and playing to the specific paranoias in and
tendencies of the American cultural psyche in the first decade of the 21
st
century, to produce a
powerful anti-democratic movement, of which the election of President Donald Trump was part.
Chapter 4: ARGs for Good? Reclaiming Design and the Future of Democracy serves as
an answer to the challenges and problems outlined in the prior three chapters. After having
walked readers through the origins of online antidemocratic movements as they exist within
communities of video game players, I offer a host of real-world examples that explain how to
push back against this phenomenon. I illustrate how designers can work together with local
17

government, politicians, and educators, using the same tools that are currently being utilized to
attack societal structures, to produce powerful counterprogramming. This chapter is divided into
two halves: the first, “ARGs for Democracy?” examines how gamification has been used to build
platforms that encourage direct participation in local government. This section takes an
international scope, interrogating the efficacy of democracy-bolstering platforms that are
currently used in Taiwan, Spain, Somalia, and many other nations. I spend the most time
focusing on two specific platforms: the vTaiwan platform currently in use in Taiwan, and
Decidim which is used across the European Union and some parts of South America. I look at
how these platforms came to be, how they have grown, and various challenges and successes that
they have encountered. I bolster these real-world examples with discussions and interviews
which I conducted with experts who specialize in the construction and usage of digital
democracy platforms, including a board member of Decidim’s controlling group. I also write
frankly about the limitations of these sorts of platforms, having explained previously how tools
and platforms can easily be misappropriated, and consider what recourse exists for the creators
of digital participatory democracy platforms when their work is repurposed by more repressive
governments.
The second half, “ARGs for Education,” looks at various ways that ARGs have been used
in an educational setting, drawing case studies from various educational ARGs that collectively
looked serve a wide spectrum of learners, from the very young to the university, and across
cultural, class, and economic boundaries. As in part one, I spend the most time with two specific
examples: The Source (2013), developed by scholars at the University of Chicago for the benefit
of historically disadvantaged youths, and Reality Ends Here (2012), a game designed by Jeff
Watson for incoming college freshmen, currently in use at the University of Southern California.
18

I choose these two examples because they complement each other; one serves a group of players
ranging in age from early middle school to late high school who have largely been unable to
engage with ARGs due to systemic social biases that have disadvantaged their access to
education or entertainment. The other serves incoming college students at one of the planet’s
most exclusive and wealthiest research universities, where students have access to the best
resources available to learners. I highlight the advantages that ARGs seem to provide over more
traditional classroom structures, speaking with designers and players alike about the strengths
and weaknesses that these games as education platforms provide. In the case of Reality I also
describe how the game, which in contrast to The Source has been run many times and iterated
upon considerably, has changed over repeated play sessions in order to better meet the needs of
the students it serves.
Design as Practice
Much of this dissertation is deeply and intimately concerned with questions around
design, practice, and creative output. In the late 1980s, a debate occurred within feminist circles
about the relationship between aesthetics and feminist politics. Within literary theory, certain
practices, styles of writing, modes of creative expression, and ways of thinking were interrogated.
One prominent example was the distinction between modernist and realistic styles of writing. Is
modernism an oppressive, paternalistic ideology, over which a more realistic feminist style of
writing, drawing from subjective experience must triumph? Is realism inherently compromised
because (among other reasons) in its attempt to portray the “real” it erects a façade of
signification, which a modernist work would inherently acknowledge and thus be freed from?
Feminism’s nature not only as a school of theory and critique but also as a political movement,
and one inherently tied to the identities of individuals, led to a feeling of the stakes being much
19

higher than standard academic discourse. In an attempt to cut through this debate, Rita Felski
argued in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics that “no convincing case has yet been made for a gendered
aesthetics [or] for the assertion that men and women write in distinctively different was or that
certain styles or structures in literature and art can be classified as inherently masculine or
feminine” (156). She also addressed widespread arguments which, drawing upon arguments
made by Barthes and Althusser, made claims that certain genres were inherently aligned with
certain modes of politics (in the above example, realism is conservative and modernism is
radical.) Felski claims that privileging one theory of understanding literature came at a
concerning cost and that conflating a work’s aesthetic value and political value was reductionist
and short-sighted. Resultantly, she writes that “it is increasingly implausible to claim that
aesthetic radicalism equals political radicalism and to ground a feminist politics of the text in and
assumption of the inherently subversive effects of stylistic innovation” (161). Readers of this
dissertation will come to understand the current debate around games and politics, and see
echoes of this earlier debate in the more modern. Furthermore, a similar discussion is currently
occurring in theories of design and creative practice. Before I can enter into a discussion of how
game design can be leveraged to strengthen systems of democracy and education, a basic
overview of these theoretical discourses is necessary to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of
such an approach, as well as acknowledging the type of critique such an approach invites.
In the 21
st
century, design, practice, and tools have come under increasing scrutiny in
such a form that strongly resembles the late 20
th
century’s debate over feminist theory.
Questions regarding whether design has inherent politics and, if so, what those politics might be,
are a present matter of urgent discourse. There are, of course, complicating factors that
distinguish the present debates from the past: for example, the profession of designer is
20

historically relatively recent (especially when compared with the existence of “woman” as a
social category.) Sasha Costanza-Chock writes “the designer as a specific kind of person, or as a
profession, emerged with the Industrial Revolution. Until then, knowledge about how to create,
use, and maintain specialized tools was transmitted via craft guilds. However, the craft guild
model could not support larger-scale designs that required the distribution of skills among many
specialists. Accordingly, ‘this new task – designing for a class of people with whom the designer
did not interact – helped mark the origin of industrial design’” (14). Thus the distinction
between design as a human activity (a verb) and design as a noun, a thing that is produced by a
designer, was codified and commodified for the modern era. It is thus subject to the same
stresses and pressures of the modern era as well, and many have subjected design and the
practice of designers to numerous interrogations: for whom is design intended? Does design
uplift or silence certain groups? What structures of power do our design practices reinforce?
As this dissertation is concerned primarily with the design and technology of games, I
will draw primarily upon that field and related disciplines for examples. In another similarity to
the past debates over feminist literary theory, design does not exist solely within the realm of the
academy and academic writing; design, like political feminism, is performed every day by
millions of human beings, all of whom have their own beliefs and understandings around the
practice. One of the most common forms of modern design is the production of computer code
by programmers. In modern western commercial technology, there is often the assumption that
code is objective and neutral. Ruha Benjamin, in Race After Technology, articulates the
problem: “Mark Zuckerburg refers to deep learning as ‘the theory of the mind … How do we
model – in machines – what human users are interested in and are going to do?’ But the question
for us is, is there only one theory of the mind, and whose mind is it modeled on?” (52). The
21

issues do not stop at the user’s mind, either, but extend to the user’s body. Western technology
design is most often based upon an assumption of a light-skinned user of European ancestry.
Cameras, photography, and camera technology offer recurring examples of this problem, with
sometimes shockingly racist results: “In 2009, an HP webcam failed to register black people.
And in 2015, Google Photos’ facial recognition categorized black people as gorillas” (Conger).
Despite Apple’s claims that their Face ID technology, designed to allow one to unlock one’s
phone without entering a password, would not have race-specific identification problems, Face
ID repeatedly misidentified a Chinese woman, allowing her friend to unlock her phone – the app
could not tell their features apart” (Zhao). This sort of discriminatory design is of course
predicated upon the dominant culture that produces it, and the world of games is not immune: the
camera-based video game WarioWare: Snapped! (2008) from Nintendo had difficulty with
players that had lighter skin tones. Nintendo, aware of the design problem, initially considered a
number of fixes ranging from selling the game with a dark sleeve to wear on one’s fingers or a
black mat to help the camera detect contrast, however, likely due to increased cost of distribution,
these solutions were all discarded and the game shipped with the defects intact (Iwata). These
examples illustrate the problems and assumptions inherent in much of commercial design within
a very narrow context, but similar concerns arise across the practice as a whole.
I do not wish to advance the notion that I believe that the above sorts of problems are
produced purposefully or maliciously. Most designers almost certainly do not set out to design
works that are intentionally discriminatory or which damage marginalized or traditionally
disadvantaged groups. The harms are unintentional or often unforeseen side-effects of working
within existing structures of power, or from adhering to external philosophies which themselves
serve to prop up existing structures of power and privilege. A robust discussion of the how and
22

why this occurs is beyond the scope of this dissertation, though I direct interested readers to both
books by Costanza-Chock and Benjamin cited above, as well as texts such as Bettye Rose
Connell et al.’s The Principles of Universal Design and Carl DiSalvo’s writing on so-called
adversarial design. These works should provide the curious reader with a grounding in current
discourse and thinking around challenges facing design and designers today, as well as some
potential solutions or paths forward.
It must be made clear that although, as indicated above, the tools which designers use in
production contain within themselves the assumptions and biases of those who created them, I do
not mean to claim that ARGs, in particular, have a bias towards the production of misinformation,
authoritarianism or fascism, as one might conclude from subsequent chapters. In this narrow
sense, I believe that they are agnostic, able to be used for a wide variety of ends without being
predisposed towards any in particular, with two possible ends being elaborated upon below. This
does not mean that they do not still carry within them the inherent biases of their creators; simply
that they are not inherently inclined to promote abuse of this sort.
As with any research, there are limitations and caveats to my work and approach. I am
not formally trained as a political scientist, mathematician, sociologist, behavioral psychologist
or many other things, despite drawing upon a host of multi- and interdisciplinary research and
approaches to the subject matter. I have done my best due diligence to vet the sources that I cite,
but I may have missed a foundational text in one of these fields that would speak very directly to
much of what my work sets out to do. Furthermore, although I draw upon my own firsthand
experience as a designer when identifying what I see as serious concerns both in the culture of
games and game-making, as well as the broader American zeitgeist, as a result of my above
training I do not have empirical scientific evidence collected firsthand from case studies in which
23

I participated, and have instead needed to rely upon the research and work of other pioneers in
this field, to whom I am stupendously grateful.

24

Chapter 1
Gaming Communities, Online Spaces and the Politics of Development

On the Origins of the Red Pages Podcast Project
In the fall of 2013, I had recently graduated from Lafayette College and was in the
process of finding temporary work while I applied to graduate programs. I had a regular Skype
group chat with several of my college friends, and one of them, Yoori Kim, who had studied
computer science, suggested that we start a podcast together. No more than two days prior to
this conversation and entirely independently, a friend whom I had at that time only known
through the internet, Gord Hill, a programmer from Canada, made the identical suggestion. I
introduced the two to each other, and we decided to make a podcast about “books, games and the
people who make them.” I had listened to a lot of podcasts over the years, both games-focused
and otherwise, and knew that even at that time the market was highly saturated (though nothing
like what it has become today). As a result, I knew that if we wanted to grow our listener base to
a sustainable level we would need a hook that nobody else had. Gamers, we supposed, were
always hungry for new information about their hobby, and if we could secure a consistent stream
of guests then surely we would acquire a massive audience – even if one episode failed to appeal,
we would have something for everybody. We also discussed inviting authors, and had a few sit
for interviews (most notably Andy Weir, author of The Martian) but we didn’t receive the same
enthusiastic response from authors that we did from individuals working in the games space.
The interview format was the solution to two unrelated problems. The first, described above,
was our immediate question of marketing and self-promotion. The second was a broader, more
nebulous perception that the three of us had never discussed before, but to which we had all
25

arrived: the online discourse around video games was becoming increasingly toxic, especially as
regards the interaction between game creators and their playerbases.
1

Red Pages Methodology and Theory
In our conception of the podcast, we did not have any formal critical theoretical-
methodological grounding laying runway for us in advance – the project very much was the three
of us doing what “felt right.” We chose the interview form because, amongst other reasons, it
seemed the smartest decision from a self-promotional perspective. As we were complete
unknowns with no obvious appeal in attracting a listenership, we could break into the public
consciousness by, put bluntly, riding the coattails of those who were already well-known. If we
could secure a continual stream of notable guests to interview, the logic ran, we would in time
develop our own following as listeners subscribed to us for in-depth discussion of their favorite
hobbies and possibly, with time, because they enjoyed engaging with the hosts as personalities.
There was very little thought in the beginning put into the theoretical foundations of the
interview of the form – for example, how the message of the interviewee is inherently mediated
through the interviewers. We simply desired to connect our listeners to the subjects in as direct a
way as possible to combat what we perceived as a dearth of access to creators, a perception
described more fully below. Despite this relatively uncritical set of motivations, we were
grasping around the edges of what Rebecca Roach describes as the interview’s place in the
modern era. “In an age of mediation,” she writes, “interviews promise immediacy: they seek to
transfer information from one locale to another and to transfer meaning from speaker to reader.

1
There were also more mundane reasons for starting the podcast – Gord described his main goal as a desire to
“Hang out with some buds, talk about videogames… I also wanted to keep rkol[Radio KoL, an online shoutcast
station for the video game Kingdom of Loathing] going and I was caught up in the community there. I saw it as
more of a community collaborative act but that never really materialized” (Hill, Gordon. Messages to Justin
Bortnick. Slack. 26 November, 2019.)
26

Fig. 1. The Red Pages Podcast homepage as archived May 2014. Image captured by author.

Fig. 2. The Red Pages Podcast homepage in September 2021. Image captured by the author.

They are fundamentally associated with acts of communication…” (7). Roach’s analysis of the
social drives behind the interview exactly aligns with our own motivations, though we could not
have articulated them at the time.
27

Despite not realizing it at the outset, we had begun building an ethnography of the video
game industry. This kind of work is important to the field; Jennifer Whitson explained when she
wrote that “ethnographic approaches and studio studies are valuable to Game Studies, not only
because they may help developers improve their craft, illustrating the varied contexts of and
approaches to game making, but also because they highlight how both game scholars and developers
approach their work with idealized preconceptions about game development roles, processes,
practices, and values” (5). The Red Pages approach to this sort of work differed, however, in
some key ways from a traditional anthropological examination. I had been personal friends with
several game developers for many years, had dabbled in amateur game making since high school,
and over the course of the podcast’s history I would transition into producing professional
commercial video game products. My co-hosts likewise stood along this spectrum from outsider
to group member; Yoori worked for a game development studio, but as a web designer, and Gord
had made a number of games as a hobbyist but never professionally. James Clifford, in
describing the “participant-observation” methodology of ethnographic research, writes that
“‘Participant-observation’ serves as shorthand for a continuous tacking between the ‘inside’ and
‘outside’ of events: on the one hand grasping the sense of specific occurrences and gestures
empathetically, on the other stepping back to situate these meanings in wider contexts” (127).
Our personal contexts led to us unknowingly engage in a modified version of this, wherein we as
a collective had at least one foot in the “culture” we were examining while at the same time
maintaining a distance that allowed us to, as Clifford noted, remain outside observers. Of note
is that we started nearly completely on the ‘outside’ and over years of podcasting moved ‘inside,’
in no small part because of the podcast itself. My first paid development job was offered to me
after we finished recording an episode of the podcast, by the interview subject with whom we
had just finished recording. This highlights a notable difference between our work and the
28

examination of a culture different from one’s own – our subjects shared a broader (usually
American) culture with us as interviewers, and we were examining a facet of our own culture
with which most are unfamiliar. This allowed us a relatively unique perspective: we were
increasingly able to speak to our subjects as insiders while maintaining our statuses as “effaced,
de-privileged interviewer[s] whose personhood [is] often discounted” (Roach, 13).
I was convinced that the project we were about to undertake was culturally significant,
unconsciously channeling Raymond Williams, who wrote that “The analysis of culture, in the
documentary sense, is of great importance because it can yield specific evidence about the whole
organization within which it was expressed” (51). It is impossible, Williams argues, to
understand a culture without first understanding the art of that culture and the theory related to it,
and that historically, documentation of the arts has been subordinate to other fields, whereas arts
histories fail to address the position of the arts within a society: “a good deal of history has in
fact been written on the assumption that the bases of the society, its political, economic, and
‘social’ arrangements, form the central core of facts, after which the art and theory can be
adduced, for marginal illustration or ‘correlation’. There has been a neat reversal of this
procedure in the histories of literature, art, science, and philosophy, when these are described as
developing by their own laws, and then something called the ‘background’ (what in general
history was the central core) is sketched in” (51). Though I was quite unaware of Williams at the
podcast’s outset, a central motivating factor was my perception that the field of game
development had barely even been “sketched in,” for reasons that will be elaborated upon below.
In this way, the podcast served as a vehicle to address not only the toxic rhetoric around video
game discourse online, but to meet a perceived gap in the documentation of the field.

29

Terminology
Most of the games and companies covered in this chapter exist in what Soraya Murray
refers to as the “socio-political context of a globalized, post-9/11, post-Obama, neoliberal
expansionist period” (Murray, 2). I refer to different types of video game manufacture, ranging
from Independent (“Indie”) studios to Corporate (“AAA”). While there is no hard definition to
differentiate between these types of production houses, there is a general in-industry consensus
about shared qualities within a category. Many indie studios work with a relatively small team
of employees (often under 50, and usually between one and ten) and limited budgets to produce
games that are of a smaller scale. AAA studios employ hundreds if not thousands of developers,
and produce games on an enormous scale with budgets that can sometimes break $100 million.
They closely parallel the relationship between major Hollywood motion picture studios and
independent filmmakers. The space in between these two poles is occupied by a (shrinking) field
of “AA” or “midrange” developers who slot somewhere into the nebulous middle. While
debates in industry spaces continue to regularly arise over the status of individual studios and
where they fit along this rough continuum,
2
these broad definitions are generally in line with the
understanding of many involved in video game production today, and can be said to describe the
shape of the professional commercial game development landscape for the past decade.

Context
Although our podcast began broadcasting almost one year before the targeted harassment
campaign that would come to be known as Gamergate (detailed below) began, in retrospect our
suspicion was in retrospect well-founded. The origins and social impact of the Gamergate hate

2
Such debates occur, for example, in discussions during the annual jurying process of the Independent Games
Festival when an entry appears to be “not indie” enough.
30

movement are discussed elsewhere, but I had noticed that even prior to its inception, any internet
forum or discussion group about video games that reached a large size would inevitably have a
vocal minority composed of internet trolls. While not in the least unique to video game
communities, I was shocked by the vitriol of the posts that were being made and the threats
directed at the creators of the games that these posters in theory enjoyed. It was not unusual to
see calls for violence. Below is a sampling of several tweets that were typical of Gamergate
rhetoric, displaying shocking threats of physical violence, sexual assault and sexist language:

Fig. 3. Example 1 of Gamergate rhetoric on Twitter (Edwards).

Fig. 4. Example 2 of Gamergate rhetoric on Twitter (VanDerWerff).
These posts stand as examples of the level of discourse one would find in these fora. These
specific comments have all since been removed, either by Twitter’s moderation team due to
31

violating the Terms of Service, or by the users themselves, though thousands of similar messages
remain. Red Pages Podcast seemed to offer the three of us a way to address this toxic style of
discourse; by offering game players a more direct line to game creators than they might find
elsewhere, they could express thoughts and concerns to those creators or ask questions of them –
while not allowing trolls to derail things through our process of vetting questions in advance as a
sort of moderation system..

Content
I hypothesized that the reason the tone of online games discussion had turned so hostile
was because, apart from a small circle of professional journalists who covered game
development and the broader industry, there was limited and highly controlled access to the
people who made AAA video games, and these were the games that were most visible to the
general public due to their large marketing budgets. Independent game makers used their
freedom from the constraints of public relations departments and marketing teams to engage
freely with their players and fans, taking suggestions and fielding questions on websites such as
Reddit and Twitter. In contrast, corporations such as Electronic Arts, Activision, Microsoft and
others presented an impenetrable façade. Statements and news about their products were tightly
regulated, taking a cue from the film industry where interviews are conducted with a publicist
present. A few AAA studios, such as Blizzard Entertainment
3
experimented with different
engagement models (Holisky), but this was the exception rather than the rule. These large
companies, beholden to their shareholders, were (and remain) deathly afraid that an unfiltered
comment from a developer might sink a project whose budget ran into the hundreds of millions

3
Although Activision and Blizzard are jointly owned by the firm Activision Blizzard, their management at the time
was nearly entirely separate, and each employed their own marketing strategies.
32

of dollars. These sorts of statements could range from anything such as an offensive off-hand
remark to the discussion of an in-development game feature that ended up being cut from the
final project.
4
The personal nature of the Red Pages interviews ran in contrast to the above, both
in terms of interview methodology and motivation. Whereas then-modern interviews played into
“the importance of marketing and promotional strategies within the industry” and were (and
often continue to be) conducted “in an attempt to ensure a [work’s] visibility in the media and to
boost sales” (Roach, 198), the academic-lite motivations of those working on the Red Pages
Podcast – namely, to alter a discourse (in this case, discourse around video games) and document
an industry were well outside much of the contemporary gaming press, and as a result we were
often of no interest to a marketing-driven press push. Over the course of the show, only a single
developer has reached out and asked for an interview as part of a self-promotion marketing
strategy.
The impact of publisher fear over lost profits manifested in ways beyond simply
restricting what could be shared about a game’s development. Publishers would often take steps
to limit what games were made available for purchase at all. Some publishers struggled to grow
with the times, disallowing many independent developers on their platforms. Dan Adelman,
former “Indie Boss” at Nintendo, spelled out the causes behind this anxiety at his former
employer. Speaking to us in 2014, he explained that many folks at Nintendo were stuck in their
ways, and lamented that they “don’t understand indie games” (Allfather, “The Biz-Dev
Episode”). Speaking about what he viewed as a fundamental “culture clash,” he walked us
through the nature of careers in the games industry: “Most video game companies, if you’ve
been at the same video game company for five years you’re an old grizzled veteran, but at

4
These fears were not entirely unfounded. The substantial online backlash against the game No Man’s Sky (Hello
Games, 2016) over missing features that had been promoted in the lead-up to release bears this out (Wilde).
33

Nintendo people stay their entire careers…” Whereas at other companies it was unusual to see a
person in the same job for any extended period of time, he noted that many at Nintendo would
stay for ten, fifteen or even twenty-five years. These long-timers were the ones making decisions
about which games to publish, yet they had grown complacent and comfortable. The effect of
this complacency, Adelman felt, was a stunting of the industry’s fundamental development,
explaining:
There are a lot of people who have been there for a long time, and I think they have
gotten used to the fact that they deal with the same people at the large publishers year
after year, and there’s a limited number of publishers, and at the large publishers
everybody understands how Nintendo works, and also these large companies have a long-
term vested interest in maintaining a good relationship with Nintendo, and so culturally I
think they’re not used to… there are many people at Nintendo, certainly not all, who
when they see indie games that have very personal content in the games, so not like, the
games are not necessarily designed to sell well, they’re designed to relay a personal
emotion or experience, people are like ‘Well why would they make that kind of game?
Who’s going to buy a game about sadness?’ But that’s part of the beauty of indie games,
you identify with the creator of the game, himself or herself, so I think culturally people,
some people don’t understand that.
Adelman also described the way in which, as a result of Nintendo’s lack of market agility, their
marketing department fundamentally misunderstood the structure of how independent games
operated both in the marketplace and in their relationships with publishers. Laying out the
different approaches to business, he explained that
34

a lot of the indie developers don’t have this long-term vested interest in making sure that
their relationship with Nintendo stays solid. So it’s not like at Activision, they may not
be able to support WiiU if the numbers don’t justify it, but they’re going to be very
diplomatic about it. Who knows when Nintendo will be on top again? They want to
make sure they have a good relationship and indie developers are not shy at all about
going on Twitter and complaining if something’s not working right, putting it out there,
and it’s a very different environment and landscape than it was even, you know, five
years ago… it’s not even meant to be overly critical, they’re just saying ‘this is my
experience right now’ and people will say, ‘well how did that get past their PR
department, they should know better than to say something like that publicly.’ And well,
they don’t have a PR department. It’s just a guy. The willingness of independent
developers to take their stories to their fans was one of the major social differences
between these small outfits and the industry behemoths: much like in independent film,
the lower stakes and lessened financial investment involved with their productions
allowed for greater risk, both in terms of game content and how the company (or ‘a guy’
presented to the public).
5

Other console platforms, such as the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s XBOX 360,
were somewhat more welcoming to independent developers, but only in a relative sense.
Developer Tommy Refenes was shown expressing his frustrations about launching the game
Super Meat Boy on the XBOX platform in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie. Despite
being marketed as a major release in the period leading up to the game’s release, on launch day

5
It is important to note historically that this period was not the most repressive for developers – from the 1980s into
the 1990s, some companies would omit end credits from their games entirely. Others would include them, but the
developers were forced to use nicknames. Even star developers like Keiji Inafune, formerly of Capcom, went by
“Inafking,” while legendary creator of Super Mario Shigeru Miyamoto was “Miyahon.”
35

the game could not be easily found in the digital storefront. “There’s nothing we can do except
blame Microsoft and then never ever work with them again. But then… It’s so dumb. I don’t
want to do games anymore I think. I want to work on cars” (Indie Game: The Movie). This is to
say nothing of the price tag that was at the time associated with deploying software updates and
bugfixes on these consoles: Phil Fish, designer of award-winning independent game FEZ
(Polytron, 2012), refused to patch the bugs in his game after Microsoft demanded $40,000 to
deploy the software update – far more what most independent developers could afford (Orland).
6

This risk-averse attitude and fear of lost profits displayed by major publishers and platform
holders, manifesting in terms of disallowing their in-house creative workers to speak about their
product while strictly limiting the diversity and breadth of content they allowed for publication
on their hardware, severely limited independent developers’ ability to gain exposure and
audiences for their games on consoles. This had the effect of making personal computers the
platform of choice for gamers who wished to expand their entertainment prospects beyond major
AAA releases, interact with the individuals who were producing games, or both.
It was into this climate of suppressed developer communication that the Red Pages
Podcast was launched. The immediate positive response the podcast received from developers
and the number of guests that immediately volunteered for interviews was surprising, especially
given that we ended up cold-calling many of them. Noting the repressive environment, Ed Del
Castillo, producer of the Command and Conquer franchise, remarked “What you guys are doing
is the mortar to the bricks of this industry.... Without you guys doing this, the information doesn't
get out. The backstories don't get filled in. The pieces don't come together in a way that leaves
the true story and the full story” (Allfather, “This Can’t Be Teletype!”). There were of course

6
Microsoft has since significantly lowered the fees involved with publishing updates on their platforms, greatly
increasing the accessibility of their audiences to smaller developers.
36

other groups and projects doing work similar to ours, so I include this quote not to toot my own
horn but instead as an example of the raw enthusiasm generated by the existence of work such as
that being done in the Red Pages Podcast, and how being interviewed as people instead of as
representatives of a product made developers feel as if they could finally be seen and heard,
outside of a tightly-managed PR context.
The tenor of online games discourse was at this point past simmering and close to boiling
over – in a podcast interview four months before Gamergate, Edmund McMillen, Refenes’ co-
developer on Super Meat Boy, remarked on his perception of the rising conflict of values within
the independent games space. McMillen has worked in independent games since 2001, years
before it grew to its modern size as a result of increasing ease of development for hobbyists.
“The indie scene has lost sight of what it used to be,” he bemoaned. “People have lost sight of
the fact that we make video games and they’re art, and that is what the foundation of what
everything is. I think people get a little too focused on whatever kind of social campaign they’re
on” (Allfather, “The Catma Sutra”). Explaining why he no longer attended the Game Developer
Conference, he spoke to the increasing corporatization of independent games, and how put off he
feels by people who have shipped a single product trying to teach him how to monetize his work
for maximum revenue. “I’m not in this to just be rich, I’m in this because I’m an artist and this
is what I do, this is my chosen medium to express myself and have fun with what I’m doing.”
An increased focus on making money is not the only change he perceives in the indie space,
however:
I feel like the indie scene has become very much more of a scene. It’s become an attitude
and it’s become this weird… it’s become this avenue to talk about a bunch of social
issues that could be much better talked about via a video game. Via your chosen art form.
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And it just bugs me. It just… I don’t care! I just don’t care, I guess. It just becomes
more and more about these personal issues that people have and they want to rant about
or whatever else, and it gets further and further away from art and games […] It’s just
human nature to segregate yourself and then point the finger at the enemy and then attack,
and you get a lot of these indies that are just talking shit about each other, like ‘your
game’s not a game’ or ‘you can’t say this in your game’ or ‘you shouldn’t make money
off of your games’ or whatever, everybody’s coming from a different perspective and
they’re all validated by other people who also share their same feelings, and they just
push further and further out…
Taken in hindsight, his words seem almost prescient. Online video game spaces were in fact a
simmering pot of conflicting political values that seethed and churned with negative emotion, but
in the end it wasn’t the divisions within the community of game makers that boiled over, but the
divisions within their communities of players.
The above-mentioned campaign of organized harassment that would come to be known
as “Gamergate” coalesced in August 2014, when computer scientist Eron Gjoni, ex-boyfriend of
independent game developer Zoe Quinn, posted “thezoepost” to a Wordpress blog (Gjoni). In
this post, Gjoni falsely accused Quinn of, among other things, receiving a positive review for her
game, Depression Quest (2013), as a result of her relationship with reviewer Nathan Grayson (in
reality, Grayson never reviewed any of Quinn’s games). Internet trolls on websites such as
4chan, a hub for internet troll culture which itself eventually banned discussion of Gamergate
entirely, 8chan, where many of 4chan’s users went following this ban, and Reddit, a popular
general-use discussion forum, would seize upon this blog post. What began as an attempted
takedown of Quinn rapidly expanded into, under the pretext of critiquing ethical lapses
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committed by video game journalists, a misogynistic campaign of targeted harassment against
women in the games industry and press, with targets chosen based primarily upon their gender
and their willingness to speak out on social and political issues within the game-playing
community. Women such as Anita Sarkeesian, a critic and founder of the online media
commentary page Feminist Frequency who had suffered past harassment for her video series
Tropes vs Women, received multiple death threats. Independent developer Brianna Wu had her
home address leaked on 8chan. Male developers who stood up for their colleagues against the
hate mob were also subject to harassment: Fish had multiple online accounts compromised and
passwords posted following his defense of Quinn. At the same time, some developers voiced
their support for the movement. Adrian Chmielarz, former AAA developer and founder of the
independent studio The Astronauts posted multiple defenses of Gamergate on his Medium blog.
Former World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) team lead Mark Kern implied on
Reddit that the only reason some developers didn’t support Gamergate was due to spousal
pressure, writing, “Some devs are anti-GG, either through lack of understanding, or wanting
things to cool down. More interestingly, there has been pressure from spouses who may not be
gamers, and who only know tumblr...and devs want a happy household” (Kern). The divisions in
the developer community that McMillen had pointed out cracked open not under their own strain,
but from external pressure exerted by players.
When McMillen referred to developers “talk[ing] about a bunch of social issues,” he was
referencing the increased visibility of games with explicit political messaging. The rise of
explicitly political games was unsurprising as the medium matured, as Williams states above,
and developers were keenly aware of this fact (if not that specific citation.) For example, Ed Del
Castillo, remarked that the reason Westwood Studios began development on the war-themed
39

strategy game Command and Conquer was because “the president of the company believed that
in times of war, war games spiked, and he wanted a perennial title” (Allfather, “This Can’t Be
Teletype!”). Making a cynical bet on the future of America and perpetual war, Westwood scored
a massive hit in 1995, and the franchise continues to this day.
There is a widespread belief that games aren’t or shouldn’t be political (Hamilton, Kain)
which is fundamentally at odds with the desire to make a game about social (or political) issues.
The tension between these two urges – to be political while remaining apolitical – betrays not
only a lack of sophisticated knowledge of how these politics manifest and how games and the
real world reflect each other, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of how “political” games
can be made. Independent developer J.P. LeBreton theorized in a Red Pages interview that there
exists a distinction between the act of making a political game and making a game politically.
Acknowledging that “[social/political content] is important to think about in games, just because
the culture and the art we make is a mirror of our society really, and if we’re treating games as
something where we suspend all of that thinking about thinking critically about the content of
what we think about, that’s abdicating a very important tool for change or awareness, socially”
(Allfather, “The Doom that Came to SEGA Sarnath”). Using animal-rights group PETA as an
example, LeBreton distinguished between a game designed with the primary intent of driving
home a viewpoint on a single issues as a “political game,” one where all other aspects of the
work are subservient to the singular message. “I think it’s much more interesting,” he continued,
“and I think there’s been much more good examples of this, as indie games, sorry, indie is maybe
not the best term but like, as more diverse groups of people have started making games over the
past six to eight years, people have made things politically, they have not made political games,
they have made games politically.” A game that is made politically, as opposed to a political
40

game, is a game where the creator “fully concede[s] that [their] own viewpoint is going to end up
in that thing, whether [they] like it or not, so [they] try to be honest about what your viewpoint is
and just try to make a good piece of art, as a human, or entertainment or whatever.” Making a
game politically, then, is to enter into the act of creation with the knowledge that the work
produced will inherently express the viewpoints of those creating it, but without the primary
intent to proselytize. At this point in the interview, LeBreton’s commentary turned inward in a
fascinating way, as he explained:
You want to make that as a good human being and sort of make sure that what you’re
encoding about yourself into whatever you’re making is something that you can show in
the daylight ‘cause honestly, I’ll be honest, a lot of the things that I worked on in my past
career y’know there’s parts of them that I’m not necessarily proud of, y’know like
Bioshock, it wasn’t openly espousing objectivism
7
, it had this like kind of like both-sides
sort of mentality that I’ve since sort of like decided is pretty problematic. Y’know but I
mean it was trying to grapple with stuff but I think it didn’t really do much at all to
overturn some of the basic ideology that you get by accepting first-person shooter design
limitations where you’re supposed to have this identity where you’re this good guy or
you’re whatever and but if the gameplay still comes down to DOOM, y’know then the
message you’re getting from the mechanics of the game like the things that the design is
really telling you, aren’t really different from DOOM.
LeBreton’s concluding thoughts on the subject are especially intriguing because of the
discomfort he expresses with his past development history on the Bioshock franchise, where he
served as a designer on the first two entries. Unlike many more modern AAA titles, the

7
The plot of Bioshock revolves around the fictional underwater city of Rapture, founded by an Ayn Rand analogue
named Andrew Ryan. The city’s founding principles fall under the umbrella of Rand’s philosophy of objectivism,
prizing the power and happiness of the individual over the well-being of the group.
41

Bioshock games did not shy away from engaging with political discourse or attempting to have a
point of view. They were games that had been, to use LeBreton’s terminology, made politically.
They clearly contained a point of view on real-world events and ideologies, but those viewpoints
were not the game’s raison d'être. For example, within five minutes of beginning the original
Bioshock, the player descends via bathysphere to the underwater city of Rapture, and is presented
with a short film and monologue from the city’s founder:
I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat
of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the
man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to
everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the
impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where
the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be
constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your
city as well (Bioshock).
Andrew Ryan, a thinly-veiled Ayn Rand proxy, spends much of the game ranting to the player
about the scourge of “parasites” that have invaded his city, sucking the resources from the more
deserving citizens and producing nothing of value. This culminates in a brutal sequence where
he informs the player that “a man chooses, a slave obeys,” and orders you to beat him to death
with a golf club. Ryan’s point in committing player-induced suicide is to demonstrate that if the
player were truly “a man” they could refuse to kill him, but the reality of the situation is that the
player cannot avoid killing Ryan short of quitting the game. This serves the purpose of revealing
the player-character has been brainwashed, while also delivering a meta-commentary on the
illusion of choice in video games: you either kill to progress the story, or quit. Bioshock 2, in
42

contrast to the original, reads as a cautionary tale about the dangers of collectivism in a post-
Ryan Rapture, and together the two works seem to present a fairly centrist thesis: both the left
and the right sides of the political debate are too extreme, and the truth is somewhere in the
middle.
8
LeBreton’s discomfort with Bioshock’s “both-sides” stance has likely only grown since
this interview given that, among other things, the position neglects the real-world divisions that
have, in the intervening years since the game’s release, polarized the United States. Additionally,
his anxiety anticipates the use of similar rhetoric by Donald Trump following the “Unite the
Right” rally in August, 2017 where far right activists clashed with counter-protesters in an
encounter that led to over 30 injuries and three deaths:
Reporter: "Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white
supremacists on the same moral plane?"
Trump: "I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a
group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with
clubs -- and it was vicious and it was horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch.
"But there is another side. There was a group on this side. You can call them the left --
you just called them the left -- that came violently attacking the other group. So you can
say what you want, but that’s the way it is.
Reporter: (Inaudible) "… both sides, sir. You said there was hatred, there was violence
on both sides. Are the --"
Trump: "Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides -- I think
there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt
about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say."

8
The third Bioshock title was primarily unrelated to the first two, though no less political in its presentation of a
racist theocratic version of an American breakaway country. The work was criticized for perpetuating racist tropes
in its storytelling and having incoherent plotting.
43

Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --"
Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very
bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both
sides. You had people in that group" (Holan).
The distinction between a political game and a game made politically has not become
standard usage, but LeBreton’s concern over the real-world impact of games with political
subjects is still on the minds of AAA salespeople to this day. Marketing teams attempt to
convince consumers that the video games they are selling are in no way political, sometimes to
outright mockery. During an interview with Polygon about The Division 2 (Ubisoft, 2019), a
game set in a devastated Washington, D.C. where players aid survivors in the fight against a
corrupt government in a new American civil war, creative director Terry Spier commented that
the game was apolitical:
Spier: And so should it be clear, we’re definitely not making any political statements.
Right? This is still a work of fiction, right? Our job —
Polygon: Wait a minute. It’s in DC.
Spier: Yes.
Polygon: Your central character here on the key art has an American flag bandana tied to
their backpack.
Spier: That’s correct.
Polygon: This is not a political statement?
Spier: Absolutely not.
Polygon: Taking up arms against a corrupt government is not a political statement?
44

Spier: No. It’s not a political statement. No, we are absolutely here to explore a new city
(Hall, “Tom Clancy’s The Division 2”).
Spier was immediately mocked, not only by readers in the interview’s comment section
(“you can’t have your fascism and eat it too, ubisoft” wrote Polygon user SixTwoSixFour), but
also by other press outlets ranging from Kotaku to The New Yorker (Alexandria) (Parkin, “The
Division 2”). This interview followed a marketing email from February 2018 which read “Come
see what a real government shutdown looks like in the Private Beta,” mere days after the longest
United States government shutdown in history had ended. The incidents surrounding The
Division 2 were not unique. David Cage, director of Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream,
2018) commented that despite the game’s subject matter dealing with the oppression of androids,
who were conscious yet considered second class citizens (they are, for example, forced to ride in
the back of the bus), he was not making a political game nor drawing on real-world history
(Grayson). A game dealing with the similar premise of discrimination against technologically-
enhanced humans, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Eidos Montréal, 2016), ran a marketing
campaign with the tagline “Aug Lives Matter” (Hurley). When some commented that the
marketing felt inappropriate, brand director Andre Vu tweeted at a developer from another studio
who had reached out, “no u r just trying prob, these words were thought in our game way before
the current events. Unfortunate coincidence for sure” (Vu). In a 2021 interview, Peter Tamte,
head of publisher Victura, claimed that the team working on then-upcoming game Six Days in
Fallujah, a first-person shooter set during the Second Battle of Fallujah, was merely trying to
“show how choices that are made by policymakers affect the choices that [a Marine] needs to
make on the battlefield. Just as that [Marine] cannot second-guess the choices by the
policymakers, we’re not trying to make a political commentary about whether or not the war
45

itself was a good or a bad idea” (Hall, “Six Days”). Lest one want to distinguish between
marketing interviews and the actual text of a game where developers might have the freedom to
be more straightforwardly political (after all, at the point where a player is playing the game
there is no longer a purchase on the line), it is clear that the development of in-game content
itself was influenced by anxieties over politics; Anthony Burch, lead writer on Borderlands 2
(Gearbox Software, 2012) told me that “[the playable character] Axton was the normal looking
white guy who played like the normal looking white guy so people can feel safe” (Allfather,
“Germ Gun”). “People” in this context are, of course, the assumed cisgender straight white male
players who are considered to be the core market demographic for many AAA games, and who
marketing teams often believe are unwilling to play as any character that does not look like them.
There is an irony in all of these quotes, especially in light of Bioshock, which is one of the most
critically successful video games in history and sold millions of copies (Ivan). Bioshock, for all
its flaws and milquetoast political positions, showed that a game which directly engages with
political questions can be wildly successful. Furthermore, there are games that take even more
pugnacious political stances than Bioshock’s centrism while still finding notable success.
Explicitly political games have addressed a wide variety of subjects, though critical
acclaim and commercial success are not always coupled. The independent games space is
seemingly more welcoming of games with a political message due to the financial stakes being
lower. Games like Cart Life (Richard Hofmeir, 2010), where the player struggles to survive and
provide for their family as a street vendor, and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 2013), a game where
the player serves as an immigration agent and border guard in a fictional Eastern European
nation, have aggressively political themes and have been met with significant critical success,
appearing in festivals and winning awards at venues such as IndieCade and the Independent
46

Games Festival (IGF). Designer Lucas Pope found Papers, Please so successful that he and his
family were able to live on the revenue from its sales for five years following its release while he
worked on his next title, Return of the Obra Dinn (2018). Both of Pope’ games also found
substantial accolades, winning grand prize in the IGF in 2014 and 2019, respectively. When I
asked him about whether he thought of Papers, Please as an explicitly political game, Pope drew
a distinction between political games and games about politics, saying,
For Papers Please, I get what you’re saying, it’s kind of weird to say it’s not a political
game… I might have said that though, actually… my approach, my thinking about
Papers, Please, when I was making it, was that obviously it’s about politics, like border
control is politics. But I wanted to kind of address it on a sort of meta-political level,
where like… there’s a lot of ambiguity in the game. There’s a lot of things you just don’t
know, you can’t know, or you get the wrong information about. So the game is not
telling you straight-up that border control is bad, but it’s trying to put you in the situation
where you can understand why someone would say it’s bad, and why someone would say
it’s good. So if I come out and say “this is a very political game” then you’re kind of
hunting for messages in there, and I really didn’t want that. I wanted to be clear that,
how you can sort of fall into either side when you’re in these situations, how the things
that happen to you as a border control agent in Arstotzka are not that predictable, maybe,
or you thought it was easy to reject people but actually it’s not. Or you thought it was
easy to let people through, but actually it’s not. I actually wanted to show more the
complexity of sort of these sorts of situations, basically. So if it’s clear that it’s a political
game then I think you’re going to lose people right off the bat and I think a lot of games,
at least at the time, or maybe not at the time, some games do, are created with the intent
47

to get across a certain message, basically, they want to show that this is good or this is
bad. And that was never my intent, I didn’t want to say that this is good and this is bad, I
wanted to create the situations where the player could almost go either way, or at least
understand why you would go either way. So that’s kind of why I backed away from the
idea that I’m making a political game, it was more like this game maybe about politics
but trying at least not to be strictly political, and I don’t know if I made that goal or
whatever, hit that mark, but Papers, Please came out six years ago… [J: “Border control
has become much more political, it feels.] Yeah, honestly, when I made Papers, Please I
felt like okay, there’s a hot-button issue here that’s going to get resolved in the next year
or two. My thought was ‘this issue is on the way out’ basically, so what a great time to
make a game and it’ll just disappear, and it’s really honestly very unfortunate that it’s so
fucking topical now, and it’s a surprise, of course, but I really wish it wasn’t so topical. I
wish it had just faded away, and people could just talk about border control being, “aren’t
we lucky that we don’t have to deal with those sorts of issues anymore” (Allfather, “The
Monkey’s Paw”).
Pope’s thinking about political games contrasts with LeBreton’s. His attempt in Papers, Please
to present a politically-charged situation without the game providing an accompanying reading
on the issues contains shades of that which caused LeBreton anxiety when looking back on his
contributions to Bioshock: there is a chance that a “centrist” presentation will implicitly acquit
one side of the argument or another, a dangerous move if one believes that one side is engaged in
activity that is dangerous to society.
Despite strong sales and accolades, for Papers, Please and Bioshock alike, the financial
success of political games is not guaranteed. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine (Dim Bulb
48

Games, 2018) puts the player in the shoes of a depression-era traveler and tasks them with
collecting stories from across the United States. These stories come from characters who have
traditionally been overlooked or marginalized in historical accounts of the era – women, Native
Americans, children, African-Americans, and so forth. In this way, it somewhat resembled the
story-gathering process that we ourselves were engaged with on the podcast. Both the game
(fictionally) and I (in reality) were engaged in the collection of firsthand accounts from
individuals who had been, for one reason or another, prevented from telling their stories, and in
both situations the collection was happening against a backdrop of political and social unrest.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine garnered multiple award nominations at the South by
Southwest festival and in the IGF, and won the Developer’s Choice Award at the 2017
IndieCade festival. The critical response stands in sharp contrast with the game’s sales, which
were low despite the notably accomplished writing team and voice work by rock star Sting.
Johnnamann Nordhagen,
9
the game’s lead designer, wrote that “Commercially, it’s a disaster. I
can’t discuss exact numbers, but in the first few weeks fewer people bought the game than I have
Twitter followers, and I don’t have a lot of Twitter followers” (Nordhagen). However, after his
blog post was picked up by mainstream press outlets, Nordhagen amended his writing, clarifying
that, “many headlines have said the game was a ‘failure’ or a ‘flop’. That’s not true, and
definitely not how we feel about it. Regardless of sales, this is an amazing artistic achievement
and we believe the recognition we’ve gotten proves that. Sales were disappointing, but sales are
only one aspect of a successful game.” WTWTLW seems to be the sort of cautionary tale that
AAA developers would wish to avoid; releasing a game with a multimillion dollar budget only to
lose it all would be seen as catastrophic. However, user generated reviews of the game seem to

9
Before WtWTLW, Nordhagen worked on both the Bioshock franchise alongside LeBreton, and Gone Home, a game
about a young woman’s first queer relationship. As a result, he was no stranger to explicitly political games.
49

indicate that it was not the political subject matter of the game that turned them off, but other
aspects of play. On the storefront Steam, where the game can be purchased, WTWTLW has a
“Very Positive” review rating, with 82% of the 479 user reviews recommending the title. Of the
negative reviews, users are more critical of the gameplay than the writing. In fact, even negative
reviews praise the subject matter: “I love how the stories change at every telling, like how the
story of the man at the campfire evolves into the story of the wandering ghost... However, once
you get all (or most of) the stories, the game does become very repetitive” (Az the Blue) writes
one reviewer. “This game has an amazing base and concept, but I found it too glitchy and not as
polished as it could be” another laments (FlockOfMeese). It would seem, then, that politics, like
any other subject matter, does not inherently condemn one’s work to the pit of financial despair –
players are happy to purchase and play a game irrespective of whether the subject matter is
political, as long as the actual experience of play is engaging and satisfactory.
One can conclude that the individuals who complain about politics in their games are
being disingenuous, and it is not “politics” that bothers them, but something deeper that they
may be unable to articulate – a sense that something valuable to them is being threatened or
challenged. A complaint about “politics” in video games often amounts to a plea by the
complainer to not challenge their worldview, because that challenge feels threatening. This is
the result of games, as an inherently political form, appealing to received cultural values in much
the same way that genre cinema does; and much as diehard fans of certain filmic genres bristle at
any work which may step outside the boundaries of their preconceived notions of what a film
“should” be, anti-politics-in-games players act with a sense of entitlement, believing that all
works should conform to their preferences. Social media outlets allow for these messages to be
amplified and articulated far more broadly than has been historically possible. However, despite
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the above evidence, the blame cannot be placed on AAA marketing teams alone for fostering an
environment where Gamergate-type movements can flourish; the networked ecosystem of online
communications into which said marketing is flung is itself structurally compromised.

Online Communication and Gamergate
To understand how the foundations of online communication structures might
lead to events such as Gamergate, it is useful to look at a several examples of political fallout
brought as a result of tapping and motivating game-playing communities. These communities
can be enticed to act politically when offered a compelling narrative to follow. It is important to
note that in the post-Gamergate world, risk-averse publisher behavior did not vanish. It has
simply redirected itself at new targets, with different political outcomes as a result. A modern
example is found in the case of e-sports: in October of 2019, the professional Hearthstone player,
Chung “blitzchung” Ng Wai, while participating in an interview as part of the the Asia-Pacific
Grandmasters championship series, wore a gasmask and stated “Liberate Hong Kong.
Revolution of our age!” in reference to the ongoing pro-democracy protests occurring in Hong
Kong. Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of Hearthstone in which Chinese technology firm
Tencent owns a stake, once more found itself in a politically-charged situation. The company
subsequently suspended Chung from professional play for one year and reduced his prize money
from the tournament to $0. Additionally, they fired the casters who had been providing
commentary for the tournament (Plunkett). In the wake of this action, players organized protests
for Blizzard’s annual “Blizzcon” convention in San Diego, and multiple United States
congresspeople wrote a letter to Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, rebuking the
company for acting against American interests in the name of profits and urging Kotick to
51

reverse course (Wyden). In the wake of this response, Chung had his prize money restored, and
his suspension, along with the two game casters, was reduced to six months. Blizzard’s former
president, J. Allan Brack, addressed the situation with an apology at Blizzcon, but it was clear
that even internally there were divisions within the company. Jeff Kaplan, former vice president
of the company, told an interviewer from The Washington Post that he believed the punishment
should have been entirely overturned (Favris). This entire situation shows not only from how
high within the company Chung’s punishment was being enforced. User protests and directed
protest activities do not stop at the ability to influence corporate decision-making; they can sway
global policy and national elections. Indeed, this was not the first time that Blizzard’s players
had caused the company to take specific action, though the long-term effects of a prior instance
were much more expansive.
In 2016, such an effort was spearheaded by the then-chairman of far-right American
news outlet Breitbart News, Steve Bannon. Bannon had long been interested in the gaming
world; in 2005 he was hired by the company Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) to raise
capital in order to facilitate the management of exploited Chinese citizens paid about $4 per day
to farm virtual currency in Blizzard’s game World of Warcraft (Dibbell). Bannon stayed with
IGE through its transformation into Affinity Media. It was during this time that
Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered while trying to build the business: an
underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young
men (most gamers were men) who disappeared for days or even weeks at a time in
alternate realities. While perhaps not social adepts, they were smart focused, relatively
wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them, their collective might
powerful enough to wreck IGE’s business and bend companies such as Blizzard to their
52

will. […] He began to wonder if these forces could be harnessed and, if so, how he might
exploit them (Green, 83).
Bannon’s opportunity came when he became the executive chairman of Breitbart in 2012. Two
years into his tenure, Bannon would champion the cause of Gamergate, providing an outlet for
the works of alt-right figure Milo Yiannopolus. Under Bannon’s guidance, Yiannopolus would
publish articles with headlines such as “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Games Industry
Apart” and “The Gaming Press’s Diversity Warriors Are All Talk and No Trousers”
(Yiannopolus). With Yiannopolus as his technology editor, Bannon explained his plan in a 2017
interview: “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power […] It was the pre-reddit.
It’s the same guys on [World of Warcraft website] Thottbot who were [later] on reddit […] You
can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto
politics and Trump” (147). Bannon’s plan worked – while there were many factors that led to
Trump’s election in 2016, Trump won 62% of white male voters – even in age demographics
where Trump lost overall (Clinton won voters aged 18-29 with a total of 58% to Trump’s 28%,
while she won voters aged 30-40 50% to 40%) (Pew Research Center, “An Examination”). In a
time when more than half of Americans self-identify as “gamers” and an election was decided by
less than 100,000 votes, without Bannon’s strategy to tip disaffected white male gamers into
conservatism it’s not unreasonable to claim Hillary Clinton would have been elected president of
the United States.
Why were gamers as a demographic so easy for Bannon to sway? Christopher Paul,
reading the work of Adrienne Shaw, writes that “Shaw argues that the foundational idea of
videogame culture is problematic, as it defines a culture around the study of a particular kind of
media and makes it more difficult to obtain the distance necessary for critique” (Paul, 69). The
53

nonsensical yet commonly-seen Gamergater rhetoric of “keep politics out of my games” can be
understood as a natural outgrowth of this culture, the result “of seeing a culture defined entirely
by the play and consumption of games, largely from a noncritical perspective.” Although these
words are cautioning against using games and their surrounding culture as an interpretive critical
lens to evaluate unrelated criteria, they unintentionally speak to the sort of political identity
adopted by many who self-identify as gamers. It is not uncommon to see references made online
to the fact that gamers are an oppressed minority, some going so far as to say that gamers are
more oppressed in the modern era than traditionally marginalized groups (Parkin, “Gamergate”).
This sentiment was widespread enough that it has become a meme. Many modern online
discussions about “gamer oppression” are posted ironically to mock those who believe that
gamers suffer real oppression.
10
Yet despite the mockery, it is this belonging to a community,
even one that is perceived as oppressed, that draws many gamergaters in, and it is the mode of
communication that allows a movement like Gamergate to fester.
How, then, is online communication itself, as a mode of interaction, implicated in this
mess? Writing about what he dubs “computer-mediated communication,” Derek Foster explains
that “the human/computer interface obscures the stage that individuals place themselves upon…
the connectivity that CMC [computer-mediated communication] virtual communities confer
upon us blinds the observer to the real character of the technology–all of its users exist as
individuals extending their selves through the computer network, but isolated by the necessary
mediation of the cathode ray tube and the keyboard” (Foster, 26). It is this unique together-
apartness that supplements the already isolationist marketing strategies. Not only were
developers siloed away from their fans, the moderating technology utilized by these fans to

10
An ever-expanding collection of these memes is continually being expanded at the “GamersRiseUp” subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamersRiseUp/
54

connect with each other has an inherently alienating quality, separating the human being sitting
at the computer from their social peers. This leads online communities to exist as hyper-real
spaces, where the social connections members of the community form have the potential to be,
despite their inherently distant nature, more emotionally intense than the average casual
relationship one might have in their real-world community. This is also owed in part to the self-
selecting nature of online communities, where membership is entirely voluntary. Membership is
a chosen identity, and as Foster notes, “This spirit of community [or Geist of Gemeinschaft as he
calls it elsewhere] is essential to the vitality of virtual communities. That which holds a virtual
community intact is the subjective criterion of togetherness, a feeling of connectedness that
confers a sense of belonging” (29). This sense of intense togetherness and belonging coexists
alongside the distancing properties of the medium. The “ability to play with identity, anonymity,
and the distanciation of space and time” (32) leads to the dehumanization of other parties with
whom one is communicating by virtue of the computer-imposed interpolation into the
communicatory act. This dehumanization (even before the above-mentioned siloing of
developers led to their identities as individuals becoming obfuscated) inherently encourages any
online attack on a person to be more vitriolic and threatening than one might issue in person.
The target is far away, not directly in front of you, so there is no fear of reprisal. There is no
inherent person-to-person connection that might evoke empathy. Web-based communication is
also lacking in standard conversational cues such as body language, leaving the text often
ambiguous and open to misinterpretation. All of these factors were in play not just in 2016, but
long before. The already-present dynamics of communication and power in online communities
simply was waiting for an individual to catalyze them for ends broader in scope than simply
harassment.
55

The gamers that Bannon tapped for his political project had already formed communities;
he did not himself need to work to build these groups, he merely needed to co-opt them. These
groups were mostly populated by white, cisgender males between the ages of 15 to 40. Even
before Bannon arrived, gaming spaces were known for rampant oppression. As Bailey Poland
notes, “Online spaces have always been, and remain, areas where dominance and control remain
deeply important, and the same types of domination tactics that are used offline appear online”
(Poland, 17). Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transmisogyny and more were common tokens of
these online communities, as the majority demographic had a vested interest in maintaining the
status quo. If an attempt was made to call out this sort of negative behavior, a common response
would be to claim that it was just “trolling” or “a joke” – and anybody who was genuinely
offended or didn’t find the “jokes” amusing had thin skin and needed to toughen up.
The question that remains yet unaddressed is why Bannon and Breitbart were so
successful in recruiting gamer communities to their political banner. The answer is comprised of
two halves, and together they, unfortunately, are the latest reprise of a classic refrain, now
reimagined for a ludic culture. The first half of the answer can be found by examining the actual
language of those engaged in online hate speech.
11
Writing on antisemitism, Sartre notes that
one should “Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their
replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing
themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in
words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by
giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors” (Sartre, 13). In an
era where every citizen plays games and “gamification” (see Chapter 4 for more discussion of

11
This, of course, is not a blanket analysis of all online hate speech but remains confined to the overall discussion of
rhetoric within gaming-focused communities.
56

this practice) has become a popular concept even in work-focused spaces, the “just a joke”
rhetoric of modern internet bigots works to obfuscate the severity of their comments in much the
way that Sartre describes the anti-Semite’s ridiculous reasoning, transforming hatespeech into a
playful rhetorical action. Those well-versed in modes of play from a lifetime of gaming
intuitively grasp the rules. The second half of the answer derives from an analysis of the
rhetorical power of fascist rhetoric. Fascism, we are told by Hannah Arendt quoting de
Tocqueville, appeals to the masses by couching its propaganda within the appeal of “the great
first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from the history
of the human race” (Arendt, 345). These totalitarian movements provide their potential
adherents with a simple, compelling narrative that allows one to easily single out specific targets
as enemies at whose feet all blame for one’s misfortune may be placed. In the instance of
Gamergate, things were no different: Gamergaters are told that the feminists and their supporters
are why games are now bad, and thus they must be eliminated.

Lessons on Community Building
The community of developers and listeners cultivated by the Red Pages Podcast, though
obviously not on the scale of the readership of Breitbart, revealed several things to us as we
attempted to grow the audience base for the program. The first was that, as we had expected,
listener numbers swung wildly from episode to episode based on two major factors: whether the
episode had a guest interview or was a “filler” episode, and who the interviewee was. More
interesting was that the most popular episodes were not necessarily the ones one might expect.
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Our most popular episode, which garnered thousands of listens
12
, was an interview with Tarn
“Toady One” Adams, the developer of Dwarf Fortress. Tarn brought the weight of his
playerbase and fan following to bear, and other episodes released in temporal proximity to that
one saw a listener bump simply as spillover from his appearance. In other words, despite Dwarf
Fortress’ relatively low level of popularity when compared to AAA blockbusters, Tarn’s
preexisting community was engaged enough in his work that they followed him to our show in
record numbers. For contrast, when I interviewed Jeff Kaplan, who served not only as Blizzard’s
vice president but also as the lead designer on one of their flagship titles, Overwatch, the episode
only garnered a couple hundred listens. This was despite Overwatch’s massive multi-million
user playerbase and a significantly increased marketing effort on our end to promote the episode
in advance of its release – I reached out to multiple Blizzard-focused press outlets and fan
communities to inform them of the interview, and of those that responded at all most indicated
they simply were not interested. Hearing from Kaplan, unless he was directly marketing a
feature of his product, did not appeal to many people; evidence has shown that the majority of
listeners only care about the game, not the person.
13

The listenerbase’s interest in games over people was, as explained above, a trained
response as a result of corporate marketing practices, and even as we attempted to break the
tendency down by highlighting the individuals before we ever discussed their work, we still saw
the behavior manifest. Listener questions were nearly always focused on product-specific
minutiae or company-focused trivia, as opposed to inquiries about the individual as a person or

12
Based on “clicks” – podcast metrics are difficult to quantify at the lower scale, especially in retrospect when the
data was not actively being gathered, so listener numbers are taken solely from the number of people who listened to
the program on its hosted website at archive.org and not via podcast software such as iTunes, Stitcher, et cetera.
13
Unfortunately my interview with Kaplan predated much of the subsequent turmoil at Blizzard Entertainment by
several months – a week later the company engaged in mass layoffs, to say nothing of the censure of Chung for
political speech later in the year.
58

more general queries regarding work practices, technique or craft. Examples of typical
submitted questions were things like “Why did you decide to include abilities such as jetpack,
sprint, armor lock, etc in reach? Looking back, do you feel like it took away from the "Halo" feel
of things?” (Allfather, “The Jabba Comparison) (asked of Joe Tung, executive producer of Halo
Reach), or “Where did the name for the studio come from cause I really like the name Fullbright
Company and I've always been curious?” (Allfather, “Japanada”) (asked of Steve Gaynor, lead
designer of Gone Home). It was only occasionally that more social or political questions would
creep in, such as when one listener asked Rand Miller, designer of Myst, “What is up with that
[conservative political pundit] ‘Rush Limbaugh Understands’ easter egg in Myst?” (Allfather,
“The Tripod”). Laughing, Rand explained that “That was a little fun statement we decided we
could put in and make a political statement without actually being political, it was like a
challenge. Because we figured we could make a statement that if you liked Rush Limbaugh, you
would go ‘wow that’s cool, see, those guys like Rush Limbaugh,” and if you didn’t like Rush
Limbaugh, you’d realize the guy who said it was like a crazy man. So you could take either
side.” Even here, in the prehistoric days of independent game development (Myst released in
1993) the anxiety about making a political statement can be seen – and despite Rand’s obvious
disdain for Limbaugh, he and his team felt that an outright condemnation was beyond what they
felt comfortable doing, instead subsuming the critique not only within a layer of plausible
deniability, but behind a significant amount of effort. Once more, we see fear over alienating
one’s potential consumers manifesting; for pragmatic reasons, Miller’s distaste for Limbaugh
was obfuscated as a result. The Limbaugh-related voice line can only be heard if one listens to a
recording of the character Achenar backwards, which is not possible under normal gameplay
circumstances. A player must navigate to the game’s installation directory and locate the
59

Quicktime video file for that segment of the game and manually play it in reverse in order to
uncover the easter egg.
The style of listener questions stands in contrast to the types of questions posed by the
hosts. As the primary interviewers, we intended to both counterbalance the consumerist
questions of our audience and to also see if our guests would articulate any particularly profound
truths about games or the discussion around them – whether it was narrative worldbuilding,
player psychology, art and visual direction, or another topic. Sample questions might include
asking a writer “How do you manage when you can’t get your vision into the art?” when
discussing ludonarrative dissonance and the tension of balancing storytelling intention against
the systems of gameplay, or “How did you make calls about where to diverge from historical
accuracy and where it was important to be as exact as possible?” when querying about a game
with a highly-researched historical setting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these sorts of questions were
the ones that interviewees were most excited to answer – unlike questions about specific in-game
features, they were not the sort of things one might find in an issue of Game Informer or EGM,
where the focus is on promoting the product and building hype for future sales. These sorts of
conversations were the kind of fare a developer might have expected to encounter in conference
spaces such as the Game Developers Conference’s Indie Summit or at IndieCade, which were
often industry-insular spaces, or on blogs like BrainyGamer which existed, like Red Pages,
outside of mainstream games media.
It has been shown that gamers can be mobilized by a negative narrative into taking
atrocious action, but can the same be done for the positive? Despite modern AAA developers
becoming savvier as to allowing players mediated interface with developers, they still cannot
match the intimacy that independent developers have when building communities around their
60

work. It is common to see designers who support their work via crowdfunding platforms like
Patreon
14
, and who host dedicated chat rooms using networks like Slack or Discord. In these
spaces, the most dedicated members of the creator’s fan community can have direct unfiltered
access to the people making the product that they enjoy. There is a somewhat ironic siloing of
these communities away from the public-facing internet, as these chat rooms cannot be indexed
by search engines and may even be private, with invitations only going out to a developer’s
paying supporters. They are also much easier to moderate than platforms like Twitter or Reddit,
as the subject of the chat room is almost always the individual with power over the chat room
and thus the ability to remove offensive material or ban accounts that issue inflammatory
statements. Thus it is unsurprising that the general tone and tenor of conversation in these chat
rooms is often more civil than one would find in more public, loosely moderated internet spaces.
The chat rooms being focused on a specific subject is another factor working towards a more
respectful discourse – everybody is there to discuss something specific. In other words, the
community has been given an identity that all members of the community have bought into,
much as Gamergate and Bannon provided a subject and an identity to a legion of disgruntled
gamers. These communities can be catalyzed for positive political action in much the same way
that Gamergate was for malicious purposes.

Conclusions
The Red Pages project serving as the basis for this chapter has a sort of humor to it, as
my collaborators and I never expected it to grow into what it became, nor did I personally
anticipate that it would become foundational to an academic critique of an entire industry – at the

14
Patreon allows anybody to set up a recurring monthly subscription to support a project, as opposed to other
crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, where a certain amount of predetermined funding is being
sought and the funding campaign runs for a short, limited period of time.
61

time, I fully expected to write about literature for my entire career, with games not entering into
my then-conceptual professional life. As it turned out, however, despite the goal of interviewing
authors falling away from the podcast fairly early, literary engagement with games had been
included from the start. My own enrollment in an English literature graduate school program,
eventually situating the podcast within a methodological framework of literary analysis, has in a
way brought things full circle. In retrospect, it is both surprising and entirely predictable that in
many ways our interviews differed from traditional “literary” interviews, where, according to
Roach, “the dominant post-enlightenment conception of authorship in the West has a powerful
ally in the interview, which underlines the notion of the author as a privileged subject, an
individual artist closeted away from society and whose writings are an almost speech-like
emanation of the self, a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’” (18). With the exception
of a few truly solo developers, most of our interview subjects were quick to deflect credit for the
final project away from themselves. “[Developers like Lucas Pope are] very rare,” Kaplan told
me. “In games, it actually annoys me because, you know, as somebody who has become the face
of Overwatch and as a spokesperson for Overwatch, a lot of people associate me as the person
who made Overwatch. I was one of 70 people who made Overwatch and this isn't me trying to be
humble. My contribution was equal to or lesser than the 69 other people on the project at the
time” (Allfather, “Chatting with Jeff Kaplan”). Similarly, Nordhagen told us that upon
undertaking the development of WTWTLW, the first thing he did was seek out additional
collaborators because he didn’t feel qualified to produce the work that he had envisioned as a
solo project. While there are auteur game developers, the tapestry of interviews we conducted
wove a story of an industry with a fundamentally different perception of authorship, one likely
62

influenced by the erasure of the developers by their publishers as much as the necessarily
collaborative process of development.
Gamergate’s violent excesses do not, of course, tell the whole story of game
communities. There are many contrasting examples of successful positive community building
around video games. One such instance has been the narrative games conference, NarraScope,
which is open to both developers and players alike. Narrative games was defined as broadly as
possible: to avoid political infighting that had simmered within the related Interactive Fiction
creator groups in the past, NarraScope defined a narrative game as broadly as possible: if you
believed something was a narrative game, then that was good enough for the sake of the
conference. Organized by the Interactive Technology Fiction Foundation,
15
NarraScope was
first held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June of 2019, born out of a flyer passed
around by Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2018. I volunteered
both out of an interest in the subject matter and in an attempt to build a more inclusive, positive
game-focused space. The conference quickly found an organizing committee sourced from
individuals interested in narrative games. This coalition was composed not only of professional
game developers but also of academics, hobbyists and enthusiasts, and the conference’s eventual
attendee makeup reflected this – over 250 people gathered at MIT in an event that spoke not only
to the conference’s stated goals but also to the above-addressed concerns about barriers between
developers and players. There was no distinction in a conference session between a person who
made games and a person who played them (and often these categories overlapped.) Although
there was a small theoretical community that the IFTF had served online to this point, the reality
proved to be larger and more diverse than any on the committee expected. The big tent approach

15
The IFTF is a non-profit organization that “helps ensure the ongoing maintenance, improvement, and preservation
of the tools and services crucial to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction, as well as the development of
new projects to foster the continued growth of this art form.” (https://iftechfoundation.org/mission/)
63

had succeeded. NarraScope remains too new to judge whether it will succeed in sustaining itself
in perpetuity, but the first year’s enthusiastic response was highly promising.
This was obviously not my first attempt to engage in positive community-building work;
I had done so with both the Red Pages Podcast listenerbase on a small scale, and subsequently
during the development of Frog Fractions 2, but each of these efforts was markedly different in
both approach and results. Red Pages is a wholly online community, and the relationship that
most listeners have with me, my cohosts and our guests is parasocial. In this way, it closely
resembles the popular video game livestreamers one finds on websites like Twitch, Mixer and
YouTube. With Frog Fractions 2, we were able to form a community built more heavily on
direct interaction and dialogue with our users, and though we were not focused on political
action at the time, we were able to demonstrate that the community of players were willing to go
to extraordinary lengths for the sake of continuing to learn about the game, interact with us as
developers, and solve the mysteries we were inventing as part of the project. In the next chapter,
I will specifically discuss the development process of Frog Fractions 2, and what I learned from
working on its development.

64

Chapter 2
Frog Fractions 2, Alternate Reality Games
and Participatory Propaganda

Alternate Reality Games
Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, are a relatively new form of entertainment when
compared to other genres of play. They combine traditional game design, narrative storytelling,
broad-scale social interaction, and the temporality of a live event, and play occurs across a
variety of venues such as fictional websites, discussion forums, centralized group chats and in-
person events and meetups. They often straddle the line between a standalone attempt at
interactive narrative and a commercial marketing effort, regularly being deployed not for their
own sake but instead with the intent to boost the market presence of another project. ARGs ask
their players to willingly suspend their disbelief and step into a game world that exists as an
overlay on the real one – an alternate reality, where fictionalized events take place. ARGs can
include thousands or even millions of simultaneous players, and the design principles of the
ARG have broken free from their place in the world of entertainment and begun to echo across
the modern geopolitical landscape. The application is obvious: how can a political actor
effectively communicate to a large population and convince them to believe in and participate
within a specific preconstructed version of reality? As a form already largely streamlined for
marketing efforts, the ARG presents an off-the-shelf solution for groups looking to propagate a
message. In this chapter, I will look at the history and form of the alternate reality game, outline
my own experiences designing ARGs for both video games and film, and then leverage the
insights I gained from that design work in examining how seemingly innocuous design
methodogies can be repurposed to malicious ends.
65

The concept of an alternate reality game was presaged in the short story The Tremendous
Adventures of Major Brown, published in 1903 by G. K. Chesterton in Harper’s Weekly. Over
the course of the story, the retired Major Brown is an unwilling participant in what would be, by
modern standards, a custom-tailored ARG. Actors approach him with information, he is given
confusing messages, encounters bizarre phenomena (for example, a bed of pansies that spell out
the message “Death to Major Brown”), is assaulted by a mysterious figure, and is sent on a
small-scale adventure to track down the source of the conspiracy. When he does, he learns that
his strange experience has has all been facilitated by the Adventure and Romance Agency,
Limited. These puppetmasters have accidentally targeted the Major with their game, which was
commissioned on behalf of the prior resident of his home.
16
As is explained in the story, “the
man who feels [a] desire for a varied life pays a yearly or quarterly sum to the Adventure and
Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him
with startling and weird events” (Chesterton).
Despite this nascent form, this proto-ARG story was acting as a tool for commercial
promotion: though the tale runs only four pages in Harper’s, nearly half of that space is
dedicated to advertisements for hotels, bread machines, cigarettes, automobiles, and other goods
and services. It is obvious that since their earliest theoretical conception, ARGs have been
inextricably linked to the idea of a marketplace. Even were one to read Chesterton’s story in an
anthology, divorced from the advertisements that surrounded its initial publication, market forces
are present in the work itself: Major Brown, upon confronting his tormentors, is presented with a
bill tallying the expenses for the adventure he was provided. In other words, the ARG has since
its prefiguring been transactional. My own experience designing ARGs has exposed to me the

16
Additional writing on ARGs and Major Brown can be found in Bryan Alexander’s white paper “Antecedents to
Alternate Reality Games,” published in 2006 by The International Game Developers Association’s Alternate Reality
Games Special Interest Group.
66

Fig. 1. Page 2 of Major Brown in Harpers, illustrating the space allocation between the
story (left column) and advertisements (right column) (HathiTrust).
67

thin line between what we think of as “play” and aggressive sales techniques, though what is
being “sold” is not always a durable good and can often be a set of ideas or philosophy. To
understand how this occurs, I will briefly provide an overview of early commercial ARGs before
moving into a discussion of my work on the ARG for Frog Fractions 2.
Nearly a century after Chesterton published Major Brown, Microsoft launched The Beast,
an ARG released in 2001 to promote the release of Stephen Spielberg’s film AI: Artificial
Intelligence, and the modern commercial ARG was born.
17
Using clues in the film’s trailers,
print marketing, posters, and other marketing material, a vast network of puzzle and story
content, taking the form of writing, video, interactive games and more, was strewn across dozens
of websites. Sean Stewart, head writer on the project, wrote:
[the] idea was that we would tell a story that was not bound by communication platform:
it would come at you over the web, by email, via fax and phone and billboard and TV and
newspaper, SMS and skywriting and smoke signals too if we could figure out how. The
story would be fundamentally interactive, made of little bits that players, like detectives
or archaeologists, would discover and fit together. We would use political pamphlets,
business brochures, answering phone messages, surveillance camera video, stolen diary
pages…
…in short, instead of telling a story, we would present the evidence of that story, and let
the players tell it to themselves.
Anybody who noticed these connections could experience a story that tied to that of the
film and appeared to be actually happening in the “real world” despite being obviously fictional
– thus creating an alternate reality. ARGs present a fictional narrative that is “specifically

17
Non-commercial proto-ARGs existed before The Beast. Most notable amongst these is Ong’s Hat, which is
discussed in depth in the subsequent chapter.
68

designed to tap into the power of collective problem solving through powerful stories and
participatory mechanisms” (J. Kim). To unravel the secrets of The Beast required the
collaboration of thousands of players who had never experienced anything like it, and it stoked
many of their imaginations. “I was tremendously taken by the experience of The Beast,” author
and ARG designer Maureen McHugh said. “I just really liked it, and contacted Sean and said, ‘if
you ever do another one of these I would be so interested in writing for you.’” At the peak of its
activity, a discussion list dedicated to the game was generating tens of thousands of messages
each week (Manjoo). Three years later, Stewart and McHugh would work with Microsoft on I
Love Bees, an ARG designed to promote the video game Halo 2 (Bungie, 2004), which engaged
over three million users across a three-month run.
Other subsequent successful mainstream ARGs followed a similar model – intending to
market a film or product, plant clues in media that seed a broader storyline and then build a
community of puzzle-solvers that will, in theory, both consume your product and serve as a viral
marketing team across the internet as the community attempts to recruit more and more people to
solve the ARG’s puzzles.
18
This is not to say that ARGs are solely the realm of the corporate
marketing department. Non-corporate ARGs have occasionally broken into the mainstream
consciousness. Artist collective Synydyne’s performance art ARG This is My Milwaukee (2008-
2009) or Jeff Hull’s San Fransisco-based “Jejune Institute” (2008) are two prominent examples,
with the story of the latter inspiring a television show for AMC in March 2020. ARGs have also
been used for education: the 2007 game World Without Oil, from a team headed by Ken Eklund,
sought to explore a future reeling from a sudden shortage of oil, and was funded by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. However, these tend to be outliers; the vast majority of

18
This didn’t work so well for The Beast, as AI: Artificial Intelligence failed to make back its budget at the box
office despite the popularity of the ARG.
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large-scale ARGs are done for product promotion. As McHugh put it, “most ARGs are
expensive to produce, and the only funding available, unless you get an art grant, is to find
somebody who thinks they can use it as content marketing.” This anecdote is confirmed by the
research of Elizabeth Bonsignore et al, who write that “transmedia practice becomes a
commodity system where each output is treated as a series of promotional exchanges, a ‘complex
of significations which at once represents (moves in place of), advocates (moves on behalf of)
and anticipates (moves ahead of) the circulating entities to which it refers’ (Wernick 1991,
p.182). While such a system is often acknowledged as producing new modes of expression, these
modes are often treated as secondary to their larger economic orientations” (27). Marie Lamb,
one of the writers of World Without Oil, has pointed towards the commercialization of ARGs as
a primary factor in their decline in popularity with their historically-strongest supporters, telling
me that “ad agencies came in, and they took over […] once they saw the success that people like
Microsoft were having with I Love Bees, and Warner Brothers with The Dark Knight and Why So
Serious, it kind of became a marketing tool, which is not a bad thing, but I think people started
associating ARGs with marketing, and so people kind of turned off because it was like another
commercial. ‘Oh, it’s just a fancy way to advertise whatever they’re trying to sell us.’” That
commercialism has negatively impacted ARGs is ironic, given how closely associated with
commerce Major Brown was in 1903.
I had lightly participated in a few of the largest-scale ARGs in the past, but I was in no
way well-versed in their construction or history. My experience of playing one was to check in
periodically to see if there was anything I could solve, and then wait for the hivemind to
complete challenges that were not easy enough for me to complete alone. I was interested
enough in their design, however, that I started to construct one of my own, inspired by the work
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of the Mysterious Package Company. Mysterious Package is a Canadian-based boutique
organization that functions as a real-world modern day Adventure and Romance Agency, selling
fictional experiences to their customers in the form of bizarre and puzzling packages containing
mysteries to unravel and stories to peruse, many based on the work of weird fiction authors such
as H.P. Lovecraft or Robert W. Chambers. Enamored with the idea that I could create an
anonymous mystery for my friends to solve, I tried my hand at creating an ARG, but soon found
I did not have the technical expertise require to bring the project to fruition in a way that I found
satisfying, and thus I shelved the project.

Joining Frog Fractions 2
In 2012, Twinbeard Studios released a Flash game entitled Frog Fractions. Although the
game initially presented as a poorly made educational title with play in the style of Missile
Command (Atari, 1980), it soon unfurled itself into an increasingly convoluted series of
subversions of game design tropes that stood as commentary on various trends in the medium.
Frog Fractions became an internet sensation, eventually being played over one million times and
winning “URL of the Year” from video game press outlet Giant Bomb. Emboldened by this
success, Twinbeard founder Jim Stormdancer (formerly Jim Crawford), quit his job to become a
full-time game developer and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a sequel.
19
The sales
pitch was unique; as Frog Fractions was a game built upon surprise and subversion, a
straightforward successor would be immediately hamstrung by player expectation. It would be
expected that the game was surprising in its content and delivery, and thus no player would end
up surprised; every twist would be anticipated. To circumvent this, Twinbeard promised that if

19
The Frog Fractions 2 Kickstarter can be found at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/475057068/frog-fractions-
2
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the project was funded successfully, they would eventually release some sort of product and do
so in secret. There would be no release date, no title, and no further information provided: it
would enter the marketplace entirely without fanfare. Anybody who backed the campaign would
be able to submit guesses as to what Frog Fractions 2 was, and once enough people had found
the game at some undetermined point in the future, Twinbeard would declare that “the jig is up”
and pull back the curtain on what they had made for the entire world to see. This unorthodox
marketing strategy worked: Twinbeard secured $72,107 (of a requested $60,000), and in addition,
received an additional $100,000 from Turner’s Adult Swim game publishing arm to facilitate
development. The game would eventually release in December of 2016, hidden inside another
game, Glittermitten Grove, which was also developed by the Frog Fractions team but, as a ruse
to hide the true nature of the product, released under another developer’s name, Mostly
Tigerproof. Purchasing Glittermitten ended up providing the consumer with two distinct games,
often to the surprise of players who were unaware of Frog Fractions.
20

The Kickstarter campaign’s pitch video was unorthodox in more ways than just
attempting to raise money for a theoretical mystery box of a product. The video was presented
by a fictional game development studio, the Ashby Brewery and Indie Game Studio. As the
fictional employees pitched their game, the video was interrupted first by visual glitches and
video artifacting, and ultimately by a group of time travelers. It seemed like a gag to most who
visited the website but was in reality the beginning of an alternate reality game. As a result, an
online community of people who enjoyed playing them had organically sprung up, congregating

20
Glittermitten Grove was itself a fully-realized city simulation game where the player designed a town for faeries
to inhabit. Although the development team received a small number of messages from Glittermitten players who
felt deceived by the game being a front for Frog Fractions 2, the average response was highly positive – more
positive than the feedback for Frog Fractions 2, with requests for additional content and expanded gameplay
features being common.
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on the (sadly now defunct) website Unfiction, which for years served as a hub for research about
and play of ARGs. The members of this alternate reality game-solving community, who were
well-trained from prior ARG experiences, quickly realized there was more to the video than a
simple comic fundraising effort (Unfiction). Over the next year, they would attempt to unravel
an increasingly arcane series of clues and puzzles in the hope that doing so would lead them to
discover what Frog Fractions 2 was and how they could find it.
My involvement with the Frog Fractions 2 project grew directly out of one of my
interviews as part of Red Pages Podcast. Approximately a year after Frog Fractions 2’s
Kickstarter, I reached out to Jim and asked him if he’d be interested in appearing on Red Pages
to discuss our usual subjects: development, culture, media, and his interests. I was aware of the
alternate reality game aspect of the campaign but had not followed it closely. During our
interview, Jim refused to speak about the subject. After we were off the record, however, he
Fig. 2. Screen Capture of the now-defunct Unfiction forums, sometimes called the
“Unforum”. Accessify.
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admitted that things had gone off the rails. It had proven to be too large a task to develop the
Frog Fractions 2 (FF2) software while simultaneously running a real-time interactive
participatory experience both on- and offline, and so development on the latter had been dropped
despite the narrative of the game not reaching any satisfactory conclusion.
In response to his admission, I offered him a band-aid solution: he could take the work I
had done on my shelved ARG project free of charge. I told him that he could take the parts I had
already completed for free, and use it to buy another month or two of time, during which he
could get caught up on work. Instead of taking me up on this offer, he instead suggested I join
the development team and manage the ARG going forward. Several discussions later, I
unexpectedly found myself working on Frog Fractions 2.

Communities: Early Days of the Frog Fractions ARG and Unfiction
Internet communities are fickle beasts to create and even more difficult to grow and
maintain. While Derek Powazek was correct in 2002 when he wrote that “web communities
happen when users are given tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming
intimate relationships over time” (xxii), the landscape of communities and the number of
communities on offer is radically different fifteen years on. I had firsthand experience in
community management: as a teenager, I spent hundreds of hours managing community forums
– and I learned firsthand that “it’s important to remember that, your users are not your enemy.
There may be a few problem cases, and it’s important to handle them well. But you must never
lose faith in your users” (Powazek, 117). I also learned the opposite: your users must never lose
faith in you. This lesson came painfully firsthand from the website BoktaiOnline
21
where,
beginning in 2006 at the age of 15, I acted as administrator to a small userbase of gamers who

21
BoktaiOnline is still available in a modern form at https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/boktaionline/.
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liked the Boktai franchise of video games. The site grew significantly under my ministrations,
rising from perhaps a dozen members to several hundred. Size led to contempt, however: in
2008, a covert disinformation campaign began, perpetuated by several disgruntled users who
were dissatisfied with the way the website was being run. Examples of pain points for users
ranged from experimental forum features leaking before full implementation and causing site
drama between users chosen to test and users excluded from testing, lack of agreement over what
level of profanity should be permitted, and how to deal with unpopular or divisive community
members. The disinformation campaign culminated in roughly half the website’s active
memberbase, including one of the two administrators, losing faith in the team that ran the page
(roughly two administrators and four moderators total) and leaving to form a competing website.
This was bad for both pages: as the competing site soon failed due in part to BoktaiOnline’s
long-standing reputation and ability to attract new users, but BoktaiOnline was itself irreparably
damaged as well, and never returned to its prior levels of activity. Although I also acted as a
moderator or administrator for several other websites at the same time, the failures, both my own
and those of others, at BoktaiOnline taught me the importance of maintaining consistency of
experience for users, and how to effectively address problematic members of a community such
that they did not destroy the experience for everybody. There are now hundreds of millions of
websites clamoring for user engagement, desperately seeking to build a community that can be
monetized, minting the next tech billionaire. At the same time, a small number of websites and
platforms have emerged as centralized discussion venues: on Reddit, for example, one can find
communities willing to talk about nearly any subject, and if not, you can start your own with the
knowledge that you already have millions of potential members – you only need tap into the
existing Reddit userbase. The ease of use of sites like Reddit, combined with immediate access
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to this massive userbase, has allowed a limited number of websites to corner the market on
online communities. It is not impossible to succeed in the face of these behemoths, but one will
likely end up engaging with them if one wants to develop a community on the internet today –
and their ubiquity means that the design decisions and feature sets of these platforms dictate
what your communities can do and will look like. Much like BoktaiOnline, the Frog Fractions
community began on a small dedicated independent forum, but in the end, it was itself subsumed
into a megaplatform: the chat client Discord.
I was lucky in that I did not have to build a community for Frog Fractions from scratch,
but after I signed onto the project, the community of solvers grew explosively and needed far
more attention than the small cadre of players that had existed before my hiring. As previously
stated, Jim had, with the rest of the development team, produced a strong foundation for the
ARG which I will briefly outline here before moving into my role in production and
development. Jim had conceived of not one, but two ARGs – dual tracks that presented
seemingly unrelated sets of puzzle content that would eventually merge into a single combined
experience. The first of these was the “Frog Fractions 2 ARG,” which will be discussed in this
section, and the second was the “Eye Sigil ARG,” which will be explained subsequently.
The FF2 ARG was straightforward in that it was clearly linked to the production and
story of what would eventually be the video game Frog Fractions 2. Much of the early solving
of the ARG at this time was done by users on the forums of the website Unfiction, which shut
down in 2017. Unfiction had been designed for ARG players to meet and discuss the games they
were playing, as well as collaboratively work through challenges. One of the site staff, Marie
Lamb, had served as a writer on World Without Oil, and discussed with me the challenges of
managing an ARG-focused forum:
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When Ken hired me for World Without Oil, one of the things I realized is that you had to
know your audience in such a way that you could help them play the game, and help the
game avoid pitfalls in terms of being hijacked. ARG hijacking was a big thing – it’s not
so much now, but back then there were a lot of people who would put up their own pages
and pretend that they were part of the game. And some of it was just kind of like fan-
fiction; they just wanted to be a part of whatever was going on […]. And then there were
people who would deliberately try to hijack the game because they wanted to draw
players away from kind of the official storyline and take it in their own direction, so it
was more like they wanted to tell their own story but by syphoning off players from the
main part of the game. And that was a little bit… that wasn’t so cool. We didn’t want
people to do that, so that’s when, especially when stakes got higher, in some of these
commercial ARGs like I Love Bees, which you know, people figured out very early on it
was a promo for Halo, that brought in a lot of video gamers and people who were not so
much interested in ARGs as they were in video games and Halo and Microsoft. And of
course that brought in a bunch of people who were like, y’know, ‘I want to disrupt this’
for whatever purposes, notorious [sic] or otherwise. That was when it really became an
issue of ‘Is this canon? Is this legit? Is this the real page, or is this somebody pretending
that they’re part of the game?’ A lot of our community management on Unfiction was
trying to sort through some of those things, some of those issues, and say ‘this is legit,
this is not legit, this looks like it may be legit, we don’t know yet, we’re still working on
it. A lot of it was just kind of managing people’s expectations, keeping them on track,
this is the current puzzle that needs to be solved, these are the unanswered questions, and
there was a lot more of… you see very little of this in games now, especially.
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The community of ARG players on Unfiction (referred to henceforth as the “FF2 Seekers”)
would eventually migrate to the online chat messaging program Discord to allow for more
immediate and responsive communication than the web forum allowed. By following a URL in
the Kickstarter pitch video led to a subpage of the Twinbeard website:
http://twinbeard.com/eolo5387.html. This page simply displayed a photograph of bread. From
here, the FF2 Seekers would discover the existence of a parody company, Twinbread. The
Twinbread page contained code written in brainfuck, a minimalist programming language that,
as its name indicates, is designed to be overly complicated and esoteric. Users then visited
http://twinbread.com/eolo5387.html (bold for distinction,) and examined the source code. By
stripping all characters out of the source code that were not included in the set of eight characters
used by brainfuck, the URL for a YouTube video would be revealed.
22
The video itself was
footage of a Commodore Datassette audio signal for a 50Hz PAL computer. By inverting the
audio and cleaning it, a ROT13 encrypted URL would then lead players back to the Twinbread
domain, where they could download a Game Boy Advance ROM for the fictional video game
Castlevania: Passacaglia of Disrepair. Attempting to play the ROM image, however, results in
audio of Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up” playing - a popular online
trolling technique indicating that one has been led on a wild goose chase.
Despite this thumbing of the nose directed at the FF2 Seekers, the Twinbread page was
not, ultimately, a wild goose chase: all of the above was merely misdirection intended to buy
time while the game was in development. The critical factor was that the Twinbread page also
contained a recipe for making bread. In the original Frog Fractions, a portion of the game was a
parser-based interactive fiction piece, in the style of classic titles Colossal Cave or Zork.

22
The video, “Kernel of Truth,” may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzVP-gRfRTY
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Presented entirely in the form of text, players typed what they wanted to do into an entry field,
and if possible, the computer would tell them the result; for example, one could type “go north”
to move their character north, or “look” to get a description of their character’s surroundings.
One room that the players explored in this sequence was a kitchen, and players could take the
bread recipe from Twinbread and, typing in the commands one at a time, use it in Frog Fractions
to cook bread. Upon doing so, players would be directed to a new website featuring a game
where they had to repeatedly shave President Obama’s face. After each shaving session,
fictional tweets from other politicians would be displayed, commenting on Obama’s facial hair.
One of these tweets contained instructions to meet at a specific set of longitudinal and latitudinal
coordinates on April 5, 2014, at 3 PM. These coordinates were located on the campus of the
University of California, Berkeley.
Several members of the Unfiction forums community sojourned to UC Berkeley and met
with Jim, who was quickly “arrested” by individuals claiming to be time travelers, presumably
the same ones from the original Kickstarter video. He left behind a paper bag with Frog
Fractions-related ephemera, including several floppy discs. One of these discs took players a
significant amount of time to decipher, as its contents were encrypted with the .arj compression
format which is not recognized by modern computers. When unpacked, it contained an MP4
video file of a live re-enactment of the original Frog Fractions game. This was intended to be
the end of the Frog Fractions 2 ARG, but players did not realize this. There was no clear
signifier of narrative conclusion, and Jim’s abduction seemed to be a hanging plot point, so the
Unfiction community was left wondering if they had missed a clue somewhere and spent
significant time combing over previous information, looking for an opportunity to make progress
towards a non-existent endpoint.
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Fig. 2. The “Eye Sigil”
in its generic form.
Communities: Steam Sale Detectives and the Eye Sigil
At the same time that the Unfiction community was working to solve the wildly obtuse
twists of the Kickstarter, another ARG solving group was forming,
completely independent from the Unfiction forums. Valve is a
corporation known for making video games like Half-Life, Portal,
and Team Fortress, as well as managing Steam, the world’s largest
online marketplace for digital PC games. In the winter of 2015,
Valve held the latest iteration of their ann ual holiday sale on the
Steam platform, with thousands of games offered at a steep
discount. 2015’s sale was different from prior years in one key
way: it contained an ARG. Astute customers soon gathered on a newly-minted subreddit page,
“Steam Store Detectives,” to attempt to unravel what was going on. There was speculation that
Valve, well-known for their protracted game development cycles, was teasing their first major
new game in years. As ARG players dug through a convoluted series of clues, they eventually
reached what ended up being the end of the experience: a Valve employee’s Steam profile page
displaying a red herring (Frank).
Following the disappointing end to Steam’s ARG, the Steam Sale Detectives reorganized
themselves into the group “Game Detectives.” “This is a new community for all the gamers that
have bonded over the ARG (and anyone else who wants to join in the fun),” wrote Reddit user
imnotgoats in the announcement of the rebranding in January 2016.
23
“We'd be silly to just shut
everything down and ruin what fun is still being had.” Later that month, Game Detectives would

23
imnotgoats. “So it’s a thing now. Stick with us at /r/GameDetectives!” Reddit post, January 7, 2016.
https://www.reddit.com/r/steamsaledetectives/comments/3zsoqu/so_its_a_thing_now_stick_with_us_at/
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open their first new investigation into a non-steam ARG; one that would come to be known as
the “Eye Sigil ARG” (imnotgoats).
Unbeknownst to anybody but the Frog Fractions team and collaborators, the Eye Sigil
ARG was a tentacle of the larger project – but the nature of the thing obfuscated this fact. The
image of the titular sigil was discovered to appear in some form across an ever-expanding list of
seeming unrelated indie video games such as Crypt of the Necrodancer (Brace Yourself Games,
2015), Mini Metro (Dinosaur Polo Club, 2014), and QWOP (Bennet Foddy, 2008) (see Appendix
1 for a full list of appearances). Sometimes the sigil was carved into a wall, sometimes it was
found in the game’s installation directory, sometimes it was tucked into a menu. It rarely looked
out of place, fitting in with each game’s art style, but it was always a variation on the same
image. By the time a headline on Kotaku proclaimed that “The ‘Eye Sigil’ Conspiracy Is Indie
Games’ Most Arcane Mystery,” the Game Detectives team had grown to thousands of users
(D’Anastasio). This community was as of yet not strongly connected to the original ARG
players toiling away at the Frog Fractions mystery on Unfiction. Ironically, several Game
Detectives members had suggested that the Eye Sigil was part of Frog Fractions 2, only to be
dismissed because it was clear that Frog Fractions was running a distinct, separate ARG. The
Game Detectives eventually moved the majority of their solving efforts from Reddit, where they
had originally convened, to Discord. This shift allowed for real-time communication and
collaboration as well as provided solvers with an outlet to grow more tightly-knit as a
community. Reddit, while serving a very similar function to more traditional message boards in
allowing users to post messages, did not (and still does not) allow its subreddits to further
subdivide themselves – thus, if Game Detectives on Reddit wished to have an off-topic
discussion with those they had grown close to throughout their investigation, they would have
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needed to create a second, entirely new subreddit. Within Discord, they could create a multitude
of chatroom sub-discussion channels at will, covering anything from a range of investigation
subjects to their favorite television programs. It is into this pre-existing world of puzzles and
online communities that I found myself placed when I took the reins of the ARG.

ARG Content and Development
After Jim suggested I join his team, I wrote a story proposal for the ARG in twenty-four
hours and submitted it for his approval. Surprisingly, nearly everything that I had proposed in
this initial document ended up being included in the final project. Building upon the original
ARG work I had already developed, I envisioned a story where an apocalyptic future had been
predicted via the artwork of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and integrated the existing story that
Jim had already told into this concept.
My design style was dramatically different from Jim’s. As indicated above, Jim was
more interested in designing puzzles than telling a coherent story – he remarked half-jokingly
several times that he believed all writing in video games was bad. Consequently, the ARG had
been filled with a significant number of obtuse and technologically obscure decryption
challenges with only a threadbare narrative to hang everything on. Conversely, my initial pitch
was entirely story-based in its content: I laid out what the setting of the game was, what the plot
progression would be, and how the story would conclude once players won the ARG.
The initial challenge of being tasked with this development project was straightforward: I
had very little experience developing games. I had made games for classes and clubs as an
undergraduate, and in high school, I worked as part of a team to produce an unauthorized
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translation and localization patch for Shin Bokura no Taiyō: Gyakkushū no Sabata
24
(Konami,
2005) on the Game Boy Advance. I did, however, have insight into how to leverage online
communities. As described above, much of the time I spent online in high school was doing the
sort of work that today is professionally referred to as “community management,” as I helped to
run various discussion forums, the largest of which had an active userbase of several thousand
members. As a result, I knew that a successful ARG project could not run on quality of content
alone – it needed around-the-clock monitoring of solvers so that any decisions about the design
could be made with the community’s progress in mind, and tailored to the specifics of what
players were attempting to do. In other words, the design had to be reactive: we couldn’t know
what the next specific piece of content needed to be produced until it was nearly time for the
production to be finished, as we couldn’t know what players of the ARG would do in advance
(though we would do our best to guide them to specific actions and solutions, for the sake of our
sanity and development pipeline). Speaking about this style of reactive design – design driven
primarily by responding to one’s playerbase – Andrea Phillips, who was initially a player of The
Beast before moving into designing her own ARGs, noted that “with an ARG … you can dance
with your audience. If they take a shine to a minor character, you can boost that character’s role
midstream. If they’re bored with a plot thread, you can catch it early and fix it. And that kind of
feedback is addictive to a writer. It can be difficult to get that kind of feedback in other media at
all. But in an ARG, you’re doing something close to watching their faces as they read along, so
you know when you’re succeeding and when you’re failing” (Watson 2010). In a way, the ARG
development process was similar to the process of an extended playtest – players would
experience content and (albeit indirectly) provide feedback, and our next decision about the
ARG’s development would be based upon that feedback.

24
Alternately known as Boktai 3: Sabata’s Counterattack
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Good playtesting is integral to the success of a game, of course – Tracy Fullerton notes
that “playtesting is the single most important activity a designer engages in” (248), – but it
requires a specific relationship between designer and tester. Writing about a developer’s
relationship with their eventual audience, Brenda Laurel writes that “the idea of being in
partnership with the people purchasing your products or on your site is not only emotionally
attractive; it is quite literally true. As my good friend (and CEO of Cheskin Research)
Christopher Ireland taught me, products people really love are products that make people feel
good about themselves” (50). Hirokazu Yasuhara, one of the original gameplay designers of
Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, similarly acknowledged this powerful relationship, noting
that, “people tend to think games are a solitary activity. But the designer is always there behind
the screen. Whenever the game player makes an action… the designer leads them to the next
thing, encourages them with a reward, and leads them onward” (High Score). Although the
playtesting process usually occurs both before the product is brought to market and before it can
become related to a consumer’s identity, the relationship between developer and playtester is
itself likewise a partnership. Games industry best practices advise setting the player up with the
game and watching them play uninterrupted for the duration of the play-test session. The
developer host should not intervene except where absolutely necessary (for example, if a bug
arises that blocks player progression) and is otherwise relegated to the position of silent observer,
sitting and taking notes about the tester’s actions. Playtesters are encouraged to speak out loud
to the developer, explaining their thought process as they play so as to provide insight into
subjects such as why they are performing specific in-game actions, what their emotional state is
like, or whether they are experiencing difficulty playing. Afterward, the playtester and developer
engage in a debriefing section to talk about the holistic experience of play. This partnership is
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one of the cornerstones of good game development: without it, developers would be left to make
their best guesses about what segments of a game are providing their intended experience and
where things begin to fall apart.
Playtesting can be critically important not just for smoothing and polishing the mechanics
of a game’s play, but also for its story and written content. I can personally attest to this value
firsthand, from both sides of the process. From the design side, the Frog Fractions ARG was
decidedly not playtested, and playtesting an ARG before deployment is difficult if not impossible
due to the way that development often needs to react in real time to the decisions of players.
Several times, I had prepared content – both mechanical and narrative – that players either did
not understand, did not like, or simply ignored, but the directions that they went in their attempts
to solve my challenges were more interesting or exciting than what I had initially planned. In
these sorts of situations, I would declare that the solvers’ answers were correct, and change the
design of the next stage to accommodate their solutions. Sections of the story would be rewritten
on the fly to suit the present situation. These machinations were invisible to players, who could
not see the chaos going on behind the curtain – to them, it simply felt like they had solved a
puzzle, been rewarded with a nugget of story or lore, and were moving on to the next puzzle.
The give-and-take nature of this reactive design ended up being the hallmark of the ARG project.
This experience was useful when I did playtesting work on other people’s games, which further
illustrated for me the distance between traditional playtesting practices and the reactive design of
ARG development.
Following the release of Frog Fractions 2, I spent approximately a year, from mid-2018
to early 2019, playtesting the game Trover Saves the Universe (Squanch Games, 2019). The
development studio was founded by Justin Roiland, creator of the popular television show Rick
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and Morty, and Trover was written with the same style of socially transgressive jokes and misfit
characters that had propelled his show to megahit status. Throughout my playtest sessions, I had
repeated long discussions about the written content of the game with the game’s development
staff (including Roiland himself) regarding a diverse selection of the game’s written content. I
pointed out where the narrative pacing fell apart, places where I became confused because
information had not been clearly communicated, emotional beats that failed to land properly
because they had not been properly set up in advance, jokes that I found clichéd, unfunny, or
which crossed the line into potentially psychologically triggering for some players due to dealing
with sensitive subject matters, such as suicide. This was in addition to more general feedback
about the mechanics of play, which changed very little during my time testing. The writing,
however, underwent visible tweaking in response to my comments – I could see the difference in
the script between sessions, which occurred once every other month or so. At first, this may
seem identical to the relationship I had developed with the Frog Fractions 2 audience: the ARG
solvers provided me feedback that changed the direction of my design. However, the scale and
quantity of feedback change the relationship entirely. Whereas Trover lists five people in the
credits as playtesters, FF2 had thousands of player-testers. While both works are collaboratively
authored, there is a clear distinction between receiving feedback from a hand-picked set of
trusted testers on a work-in-process and one’s entire audience at large on a live product. In both
cases, the playtesters contributed to the authorship of the final product, but on Trover, the testers
served a role closer to that of a collaborating designer as opposed to simply a bug-finder,
providing feedback on work that has already been completed such that the developers can revise
that work – a not uncommon circumstance within game development. In the case of Frog
Fractions 2, the feedback is provided so that future work can be improved, but what has already
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been released is set in stone, due to the public nature of an active ARG. In both cases, however,
despite recommendations that developers should “embrace shared authorship with your
playtesters” (Freyermuth, 183), testers rarely if ever get authorship credit on a work. This kind
of labor, alongside work such as bug testing and hardware compatibility, is classified as “quality
assurance.” Furthermore, such work is often looked down upon or derided by self-proclaimed
“real” game designers, despite their integral place within a game’s development process. If the
individuals producing assets and content for a game are its “authors,” QA testers resemble the
role of copyeditors and proofreaders – and as a result fully deserve to be included under the
umbrella of video game “authorship” alongside designers, artists, musicians, programmers and
every other person who contributes to the release of a game, and credited appropriately. It is a
thornier question, however, when a consumer or player enters into the discussion of authorship,
and determining what role a player plays in the authorship process remains largely unaddressed
when it comes to giving credit.
The question of a player’s role in a game’s authorship was put to the legal test in 1982.
Stern Electronics, the holders of the American rights for Konami’s video game Scramble, alleged
that Omni Video Games, Inc., infringed upon their copyright with their game Scramble 2.
Konami had not registered a copyright of Scramble’s code, instead opting to register the game as
an audiovisual work. Against these accusations of infringement, in Stern Electronics Inc. v.
Kaufman, Omni offered several defenses, including the argument that “[Stern] was only entitled
to copyright the written computer program stored in the video game's memory” (Grabowsky
143). The most novel defense, however, pertained to a theoretical consideration of the point at
which a game’s assets and display become authored – and how that authorship occurs:
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Omni contends that Konami is not entitled to secure a copyright in the sights and sounds
of its "Scramble" game because the audiovisual work is neither "fixed in any tangible
medium of expression" nor "original" within the meaning of § 102(a). Both contentions
arise from the fact that the sequence of some of the images appearing on the screen
during each play of the game will vary depending upon the actions taken by the player.
For example, if he fails to avoid enemy fire, his spaceship will be destroyed; if he fails to
destroy enough fuel depots, his own fuel supply will run out, and his spaceship will
crash; if he succeeds in destroying missile sites and enemy planes, those images will
disappear from the screen; and the precise course travelled by his spaceship will depend
upon his adjustment of the craft's altitude and velocity (Stern).
This novel argument, based upon a theory of player-as-author, was dismissed by the courts, and
understandably so – to accept such a legal argument would make any copyright of video game
software unenforceable. Stern v. Kaufman is one of several cases that form a body of legal
decisions from the 1980s around the unauthorized reproduction of video games, but it is the only
one that presents such a prescient reading of video games as a collaborative product and the only
one that recognizes the relationship between developer and consumer that must exist in order to
manifest the actual game. Until the game is played, it is inert code. This is fundamentally
different from an unread book or an unwatched film. A book contains the complete work even if
it remains unread, its words all presented in order from beginning to end. A film (especially one
shot on film) likewise contains the complete work front to back even if unwatched. A video
game, however, does not exist unplayed. Examine the code and one cannot see the game, only a
series of functions that produce the game when executed. It is the role of the player, then, to play
and manifest the work – together, the designer and player cooperatively birth a new instance of
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the game into the world anew each time play occurs.
25
How, then, does one credit the authorship
work of thousands of ARG players, especially in situations such as I described above where I
would rely on their “wrong” solutions to generate new content? There are no structures in place
at this time to allow one to easily credit each and every contributor, but this in no way absolves
the developer of needing to fully credit the contributions of their audience.
The great strength of games (and more broadly interactive media) is, of course, their
interactive nature. The act of creating a story in games is at its best when the collaboration
between the player and the designer in producing a narrative is acknowledged. Doing so enables
the production of what Stanley Fish describes as “a core of agreement (although one subject to
change) concerning the ways of producing the text” (342). Some games are much better at doing
this than others – in the video game world, works like Minecraft (Mojang, 2009) allow players a
sandbox in which they can create any story they desire. The strongest expression of this
collaboration can be found in tabletop role-playing games, where the stories are often literally
authored in real-time through a negotiation process between the Game Master and the players.
Even board games, with rigidly defined rules, can provide space for story building. The game
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (Sleuth Publications, 1981) bridges the gap between
open-ended games like Dungeons & Dragons (Tactical Studies Rules, Inc., 1974) and more
traditional board games like Monopoly (Parker Bros., 1935). Consulting Detective places players
in the shoes of detectives competing against the famed sleuth to solve a mystery the fastest.
Armed with a description of the case, a copy of The Times, and an address book of London

25
An interesting an somewhat parallel decision was made in the Supreme Court decades later, in 2014’s American
Broadcasting Cos., Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. Although the case was about broadcast television antennae and streaming
over the internet, it likewise revolved around questions of when a work becomes instantiated on a viewer’s screen,
and whether a copy exists before or after the act temporally. As with Omni, the court similarly ruled against antenna
manufacturer Aereo, due to a fundamental misunderstanding over how the technology functioned on behalf of the
justices.
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locales, players collaboratively decide where to go, who to question, and ultimately what the
solution to the case is by relying on the clues provided. They then compare how long it took
them to solve the case against how quickly Holmes managed to reach the solution (this
information is provided by the game) and if they solved it faster, they win. Although the cases
have a correct solution and a predetermined story, the way that players piece together the clues,
the locales they choose to visit, and the individuals they subject to questioning are all up to them:
their casefile ends up being a unique story, produced in collaborative authorship with the
scenario writers.
The content of the FF2 ARG which I designed followed a simple content loop: I would
hide a clue about a log-in username and password somewhere online (for example, in a comment
posted on a game news webpage, or in a custom level designed in the video game Super Mario
Maker) and solvers would have to figure out what the username and password were. They could
take these to a website for a fictional time travel organization and use them to access different
accounts, each account providing more worldbuilding information and character backstories for
the fictional players in the story. The game’s story, about a post-apocalyptic future where the
remnants of humanity augmented themselves into cyborgs to combat an army of faeries that had
arrived from another dimension, was absurd but was designed to provide context and backstory
for players who would eventually play Glittermitten Grove. I also facilitated the eventual
merging of the FF2 ARG and the Eye Sigil ARG, writing a short fictional book excerpt that
appeared in the game Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016), bridging the seemingly unrelated ARGs.
In the final months of the ARG’s development, I handed most of the design work to a former
ARG player, Erika Newmann, who had expressed a desire to Jim to run her own ARG. We
allowed Erika’s work to become the official conclusion to the narrative (with both Jim and
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myself providing supervisory oversight.) This was perfect timing for me, as I was preparing for
my field examinations and did not have the time to dedicate to steering the project to its
conclusion. Ultimately, Glittermitten Grove and Frog Fractions 2 both released to polarized
reviews but garnered praise and the holistic package (both pieces of software and the ARG) was
a finalist at 2017’s IndieCade Festival.
Ultimately Frog Fractions 2’s successes were perhaps a perfect storm that would be
difficult to reproduce: it landed at the right time for an industry, was preceded by a free game
played by millions and thus had brand recognition, and was successfully funded before the
collapse of Kickstarter as a reliable source of money for independent video games. The audience
for Frog Fractions 2 was smaller than the original. The dedicated Frog Fractions Discord had
several hundred people in it, while the Game Detectives Discord contained several thousand
(though there is no way to know how many were there for the Eye Sigil ARG as opposed to
several other ARGs the organization began pursuing shortly after starting to play our game.)
Writing about the small yet enthusiastic user base for her company Purple Moon, Brenda Laurel
notes that “Purple Moon’s fandom was small in comparison with … mass media products [such
as Star Wars and Star Trek] … but it was large and extremely active compared to other
interactive properties with similar reach. I think we can attribute that to two factors: the
affordances offered by the Website, and the appeal of the characters and their world” (51). Her
self-analysis of Purple Moon (she estimates that the company website had daily activity of about
400 users per day in 1999) maps very closely to my perception of the Frog Fractions 2 project,
substituting characters for mystery (we had extensive worldbuilding, so that aspect remains the
same.) Our numbers were higher, but our project occurred nearly twenty years after Purple
Moon closed – the internet had since become ubiquitous.
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The Dark Side of ARG Development
I had no obligation to moderate the Frog Fractions community – that was done by
others, as those groups sprung up independently and were managed by their founders – but the
community and player/user management lessons I learned from BoktaiOnline came in much
greater use on my next ARG project. Following the completion of Frog Fractions 2, I was
subsequently asked to work on a new ARG for the company Definitely Real. The company was
pursuing a film project that they described as “Alternate Reality Cinema.” Instead of drawing
upon the more traditional film/ARG model pioneered by The Beast, Definitely Real’s film, titled
Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life, sought to tie the narratives of the film project not only to
an ARG in a way more tightly bound than before, but also to a network of thirty to fifty other
collaborators who would produce related but distinct art and media projects across the internet
that spoke to the themes and ideas of the film. The distribution methodology of the film was also
novel: instead of being distributed by a major studio or even released all at once, it would be
launched via the internet episodically, with each episode releasing in real-time over online
streaming services such as Facebook Live and YouTube. When a new episode launched, the
amount of time that had elapsed in the story was the same amount of time that had passed in the
real world, giving the appearance that the events of the film were really happening.
The plot of Dared is straightforward: two best friends, Zander and David, are bored
during summer vacation and dare one other to ruin their lives as a way of keeping themselves
alert and sharp. The dare escalates far beyond the bounds of good sense, and both characters are
thrust into a dark world of computer hacking, modern technological social manipulation and
eventually death. From the project’s outset, one of its goals was to serve not only as
entertainment, but as an educational service that would instruct and inform the viewer-players
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about internet safety and security in the 21
st
century. To facilitate this goal, Zander forms an
online “team” to protect himself as David’s attempts to ruin his life escalate, and the team is
issued missions. These missions varied from asking users to access websites only available via
the TOR browser to infiltrating fictional web forums for “Team Takedown,” a competing team
of disaffected angry men with whom David had allied himself.
One of the major dangers that the Dared project posed was that it had the potential to
create the very thing that it was attempting to condemn. During production there was constant
discussion about how to avoid the accidental formation of a “troll army” like Team Takedown.
There was a fear that the film, if mishandled, could end up in a similar situation to that of Fight
Club (1999), the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about the impotence of traditional
masculinity in the modern era and the negative ways that men find outlets for their aggression.
The message of the film was lost on many, and Fight Club’s iconography became an unironic
celebration of the exact sorts of behavior the movie was attempting to decry. To prevent this
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same fate from befalling Dared, there was an ethics code put in place, and all of the interactive
content I produced for the ARG segment of the project needed to be designed in such a way that
it would not facilitate abusive behavior or the formation of negative habits on the part of the
playerbase, an endeavor that was ultimately successful.
As the Dared project demonstrates, the production and dissemination of fictional content
in the service of an entertainment product closely mirror techniques and strategies used by
disinformation campaigns. With only slight tweaks to the formula, a skilled disinformation
department could disseminate political propaganda to befuddle the masses. Unlike traditional
propaganda, where disinformation flows from the top down – in other words, from a government
to its citizenry (or to whomever the target is) – the new age of propaganda is largely bottom-out.
Although the information may still originate with a government or other powerful organization,
it is primarily distributed by the targets to each other. This new paradigm is what Alicia Wanless
and Michael Berk call participatory propaganda. “Participatory propaganda,”
they explain, “moves beyond a traditional, unidirectional “one-to-many” form of
Fig. 3. An image of the Team Zander website, where players would aid the protagonist in
various missions. Image captured by author.
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humor, was favored by online supporters of Trump, claiming to have ‘actually elected a meme as
a president’” (400). In pointing out that “the main conceptual innovation of Trump’s campaign
was utilizing micro-volunteering for cultural meaning-making,” Gekker cuts to the heart of this
new technique for disseminating political messages: with very little effort, one can catalyze one’s
audience to proselytize, amplifying your statements and expanding the scope of one’s reach far
beyond the audiences available using traditional propaganda. There is also no reason to fear that
the message will become lost or distorted as it moves through the hands of others: “Even if
modified through the consumer’s own interpretation, the core message remains intact, and
sometimes could even acquire a ‘new life’ (e.g. a new wave of content dissemination)” (Berk 6).
The new methodology of spreading propaganda grants any information disseminated in
this way a deeper level of danger, as it circumvents one of the major hurdles that propaganda has
historically been forced to overcome. Hannah Arendt writes, “Since totalitarian movements exist
in a world which itself is nontotalitarian, they are forced to resort to what we commonly regard
as propaganda. But such propaganda always makes its appeal to an external sphere – be it the
nontotalitarian strata of the population at home or the nontotalitarian countries abroad. […] The
external sphere can also be represented by groups of sympathizers who are not yet ready to
accept the true aims of the movement…” (342-343). Conquering this external sphere has always
been the major challenge for totalitarian movements, yet participatory propaganda allows one
who utilizes it successfully to sidestep the obstacle. This is because the propaganda appears to
originate from within the internal sphere, as shared by members of that internal sphere, for their
own in-group consumption. It takes only a single individual in the external sphere adopting the
message and sharing it to friends and family for that message to become integrated; as there is no
sense of an external government or power attempting to impose ideas from an outside position,
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there is less suspicion from members of the sphere in question. The internet has provided plenty
of external spheres ripe for infiltration due to the public-yet-insular nature of online
communities: anyone can join, but these communities have their own micro-power structures,
influencers, and social dynamics.
Like many other enthusiast cultures, gamers have been forming communities online for
decades. What differentiates gaming communities from many others is that the content of many
modern AAA titles has inadvertently primed game players to be receptive to messages
promoting violence, hatred, and other negative mindsets. Hate groups have long been aware of
the power of games to propagandize for their causes. Michael S. Waltman writes:
Online games “allow the hate monger to conquer the out-group rhetorically. Many online
games position the player to take the point of view of a shooter or bomber and
accumulate points by killing members of the out-group. The game, Watch Out Behind
You, Hunter, allows the game player to conquer gay men symbolically by hunting and
killing gay rapists. Another game, Border Patrol, allows the player to ‘hunt’ Mexicans
‘jumping’ the border… A new game on [the website for white supremacist newspaper]
The Insurgent is entitled Kaboom: The Suicide Bombing Game. In the game, a suicide
bomber skulks through the streets of a typical American city as other pedestrians pass by.
The goal is to blow one’s self up while killing as many citizens as possible. Victims
scream while exploding in a soup of blood and bones. Immediately thereafter, a score
appears on the computer screen listening the number of men, women, and children killed
(97-98).
These sorts of hate-propaganda games present as innocent propaganda, perhaps at times even
satirical for their grotesque and over-the-top content, but as Waltman notes, “Arguably, when
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players repeat these games time after time, they may eventually see themselves killing their
enemies in real life.”
It is not hard to draw the line between my commercial work and the participatory
propaganda model. Much of my work on ARGs took place on social media platforms such as
Twitter and Twitch because these platforms provided immediate access to an audience of
millions of users that were already predisposed to be receptive to the game and become engaged
in the play thereof. This landscape makes ARGs the ideal vehicle for Wanless and Berk’s
model: the content of the game is diffuse and spreads by word-of-mouth, incentivizing existing
players to pull in as many new players as possible to lighten the load of investigation. Each of
these existing ARG players becomes themselves a potential content dissemination vector.
Furthermore, as my own experience engaged in reactive game design has shown, the ARG
players can generate content that the game masters feel is superior to their original plan, and that
content can then be integrated into the larger project without the players ever realizing that was
anything other than the plan all along. It is not inconceivable for a politically motivated “game
master” to elevate specific ideologies that emerge from within their playerbase and use those
ideas to advance their goals of radicalization. The playerbase becomes more likely to accept
these ideas because they were generated from within that selfsame playerbase as opposed to
being handed down from authority, as in traditional propaganda models.
The collaborative work of ARG players often takes place on message boards or in private
chat rooms. Christian Fuchs notes: “One often hears that social media and the decentralized
character of the internet overcome hierarchies and foster a participatory culture and democratic
communication” (72). Though Fuchs acknowledges that there have been objections to the
absolute truth of this claim (noting Edward Herman’s observation that the increased efficiency of
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web technologies promote a loss of diversity in the media landscape and allows web firms to
produce more content with an increasingly reduced human staff,) it is this participatory culture
and democratic communication that was on display as I observed the Game Detectives and FF2
Seekers working independently from and then in concert with each other as they struggled to
solve their respective sides of the puzzle.
Discord as a communication platform is especially notable because it exists as a social
network that, while still falling within Fuchs’ concern as a centralized, privately-owned platform
where users have little to no control over the program. Discord, unlike Facebook, Google or
other web media firms, does not advertise for services other than itself – it is funded by user
subscriptions and venture capital
26
. Indeed, Discord, which was first released in 2015, attempted
to launch a store that sold video games as part of the chat client in October of 2018 but retired
the feature in September 2019 after determining that its users were not responding to the feature
(Welch).
27
The profit orientation thus exists at one step of removal from the targeted advertising
ecosystem that Fuchs describes – it is still a platform for communication and serves as a forum
for information dissemination, but apart from attempts to convince users to pay for a subscription
to support the platform itself, there is no targeted advertising or sales of promotional material, as
CEO Jason Citron has dismissed ads as “too intrusive” (Needleman). Furthermore, the nature of
the system works as a double-edged sword as regards ideological dissemination. Due to the
private, decentralized nature of Discord servers – servers can be set to private and made invite-
only – it has been incredibly easy for bad actors to operate on the network. April Glaser reported

26
Discord is not currently profitable, and the long-term viability of the platform is still in question as a result
(Needleman, Park).
27
Discord still allows server owners to sell games within their servers, though not to a broader Discord userbase.
One must be a member of the seller’s Discord chat in order to have the option to purchase anything, thus allowing
game developers to both host a space to discuss their game while allowing their audience to also purchase the
product within the same interface.
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in 2018 that “Leaders [of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville] didn’t do the bulk of their
logistical planning in any kind of public forum or open Facebook group. They used a popular,
and rather private, chat platform for gamers called Discord.” Although Discord purged many
accounts associated with the alt-right, she writes:
“Discord in particular remains a very popular destination for communities of neo-Nazis
and white supremacists to socialize, share hateful memes, boost the ideas that undergird
their movements, inculcate strangers, and plan activities that take place elsewhere online.
In the course of an afternoon, I found and joined more than 20 communities on the
platform that were either directly about Nazism or white supremacy or reveled in sharing
anti-Semitic and racist memes and imagery. ‘Discord is always on and always present
among these groups on the far-right,’ says Joan Donovan, the lead researcher on media
manipulation at the Data & Society Research Institute. ‘It’s the place where they do most
of the organizing of doxing and harassment campaigns.’”
Even in an ecosystem designed to prohibit the spread of certain types of propaganda, the very
steps that inhibit that spread foster the growth of alternate and potentially more malicious
ideologies. “I signed up for Discord to see it for myself,” writes Julie Jargon in The Wall Street
Journal. “There was no prompt to enter my age or date of birth. It took only about 15 minutes to
find porn and Nazi memes, without specifically searching for them. I easily entered invite-only
servers without a prior invitation. Once inside, I could access adult content by simply clicking a
button saying I was at least 18.” Noting that this problem is not exclusive to Discord, she points
out that “it differs from Google’s YouTube and Facebook Inc.’s Instagram—also popular with
teens—in its level of content policing.” Put another way, the irony is revealed: the corporate
oversight systems that produce capitalist propaganda appear to dissuade the sort of content
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Jargon describes, but in exchange for the (albeit often superficial, mediocre, ineffective, and/or
understaffed) moderation services these tech companies provide, one must live with these
corporation’s ideologies. In the end, stepping out of one circle of propagandizing only enters
one into another. It is as Slavoj Zizek laments onscreen in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology:
“The tragedy of our predicament, when we are within ideology, is that when we think we escape
it, into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.”
The heavy use of Discord by fascist groups was perhaps to be expected, as
“Social movements often use social media because they are not adequately
represented in the mainstream media. They tend to understand how to use online
communication as a tool for political organization well. The capitalist online public
sphere is not totally, but predominantly, an entertainment sphere, and only to a lesser
extent is it a political public sphere” (Fuchs, 80).
28

How, then, does one arrive at a mode of online interaction that is neither facilitated by outside
interests with ulterior motives (whether those be the spread of competing propagandas or
ideologies, the sale of goods, or other factors) nor too niche of a solution to be broadly adopted
by the critical mass of population required to make it worth using from a social standpoint? It
may currently be impossible to produce a widely accepted model under current implementation
for online communication. The process would be further compromised by externalities such as
mass media reporting: even were a system not subject to systemic abuse to manifest, news media
and reporting, much like many other parts of western society in the twenty-first century, has
become politically polarized and prone to misrepresenting or distorting information with the goal

28
This sort of usage is not limited to the right wing – as Fuchs notes, “The data indicate that right-wing groups and
individuals are at least just as active and popular on social media as left-wing activists and groups” (81). However,
far-right political activists are more likely to be covered and condemned for their activity than far-left activists in the
mainstream western media.
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of advancing a specific narrative. The attacks on the free press by Donald Trump, claiming that
any coverage unfavorable to him is “fake news,” (a technique now widely adopted by right-wing
politicians across the globe), has further eroded public trust in the reliability of information.

Final Lessons
This chapter seems to be at odds with itself. The pitch appears somewhat incoherent: a
story about a backward fall into designing a major marketing campaign, which transitions into a
discussion of worker’s credits before concluding with a discussion on how propaganda spreads
in the twenty-first century. One might ask, “how does this tie to literary theory?” As I have
(hopefully) shown, the process of making a game of any sort, even if it is a solo auteur work
before release, is ultimately a work of collaborative authorship, and it is the stories of games –
whether the bespoke texts and symbols that are encoded in the texts of the work or the narratives
that arise around the games themselves in social spaces online – that ultimately produce political
messaging. As one can see, games, as any creative medium, are grappling with questions of
authorship, and through all of this chapter’s seeming discursion, it is these questions that unify
things. It must be understood that in this space, the meta-moment of game story creation, that
both the greatest risks and greatest rewards lie. It is a system open to wild abuse, where theories
and practices can be hijacked for nefarious, fascistic ends, and a system that supports the creation
of unifying, collaborative healing works. The responsibility falls on the developers to build
systems that minimize the potential for harm and to encourage positive use cases, while working
to take steps to remove anybody who seeks to commandeer their work – either directly, via the
use of their software, or indirectly, via their social networks and marketing channels. It is the
responsibility of players to communicate clearly with developers about what works and what
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doesn’t. I put these recommendations into practice during Frog Fractions 2’s development – I
watched the community daily and established a continual back-and-forth, modeling the sort of
dialogue and generative behavior that I wanted to see our users enact, and was met with success.
By blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is fiction, ARGs have the potential to
afford their developers a bounded, safe test space to demonstrate and test drive models and ideas
that can be exported to the world outside of the game if successful: together, the players and
designers can author their ideal reality. If they do not, others will do so for them.
We live in a time when world leaders are attempting to use their bully pulpits to produce
a real-world alternate reality: one that serves their own political interests even if it comes at the
expense of the lives of their citizens. The 2020 American presidential election put the question
of reality itself on trial, asking Americans, as they voted, to decide how they define reality: is
what the president says the truth, even when it seems to fly in the face of their own observations?
At the same time, COVID-19 forced much of the world into a quarantine state where
increasingly, real-world social relationships came via the same delivery mechanisms as virtual
ones: through the computer or phone screen, in text or via video. The rules of online community
management suddenly became relevant to the classroom when teaching via Zoom, and teachers
needed to take steps to block trolls from “Zoombombing” their class sessions. At a moment
when conspiracy theories borne on 4chan have come to dominate the news cycle and gaming-
related terms such as “NPC” (non-player character) have entered the public discourse as insults,
it is apparent now more than ever that the boundaries between digital spaces and the real world
are collapsing, and it is not yet clear what the long-term fallout will be. Whether leaders will
draw upon the lessons of what was once merely entertainment but now has been shown to have
much higher stakes is one that is seized is not a question of if, but when – as has already been
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seen to a minor degree. It is only by understanding the mechanisms of this new propaganda that
it can be combatted, lest the vanquished ideologies of the past continue to return to bedevil the
future time and time again. In the next chapter, I will extend the discussion of propaganda begin
in this chapter and examine how ARG-style conspiracy theories have come to influence modern
American society at every level.

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Chapter 3
Play and Misinformation
How America’s Conspiracy Culture Became Gamified

What is better than making one’s fellow man believe something that is not true? Why, making
multitudes believe something that is both preposterous and harmful! Systematically spreading
false news has proven to be of enormous value, and those scientists and thinkers who seek to
disrupt our despicable designs have few answers as to how they might limit the havoc that we
can wreck.

- Mark Bernstein and Clare Hooper
“A Villain’s Guide to Social Media and interactive Digital Storytelling”

Conspiracy in Popular Culture
In 1973, the film Soylent Green, loosely based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room!
Make Room!, introduced moviegoers to what has become one of the most enduring pop-culture
examples of a conspiracy to grace the silver screen. Easily ranking alongside films such as
Citizen Kane, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Planet of the Apes for how likely the
average citizen is to be aware of the film’s twist reveal, Soylent Green stars Charlton Heston as
NYPD gumshoe Frank Thorn as he investigates the murder of William R. Simonson, a wealthy
man living in a time when environmental damage has caused heat levels to spike to unbearable
levels, natural resource exhaustion has led to the breakdown of most appliances, and population
growth has ballooned to the point where New York City houses 40 million people.
Viewers witness Simonson’s death firsthand early in the film, and it is preceded by the
following exchange between him and his assassin, Gilbert:
Simonson: What do you want?
Gilbert: You, Mr. Simonson.
Simonson: I knew soon.
Gilbert: Uh, they told me to uh say that they were sorry, but that you had become
unreliable.
Simonson: That's true.
Gilbert: They can't risk a catastrophe, they say.
Simonson: They're right.
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Gilbert: Then uh... this is right?
Simonson: No, not right. Necessary.
Simonson’s killer is in the employ of a nebulous “they” who have decided that the man has
become a liability. When Thorn asks, during his investigation, what Simonson’s profession was,
he is answered: “Rich.” Elaborating further, he is answered “Lawyer. Politics.” More digging
reveals Simonson was connected to New York’s governor and was on the board of Soylent
Industries, which manufactures much of the world’s food including a new superfood called
Soylent Green. The now well-known reveal, “Soylent Green is made out of people,” exposes a
conspiracy that runs through all levels of elite society: politicians, big business, the police, and
more. The controlling interests of Soylent Industries were willing to literally grind dead humans
into food and feed them to the living in order to increase their profits, while selling the public a
lie about their products being made from sustainable, renewable plankton.
Popular culture and entertainment have long used conspiracy theories to drive fictional
narratives. Though conspiracy fiction is primarily a western genre
29
, it is not exclusively so:
Chiyomaru Shikura’s visual novel series Science Adventure, one of the most consistently popular
Japanese visual novel franchises, is primarily concerned with the “Committee of 300” conspiracy
theory, which posits that a cabal of three hundred individuals that, similar to the Illuminati,
control all civilizations on the planet.
30
Shikura’s protagonists often find themselves grappling
with the machinations of the Committee, struggling not only against the direct influence of
committee members themselves but also with the impossible struggle of being unable to inform
the broader population that such an organization exists; after all, who would believe such a

29
While non-western examples exist, such as Rakesh Roshan’s Indian superhero film Krrish 3 where a deadly virus
is spread by the villain in order to make a profit selling the cure, the preponderance of the genre’s texts are produced
by western authors, filmmakers and designers.
30
In some versions of the conspiracy, the Committee and the Illuminati are the same organization.
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ridiculous claim? The characters themselves begin as skeptics who are inevitably drawn into
belief as evidence mounts. What makes Shikura’s work notable is the heavy use of both real-
world scientific concepts and references to other works of popular culture to bring a strong sense
of reality to his writing. His sources draw upon such varied texts as scientific publications by
Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking, literature by H.G. Wells and Lewis Carroll, films such as
Psycho (1960) and Mad Max 2, (1981), popular anime series like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and
Mobile Suit Gundam, video games franchises like The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon, and
popular Japanese internet memes. It is this seamless blending of fact and fiction that no doubt
contributes to the enduring popularity of Shikura’s work, and all of this serves to couch his
exploration of fictional conspiracy theories in a setting that feels immediate and real. When
Shikura chooses to introduce fictional elements into the narrative – whether fantastical ones,
Fig. 1. A screenshot from Science Adventure’s third entry, Robotics;Notes Elite, featuring
the protagonist responding to a secret report detailing plans to manufacture a global
apocalypse. Much of the work involves reading similar reports, as the protagonist moves
from skepticism to belief regarding their contents. (Image captured by the author.)
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such as time travel, or more mundane ones such as conspiracy theory, his table having already
been set in a world of the familiar allows him to transition into the fantastic without friction.
Similarly, real conspiracy theorists must present their worldview in such a way that does not too
strongly contradict the perceptions of those they are trying to convince. Their explanations must
be seemingly plausible alternatives to the narrative offered by the mainstream culture. This can
be seen in how Shikura’s choice of overarching antagonist, the Committee of 300, in many ways
prefigures another real-world conspiracy theory, which I will discuss at length below: QAnon.

Framework for Conspiracy Development
In the previous chapter, I discussed how alternate reality games could serve as a delivery
method for a new style of propaganda, one that spreads from the bottom up instead of from the
top down. In this chapter, I will address a related but distinct subject: the links between alternate
reality games, conspiracy theories, and political revolutions. Conspiracy theory, to provide a
working definition that serves for this chapter, is the belief that a covert group or organization
exists, and that this group manipulates some aspect of society or reality. Much like in Soylent
Green, the motivation for doing so is usually for personal gain, often at the expense of those not
a part of the group. Conspiracy theories are possibly as old as play, and it is important to
distinguish conspiracy theory from propaganda. Propaganda as described above most closely
resembles the process of game design, whereas conspiracy theory more closely resembles
gameplay. Therefore, while the two concepts are inextricably bound together – effective
propaganda can affect a belief in conspiracy in the same way that game design affects gameplay
– they are still themselves distinct entities. Much like how in the prior chapter, ARGs served
above as a powerful tool for understanding an emerging form of political propaganda action, it
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will be shown below that ARGs, conspiracy theories, and revolutions exist along a spectrum,
each dealing with the same fundamental concept with increasing intensity. To help understand
this relationship, I have established a three-tiered framework to describe what I will call
“misinformation games:”
1. Alternate Reality Game. Projects on this tier are planned by a central creator or
team primarily for the purposes of art or entertainment. ARGs are positioned as
entirely fictional; outside of the bounds of the game, there is not meant to be any
sense that the narrative of an ARG or the actions of ARG players and characters are
“real.” Consequently, ARGs have no aspirations beyond amusement, artistic/political
statement, or both. Furthermore, ARGs have a relatively low ability to spread
compared to the higher tiers of the framework. Players are unlikely to share ARG
content with or recruit new players from friends and acquaintances unless they
believe another person is likely to enjoy the experience. The history of ARG
development has shown that even the most successful campaigns have relatively low
user numbers: a “successful” ARG might have 1,000 core active members, 10,000
tangentially interested observers, and 100,000 people who end up hearing about the
project at all (McHugh).
2. Conspiracy Theory. Unlike an ARG, conspiracy theories do not necessarily have a
central planner. Conspiracies are created primarily to explain an actual reality that
the individuals find scary, dissatisfactory, or otherwise suspicious. While the purpose
of a conspiracy theory on one level is to provide stability and understanding, it does
so by blurring the lines between fiction and reality in such a way that individuals may
not understand that the explanation is fictional, or more troublingly, they may be
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aware of this fact but choose to dismiss this fact because of cognitive dissonances.
This tier has a relatively middling ability to spread, increasing as the general
dissatisfaction level of the overall population of the state or nation increases. It is
also worth noting that when a conspiracy does have a central planner (or, to use ARG
terminology, a “game master,”) it can double as political propaganda, though this
facet is not strictly necessary to meet the definition.
3. Political Revolution. At this tier in the framework, mass direct action is taken by a
nation’s population. Borne out of genuine motivation to immediately change the
underlying social structure of one’s society, widespread dissatisfaction has spread the
conspiracy into the mainstream, and adherents work overtly instead of covertly to
bring about their goals. The spread potential of the revolution’s messaging is
significantly higher than either of the prior tiers, as even a failed attempt at revolution
is likely to receive significant attention from domestic and international press.
31
It is
important to note that not all political revolutions are reached by this process, and
furthermore that not all political revolutions are reliant on misinformation and
deception to succeed or justify their existence. This tier refers only to revolutions that
are born from conspiracy, misinformation, or rumor.
Movement between the tiers has historically (as of 2020) been progressive: for example, an ARG
that becomes a conspiracy theory does not return to being an ARG; though this does not preclude
the possibility of regression occurring as future events develop. The remainder of this chapter
will be dedicated to dissecting each of these three tiers, showing their relationship with one

31
An example of a modern failed revolution in the United States of America can be seen in the October 2020 plot to
kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.
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another, examining real-world examples from each tier, and explaining how it is possible to
move from one tier to another.
Conspiracy as American Folklore
Although the conspiracy du jour in the United States, QAnon, may seem to some to be a
unique symptom of the era of Trumpism in American politics, it is merely the latest in a long
string of conspiracies that have held immense cultural power since the nation’s origins and
earlier. Mark Fenster posits two competing positions on conspiracy theories: the first is that
conspiracy theories “circulate[] on the margins of society… [and] conspiracy theorists are
political extremists and unsavory characters.” The other, unfortunately stronger case, is that
“conspiracy theory has come to predominate American culture.”

(Fenster, 1) Across film and
literature, our entertainment media is littered with conspiracy-theory fiction: National Treasure,
The X-Files, The Da Vinci Code, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Soylent Green, The Manchurian
Candidate, and Gravity’s Rainbow all deal with stories of conspiracy brought to screen and page,
to name a very few from a long list. As the medium has matured, video games have entered this
arena as well, with releases like Assassin’s Creed and The Secret World telling the same sorts of
stories as the above list of films and novels. While these two opposing models of conspiracy
theory – fringe vs mainstream – may have seemed evenly balanced when Fenster was writing in
2008, in the intervening years the scale has become lopsided in favor of the mainstream. Real-
world conspiracy theorists, if they ever truly existed solely on the margins of societal discourse,
have taken a place within the realm of the American political process: in the 2020 election cycle,
multiple congressional candidates openly identified as QAnon believers, and several won seats in
government (Stracqualursi). The president embraced these believers, lauding them as “people
who love our country” (Rogers). With this rhetoric, Donald Trump formally tied belief in
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conspiracy theory to national pride; the conspiracy had received the endorsement of the highest
office in the country. While the social and political fallout of this shift from fringe to
mainstream has yet to be seen, the reasons behind increased public buy-in are clear, and much
like with the political propaganda of the previous chapter, ARGs provide a roadmap for
understanding why people buy-in, how a conspiracy is “played,” and what steps might be taken
to combat the spread of disinformation.
The rise of the political campaign as propagandist or misinformation can be traced to the
early days of the ARG. Joseph Matheny, the creator of Ong’s Hat, an early proto-ARG, draws a
line directly from his work through the corporate co-opting of the art project he had pioneered to
the conspiracy theorists of the modern internet. Ong’s Hat was a work of collaborative fiction
that described a fictional conspiracy theory, and in the late 1980s, Matheny used zines, internet
BBSs, physical mailings, and more to create a story about a dimensional travel device created by
professors at Princeton. I interviewed Matheny about Ong’s Hat in September 2020, where we
discussed his motivations and thoughts on the work’s lasting cultural influence. The project, as
Matheny envisioned it, was an experiment, “an exercise in myth-making, or as some have called
it, legend-tripping,” that created new American folklore (Matheny). He described visiting the
areas near the real-life ghost town of Ong’s Hat in New Jersey and hearing people who lived
there tell him about the fictional events he had created as if they had actually happened. “I just
basically played along, assuming that they were playing along, and in some cases it turned out
they weren’t.” The humor that might be derived from people being inadvertently hoodwinked
had not yet become apparent; it appeared that perhaps this was the sort of thing that would pass
into popular myth, much like the Jersey Devil in the nearby Pine Barrens. “[Conspiracy theory]
is American folklore,” Matheny told me. Just a few years later, reality would rear its ugly head:
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in 2000, Matheny found conspiracy theorists camped out on his lawn, seeking information about
the truth. He had received threatening phone calls, and anonymous individuals had contacted his
employers to warn them that Matheny was dangerous (Oelbaum). With the explosion of
conspiracy theories following the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York, Matheny had had enough.
The time had come to end Ong’s Hat.
Matheny came from the bay area counterculture movement in the early days of the
internet. One of the works to emerge from this scene was Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books,
Manuscripts & Curiosa, Conspiracy Theory, Frontier Science & Alternative, which was itself
integrated with the Ong’s Hat project. Describing the creation of Incunabula, which he
professes to only have been “a rather conspicuous fly on the wall to,” Matheny writes,
The Incunabula catalog is a culture jam, created by culture jammers. […]
One was an artist, who made beautiful, moving and otherworldly collages and pictures.
One was a poetic terrorist who could weave words together with an unparallel passion
and vigor.
Another was a media and network hacker who could make the media pay attention to a
bingo match in Poughkeepsie if he wanted them to.
One was a physicist with lots of friends in the Dancing Wu Li master circles and a
wonderfully twisted sense of sexual humor.
They decided one day to take some pre-existing fiction bits, stir in some current pop
science, parody of paranormal conspiracy literature and graffiti it on the walls of the
noosphere. Boys will be boys after all. Over the years, others in certain academic circles
were brought in to work on updating and upgrading the concepts employed and to
integrate the lesson learned into other projects, some of which are currently underway.
Three of them (the latter 3) made a verbal pact:
Never let it be used to start a cult.
Never let it be used as a platform to piss down the back of anyone who gave blood, sweat
and tears to make it realized.
If a channel became available that made it more accessible to more people and money
was involved, always give the money away (aka charity).
When and if it all becomes too much to manage, toss it into the public domain via a free
game or something like that (New World Disorder).
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The first article of this pact was prescient: while Incunabula never became a cult, the techniques
that were used in its construction have subsequently been deployed to that exact end by modern
conspiracy theorists.
Ong’s Hat was succeeded by several other proto-ARGs, and it was not long before large-
scale commercial ARGs like The Beast or Majestic from video game company Electronic Arts
had wholly commercialized the form. The move of the ARG format from a kind of outsider art
into a vehicle for delivering a Hollywood blockbuster or a AAA video game, only to accidentally
spawn or reinforce a social movement that has been widely held to have caused significant social
damage, recalls the profit motives described in Chapter 1. Whereas in that case the preliminary
forces that led to Gamergate were accelerated by major studios’ fear of compromising profits
resulting in depersonalization of the development process, in this case, the quest to reach ever-
larger consumer bases and increase the engagement of an audience has led to an explosion of
conspiracy theory believers.
Fenster offers an explanation of why conspiracy narratives seem to draw in people from
across the social strata. “The conspiracy narrative,” he writes, “is compelling in its rapid, global
movement, its focus on the actions of both the perpetrators of the evil conspiracy and the
defenders of the moral order, and its attempt to explain a wide range of seemingly disparate past
and present events and structures within a relatively coherent framework. ‘Conspiracy,’” he
concludes, “is not a convention of Hollywood film production… rather, it is a generic, stock
narrative whose dynamic and trajectory allow it to be both a shorthand and a culturally and
politically compelling framework for filmmakers, conspiracy theorists, and audiences alike”
(Fenster, 119). The stock nature of the narrative made it easy for game designers to adopt for
their own interactive experiences. As in Ong’s Hat as well as numerous other examples from
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literature and cinema as formative models, many ARGs create their own fictional conspiracies
for the purposes of driving their internal plot forward. Indeed, it is nearly a requirement that they
do so to some degree, as their creation of an alternate reality necessitates the fiction that is
created diverge from reality, and as most people (non-players of the ARG) are unaware that the
ARG is taking place, it creates both a sort of secret society of players while giving these players
access to exclusive or privileged knowledge that allows them to be set apart from their non-
player peers. Adrian Hon notes how the language of QAnon adherents mirrors the rhetoric of
players of The Beast:
QAnon’s followers always seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done
my research.”
I’d heard that line before. In early 2001, the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s latest
movie, A.I., had just begun (Hon, “What ARGs Can Teach Us”).
One of the most enticing parts of participating in an ARG is the feeling of being privy to unique
or privileged information to which the general population does not have access. The fiction of
the game’s reality, into which players necessarily buy to varying degrees in order to play, creates
a similarly fictional level of importance that players experience: they are the chosen few, they
know the truth of what is going on, and it is up to them to act on this information. If they do not,
the game will end, the plot of the ARG will remain unresolved, and the experience will be
dissatisfying. Therefore, the more time and effort players put into an ARG, the more invested
they become in its success and the greater of a final payoff for the time and energy they expect.
Furthermore, because they know that there is an authority (the game’s creators and puppet
masters) that are managing the experience, they feel secure that the privileged knowledge they
have acquired is factually correct and true, at least within the context of the game. There are
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social factors that encourage dedication as well: the most invested players of an ARG form an
elite group even within the already-small subset of players: solving puzzles, maintaining
documentation, and making the necessary logical leaps to advance the game’s state earn social
capital for the most skilled players. Beyond the rewards for solving the game itself, these social
dividends are a powerful motivator as well. The underlying motivations behind the psychology
of those who buy into conspiracy theories is fundamentally identical to what, as described above,
drives the ARG player.

Psychology of Conspiracy
During the conversation with Ed Del Castillo that began this dissertation, Del Castillo
commented that “video game designers of today are the psychologists of tomorrow. We’re
figuring out why people do what they do and getting them to do more of it. And narrative is a
huge part of that. Story doesn’t rot.” (Allfather, Chatting with Ed Del Castillo). Indeed, the
work of psychologists Karen M. Douglas et al. in their paper “The Psychology of Conspiracy
Theories,” explain why conspiracy theories (and by extension, conspiracy-based ARGs,) are so
compelling. They outline three motivating factors for belief in conspiracy theories: Epistemic,
Existential, and Social. The epistemic motivation, as they describe it, is borne from the need to
form a consistent view of the world and how it functions. “Specific epistemic motives that
causal explanations may serve,” they write, “include slaking curiosity when information is
unavailable, reducing uncertainty and bewilderment when available information is conflicting,
finding meaning when events seem random, and defending beliefs from disconfirmation.
Relevant to these motives, conspiracy theories have attributes that set them apart from other
types of causal explanation” (538). In this regard, the conspiracy theory believer parallels the
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thought process of an ARG player being newly introduced to a game in progress: they have to
read about the game state to that point, research the backstory narrative for the game, and build a
mental map of the various characters, puzzles, and plot threads to form for themselves a coherent
picture of the fictional reality.
When it comes to epistemic motivation, there is a strong resemblance between the newly-
minted conspiracist and the literary critic. Both choose a text, whether it be a novel, film, or a
real-world event, and perform a “reading,” attempting to make sense out of something messy and
resolve various tensions into a coherent interpretation. They diverge in that the critic might also
seek to further problematize a text, further muddying the waters to see what of interest emerges,
whereas the conspiracist is always looking for a solution, trying to find the right answer. ARGs
are distinct from the majority of other entertainment media that deliver fictional narratives in that
they require an individual to perform active research to achieve initial understanding and engage
on a basic level with the work. This is on top of what is usually an effort to make sense of the
game that depends upon the participation of multiple individuals. Whereas the reader of a novel,
for example, may greatly enhance their understanding of a work from conferring with friends
and peers, there is no expectation that they will do so in order to access the basic form of the
work. Thus, the act of communal meaning-making that is present in all interpretive acts
becomes a requisite part of the ARG experience – and the experience of buying into a conspiracy
theory. Playing an ARG, for the most invested players, is a type of role-play activity that mirrors
academic work: players research the existing text (the game content,) produce a reading
(suggesting a possible solution), and submit the ideas to other players for feedback (peer review.)
Outside of the core group of solvers exist a wider circle of players who facilitate their work,
doing essential tasks that mirror real-world jobs: building software tools for solvers
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(programmers,) keeping track of information, and cataloging it in databases or on wikis
(librarians) and so forth. This latter group is arguably the most essential to the endeavor, as
without a coherent aggregation of information that can be parsed easily and quickly by
newcomers, it quickly becomes impossible for the “scholarly” circle of players to expand due to
the endeavor becomes increasingly more opaque to an outside observer. The act of describing is,
as Sharon Marcus et al. write, “a ubiquitous and necessary condition of scholarship” (1), and this
is as equally applicable to an ARG as to any other research-based project. It is when this sort of
play, whether rooted in either an academic instinct or an urge for entertainment, becomes
hijacked by misinformation, that it can become unsafe.
The application of game-world thinking to reality has a high potential for danger: those
that do so become embroiled in a form of false consciousness, where all evidence that their
beliefs in the conspiracy are incorrect must become twisted to reinforce their beliefs instead. An
example of this occurring was presented by Stephan Lewandowsky et al. in a study about the
psychology of climate change skeptic bloggers, who would describe global warming as a type of
scam: “the scamming hypothesis evolved continuously without being guided by clear a priori
assumptions about what would constitute a scammed response profile, thereby ultimately
rendering this hypothesis self-sealing and unfalsifiable […]. It is this psychological attribute,
[…] that points towards a conspiracist component rather than conventional scholarly critique”
(169-170). To put this phenomenon in game design terminology, and while the term may be
considered somewhat passé, the alternate reality of the fictional game world has escaped from
the magic circle and inverted the experiences of the conspiracy believers: reality has become
false, and the “game” is perceived as factual.
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Continuing with Douglas et al’s psychological motivating factors, the existential
motivation for conspiracy belief is borne from a “need for people to feel safe and secure in their
environment and to exert control over the environment as autonomous individuals and as
members of collectives” (539). It is no coincidence, then, that as social and civil unrest has risen
in the United States, the public embrace of conspiracy theories has become a major force both in
the political arena and in the day-to-day lives of the citizenry. As Douglas et al. posit,
distinguishing believers from skeptics allows one to more readily identify individuals who
appear untrustworthy, and thus increase one’s feelings of safety and security by allowing one to
take proactive steps against those individuals. Unfortunately, they also note that belief in
conspiracy theories paradoxically makes a believer feel less secure and in control of their own
life, and more prone to belief in additional conspiracy theories. “Furthermore, exposure to
conspiracy theories may subtly undermine people’s autonomy in another way,” they continue.
“Douglas and Sutton (2008) showed that people were effectively persuaded by proconspiracy
material but were not aware that they had been persuaded and falsely recalled that their
preexposure beliefs were identical to their new beliefs” (539). When a conspiracy theory
doubles as political propaganda – for example, the belief that political elites are engaged in child
trafficking, or that a cabal of Deep State actors plots to unseat the president of the United States
– believers will often feel morally compelled to share their beliefs, for the good of the victims or
even the nation itself. Thus the participatory propaganda machine as described in the previous
chapter is engaged, and misinformation and conspiracy theories enter wide dissemination.
The final motivating factor for belief, the social motivator, relates to the believer’s sense
of self, identity, and desire to belong to an in-group. “Scholars have suggested that conspiracy
theories valorize the self and the in-group by allowing blame for negative outcomes to be
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attributed to others. Thus, they may help to uphold the image of the self and the in-group as
competent and moral but as sabotaged by powerful and unscrupulous others” (540), Douglass et
al. explain. Those who feel ostracized or outcast from the communities they encounter in their
daily lives, be they ethnic, religious, national, or otherwise, are more susceptible to belief in
conspiracy theories, as a new community of believers is formed. With this research in mind, it is
no surprise that many right-wing voters in the United States turned to conspiracy theories
following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Trump ran on a platform about the destruction
of traditional American communities – white, wealthy, and Christian – by outsiders and
immigrants. Much of far-right extremism is fueled by a belief that minority groups seek to
supplant the traditional holders of social capital in society; the chants of “You will not replace us”
at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017 are a direct
manifestation of this fear. The 2012 book The Great Replacement, written by Renaud Camus,
popularized the fear of being supplanted. He argued that Europe was being overrun by Muslim
immigrants who were engaged in mass migration and would soon entirely displace the native
European population, whose way of life and culture would cease to exist.
With this all in mind, it becomes clear that it is the social motivator that is the strongest
of the three when it comes to reinforcing belief in conspiracy theories. The modern conspiracy
community is just that – a community. To extend the example of QAnon, a believer that has
bought into the conspiracy is instantly welcomed by thousands of other adherents via the internet.
It is a death cult, its members buying into the destructive narrative and displaying many of the
psychological markers previously seen in other destructive cults. In early October 2020,
Facebook terminated at least 1,500 pages, profiles, and discussion groups that had accrued across
its various platforms over the prior three years, as part of a universal ban on the conspiracy
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(Collins). This appears to have done little for the group’s ability to spread its narrative, however.
The players of the “QAnon ARG” have themselves become a type of unwitting game masters,
for as they play and continue to accrete new theories onto what becoms a conspiracy katamari
32
,
they produce new participatory propaganda.

Historical American Conspiracy
Conspiracy theories have existed for millennia, but they have held a special place of
prominence in the American consciousness. Mark Cheatham ties the origins of American
political conspiracy theory to the election of John Quincey Adams in 1824. Cheatham illustrates
a scenario that is chillingly similar to more modern occurrences:
The controversy around Adams’s victory quickly fueled suspicions: Tennessean Andrew
Jackson had won the most electoral and popular votes and the most regions and states,
but because he did not win the majority of electoral votes, the U.S. House of
Representatives was constitutionally required to choose the president in a runoff of the
top three vote-getters. Jackson’s supporters believed that House Speaker Henry Clay,
who had placed fourth in the regular election, helped Adams win the House election in
return for being appointed secretary of state. The Jacksonians’ charges of a “corrupt
bargain” between Adams and Clay ensured that the 1828 election would, in part, be
fought over this conspiracy theory (Cheatham).
Cheatham continues by explaining how in the 1828 election, Andrew Jackson’s opponents
utilized conspiracy theories against Jackson to counter the strategy, but ultimately Jackson was
elected president, “and conspiratorial rhetoric remained ever-present throughout his presidency.”

32
Katamari, Japanese for “clump,” became familiar worldwide with the 2004 release of the video game Katamari
Damacy, the gameplay of which consisted of rolling a sticky ball around various environments, accreting into a
larger and larger mass.
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It is not surprising that Donald Trump’s favorite president is regularly cited to be Andrew
Jackson (Jacobson), perhaps the president whose term Trump’s most resembles.
One might ask, then, why conspiracy theory, despite having a global presence, holds such
a long-standing place of prominence in American culture. A few lines of thinking can be
advanced to explain this phenomenon. A very young country relative to the empires of Europe
and Asia, the founding of America as a nation is inextricably tied to the displacement of a native
population. Unlike many other countries, America was relatively geographically isolated, and in
the absence of traditional fears about an “other” that, for example, plagued Europe and led to an
outward-looking, xenophobia-fueled nationalism, Americans instead turned inward. The
improbability of foreign invasion meant that an internal enemy was the only foe that could
emerge. In other words, the calls needed to be coming from inside the house. The American
desire for a group to other can also be seen in the forcible importation of African slaves, who
conveniently came from elsewhere, were visibly distinct from European-descended Americans,
and provided a population that could be dominated. As a result, once the conspiracy theory
emerged in American politics, it should come as no surprise that conspiracy theories concerning
slavery and slave uprisings were among the most influential on everyday life. It is here that can
be seen early roots of an American variant of fascism that carries forward to the modern era.
As Umberto Eco notes in his classic article on the elements of fascism, those who
participate in fascist systems are, much like modern conspiracy theorists, playing a game:
The fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not
change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can
be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot
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involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family
resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it.
He continues with an explanation of fascism’s appeal:
To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only
privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of
nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its
enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot,
possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve
the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews
are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time
inside and outside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found
in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many
others.
Eco’s reference to “many others” extends into the future, beyond what he had experienced, and
must necessarily include the above examples such as The Great Replacement and the
Charlottesville rally. In an era when games are the most popular form of entertainment, the
game-like nature of fascism manifesting in ARG-like conspiracy theories seems almost a
foregone conclusion. As a compounding factor, historically, when American belief in
conspiracy theories is high, events occur that seem to confirm the conspiracy’s believes, adding
more fuel to the fire. Much as Trump’s election can be seen as a parallel to Jackson’s, anxieties
around slave uprisings can be seen to mirror QAnon’s obsession with rooting out pedophiles.
Lending credence to the above is one of the earliest American conspiracies, the New
York Slave Conspiracy of 1741. The theory purported that lower-class whites planned to ally
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with slaves to burn down New York. Although not the only theory of its sort – we are told that
“slave rebellions, conspiracies, and plots in the mainland and island colonies were numerous
throughout the 1730s and early 1740s” (Plaag, 277) – it had one of the most brutal outcomes,
with approximately 200 enslaved people arrested and tried for conspiracy, seventy-two deported
from the colonies, and over 100 sentenced to varying forms of execution ranging from hanging
to being burned at the stake. Evidence hinged largely upon testimony from alleged conspirators,
as “to encourage confessions, authorities eventually offered a confessional reward system,
exchanging lighter punishments—or even pardon—for full disclosure” (Plaag 279). New
Yorkers’ imaginations, primed by reports of other uprisings, acted in what they no doubt felt was
the most prudent fashion, and erred on the side of caution, resulting in what was effectively a
slave massacre based on wholly unreliable evidence.
In the century that followed, conspiracy theories, not just ones tied to slave uprisings,
became almost a perverse American folklore, a sort distinct from that in Where the Water Tastes
Like Wine. It should now be no surprise that Matheny referred to Ong’s Hat as an attempt to
create a new American legend. By the 1860s and the election of Abraham Lincoln, conspiracy
theory had become fully mainstream within both everyday American life and mainstream politics.
Especially common were theories that wealthy northern abolitionists were conspiring to incite
slave uprisings in the south. Inhabitants of the southern states believed that “The abolitionists
are coming, that Abolitionists are out to get us, that Abolitionists are encouraging slave revolts”
(Davis). These theories were reinforced by the rare occurrence where one turned out to be true,
such as in the case of John Brown. In 1858, Brown led a raid in Missouri that freed eleven
enslaved people, the first of several with which he was involved, culminating in a raid and armed
standoff that lasted for two days at Harpers Ferry in October of 1859. One of Brown’s co-
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conspirators, Franklin Sanborn, wrote a detailed account of the conspiracy in the April 1872
issue of The Atlantic, noting that when Brown founded his abolitionist organization, the United
States League of Gileadites, he had written in the founding articles that “These Articles not for
the Overthrow of Government. The foregoing articles shall not be construed so as in any way to
encourage the overthrow of any State Government, or of the General Government of the United
States, and look to no dissolution of the Union, but simply to amendment and repeal, and our
flag shall be the same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution.” Unfortunately,
Sanborn’s detailed account came too late, published nearly a decade after the Civil War’s
conclusion. This has not prevented John Brown’s revolt from maintaining a place within the
American psyche even as public knowledge of the events faded with history; in fact Brown’s star
seems once again to be on the rise. The path that Brown took on his journey to Harper’s Ferry
has been preserved by multiple states as a historic hiking trail. In 2017 the legislature of
Vermont voted to designate the date of Brown’s raid. October 16, as John Brown Day, and in
2020, Blumhouse Television produced a miniseries, The Good Lord Bird, dramatizing the events
of the revolt for Showtime and starring Ethan Hawke.
Despite their wildly divergent circumstances, John Brown’s 1858 revolt reinforced the
worst fears of southerners in much the same way that the July 2019 arrest of financier Jeffrey
Epstein, on charges of sex trafficking of minors, exacerbated one of the founding myths of
QAnon: that there exists a pedophilic ring of elites that control American society and protect one
another from the shadows, and against whom Donald Trump is warring. Epstein’s social circle
was wide, and he associated with dozens of prominent public figures, revealed in the publication
of what has come to be called “Epstein’s Black Book.” Public figures like Bill and Hillary
Clinton, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, Malcom Gladwell, Rupert Murdoch and (ironically) Donald
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Trump are a small number of the dozens of names that appeared in what described as a “small
bound book” (Pryor, 5) removed from Epstein’s residence by a former employee, Alfredo
Rodriguez. Just as Brown’s revolt reinforced fears that abolitionist-led slave revolts were being
planned across the north, the revelations both about Epstein’s perversions and about the elite,
extraordinarily wide social circles in which he moved, amounted to a smoking gun for those
inclined to believe that pedophiles rule the United States.

QAnon and the Appeal of Conspiracy
Conspiracy theories, as Matheny pointed out, always reflect the sentiment of the era in
which they arise. Even in the modern era, the idea of “illegal aliens,” or undocumented
immigrants, remains a powerful rhetorical prop for conservative American politicians; launching
his presidential campaign, Donald Trump spread a conspiracy theory that those crossing into the
country along the Mexican border were all “bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're
rapists” (Phillips). Matheny’s argument that conspiracies shift with the era is evidenced in is the
way that alien-related narratives have evolved. In the 1960s, the majority of UFO stories were
about contact: aliens were mostly concerned over nuclear proliferation and brought with them a
message of peace and intergalactic brotherhood. By the 1980s, the national mood had become
more paranoid, especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and the stories turned from
contact to abduction. Messages of interspecies harmony had given way to human
experimentation, pregnancies, and probes (Matheney). The X-Files, with its focus on alien
contact conspiracies and government cover-ups, went so far as to include a character named
Deep Throat, named for Mark Felt, a key player in the Watergate scandal. When asked about the
enormous popularity of The X-Files, lead actor David Duchovney said, “Obviously it’s tapping
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into something the nation wants… I think it has to do with religious stirrings — a sort of New
Age yearning for an alternate reality and the search for some kind of extrasensory god. Couple
that with a cynical, jaded, dispossessed feeling of having been lied to by the government, and
you’ve got a pretty powerful combination for a TV show. Either that, or the Fox network has an
amazing marketing department” (Svetkey). The X-Files provided an ARG-ish experience to the
home television viewer: describing her growing fandom while researching the show, Bambi L.
Haggins writes that “the show differed from any other in my long history as a consumer of
television—watching the series afforded me intellectual stimulation and much-needed leisure. I
found myself watching episodes I had seen before, making connections in the second viewing
that I had not initially grasped, and being (dare I say it) exhilarated by getting the little in-jokes
and allusions written in for the true fan” (Haggins, 9). It is catching “in-jokes” and “allusions”
that delights many QAnon believers today. Seemingly innocuous facts, such as the fact that at
Donald Trump’s farewell speech on January 20, 2021, there were seventeen American flags,
become transformed into secret messages: Q is the 17
th
letter of the alphabet, and thus this is a
coded sign to the faithful.
QAnon posits that not only is America controlled by a pedophilic cabal, but that Donald
Trump is waging a one-man war against this shadowy organization, and a mysterious individual
known as Q provides cryptic updates about how this battle is going. QAnon is an incredibly
successful version of the conspiracy katamari, taking other conspiracy theories into itself and
incorporating them as mere facets of the overarching plot, thus maintaining an ability to stay
relevant and up-to-the-minute based on whatever might appear in the news on a given day. The
identity of Q is currently unknown, although many believe that it is currently a businessman
named Jim Watkins, who operates the website 8kun. 8kun, formerly 8chan, is ironically a
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common place to find child pornography, and was founded in 2013 by computer programmer
Fredrick Brennan. Brennan, who had felt that 4chan had become too draconian in its moderation
policies, wanted to create an alternative page where free speech would not be stifled. Brennan
turned control of the site over to Watkins in 2016 following the page’s popularity exploding due
to the Gamergate controversy, about which 4chan had banned discussion. Brennan is the one
who has fingered Watkins as the identity of Q, though Watkins may not be Q’s original identity
(Vogt). Whomever the original owner of the Q account may be, it seems to be the case that
Watkins had “gamejacked” them – a term from the ARG community wherein an outside actor
seeks to co-opt the narrative of an ARG and launch their own ARG from within the original.
The character Q is central to the narrative worldbuilding project that is the QAnon
conspiracy. As ARG designer Reed Berkowitz notes, “Q is not a real person, but a fictional
character. QAnon uses the oldest trope of all mystery fiction. A mysterious stranger shows up
and drops a strange clue leading to long-hidden secrets which his clues, and your detecting
power, can reveal…. The fictional mysterious stranger already knows [the solution,] but instead
of telling you the answer… they give you clues. Hard to follow clues. Ambiguous clues. They
say things like ‘Follow the money. Don’t let them fool you. This goes all the way to the top.’”
(Berkowitz). This sort of rhetoric echoes Hon’s earlier observations about the claims of Q
followers: they all claim to have done their research.
The presence of an invisible yet known “game master” figure is a key aspect when it
comes to drawing a comparison between QAnon and ARGs, not least because it is a
distinguishing factor that sets QAnon apart from other conspiracy theories. Attempts to identify
Q, even by those who do not believe in the conspiracy, mirror common reactions held by ARG
players when stumbling across a new game trailhead. During the soft launch of Dared, multiple
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investigators immediately jumped to try and determine who the individual pulling the strings
might be. “[W]itch hunting is a no no here” one of the moderators had to remind players in the
Game Detectives discord. “Also, no doxxing” (hyzer). It is this reliance on the words of a
singular, known individual as the leader of the movement that might ultimately end up being
QAnon’s undoing. Following the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 American presidential
election, Q fell silent for days. When he finally returned to posting on November 13, a week
after every major network had called the race for Joe Biden, there was no prophecy or
information or substantial update; Q’s posts included an American flag, a statement about how
nothing can stop what is to come, and a platitude: “It had to be this way. Sometimes you must
walk through the darkness before you can see the light” (Dickson). While some Q adherents
were unshaken in their faith, skepticism and fear were visible amongst his followers, with many
expressing open dismay or fear that Q had failed to secure a second term of the Trump
presidency. Perhaps not coincidentally, Watkins had resigned as a moderator of 8kun a week
before. The movement is not dead – in this same election, QAnon followers were elected to
congress for the first time – but it is clear that something has changed.
There is no clear agreement among ARG designers as to the degree they are themselves
responsible for the rise of the modern conspiracy theories and propaganda methodologies. Hon
finds himself at odds with Matheny’s perspective as to how influential the form has truly been.
“It is possible that modern disinformation people, practitioners, have taken some ideas from
ARGs, but I don’t want to give ARGs too much credit,” he explains. “I think it’s more kind of
family resemblance than actual direct inspiration. I say that because ARGs have never really
been that popular… most people […] haven’t played an ARG. Most of my friends haven’t
played ARGs. I think they use tools in the same way, but it probably would have happened
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anyway, so I’m not, I don’t know, it doesn’t keep me up at night thinking ‘did I bring about the
downfall of western civilization by helping popularize ARG tools’ because I think it would have
happened anyway, and in a way it did” (Hon, Gamification). He continues by urging that
designers must now be more vigilant in how they present their fictional worlds, as there is no
guarantee that players will not truly buy into the fiction. (This was also a major concern during
the creation of Dared; the tension between trying to make everything appear as “real” as possible
was at constant odds with the need to meet the standards of the film’s ethics policies.) Where
Hon seems to miss a critical connection is that while he is correct that the ARG is, as game forms
go, a fairly niche form of game, the far-right architects of the QAnon conspiracy theory and the
surrounding media that props it up are particularly game-savvy: recall the connection, as
illustrated in Chapter 1, between Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and Gamergate. 8kun itself has a
large and active video game discussion community that arose as a direct result of 4chan banning
discussion of the harassment campaign; by the end of 2014 it had been reported that the
Gamergate discussion board was the second most popular forum on the website (Bernstein). In
February 2019, video game publisher THQ Nordic held a public “Ask Me Anything” event on
the website. One does not need to have played an ARG in order to be aware of the form,
understand the structure, and observe the potential for motivating group action that the game
format contains.
At this point, our focus can shift to the third level of the framework described at this
chapter’s outset: political revolution. Even before the popularization of the ARG, the potential
for rumors and conspiracy theories to motivate action was well known: “the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia was described as a ‘revolution with roots in a rumor,’” Heng Chen et al note.
“At the dawn of the revolution, a prominent (false) rumor that a 19-year-old student was brutally
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killed by the police triggered many otherwise hesitant citizens to take to the streets. The
revolution gained huge momentum right after that and the regime collapsed a few days later”
(89). As described above, 2020 was the first year that QAnon believers were able to win
national office in the United States. Despite this fact, in the days following the election of Joe
Biden to the presidency, there was substantial fear reported in mainstream news outlets that Q
followers, alongside other right-wing political adherents, would believe the false statements
issued by Donald Trump about the legitimacy of his electoral loss, and that Trump would attempt
a coup, possibly plunging the nation into open civil war. This was documented by both the
domestic and international press, and the opinion pages of the media attacked the situation in no
uncertain language: “Trump's election lies are an attempted coup” blared one headline from NBC
News (Obeidallah). “Can Trump actually stage a coup and stay in office for a second term?”
asked The Guardian (Levine). The New Yorker took a withering look at “The Coup Stage of
Donald Trump’s Presidency” (M. Green). To many, it seemed as if Trump was engaging in a
form of a popular internet meme: “Just Kidding… Unless?” (Know Your Meme). In other words,
of course Trump would not actually refuse to leave the presidency; it was merely a matter of
time… unless he could get away with it. It appeared that the Trump Administration was playing
a high-stakes game of chicken, whereby repeatedly spreading false narratives about the
legitimacy of the election and encouraging voters to tell others about rigged polls, they hoped to
undermine the next administration (and if possible, displace them). Those who believed
Trump’s conspiracy theories, however, began organizing on social media, where on “sites used
by the far-right, such as Gab and Parler, directions on which streets to take to avoid the police
and which tools to bring to help pry open doors were exchanged in comments. At least a dozen
people posted about carrying guns into the halls of Congress” (Frenkel). This effort resulted in
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the breach of the United States Capitol by a mob on 6 January 2021, when the president incited
an attack on Congress following a rally at the White House where he continued to push for
action to reverse his electoral loss. Rioters proclaimed that the third tier of the above framework
had been reached, and that “It’s a revolution!” (Walker).
The game-like nature of the spread of rumors is not lost on Chen et al: “[rumors] may
serve as a coordination device just like a public signal in a coordination game… we model
political revolution as a global game” (90). Using games as a metaphor for understanding
systems with worldwide implications is a longstanding academic exercise. This is most
prominent in economics and mathematics, where game theory has led to a prodigious quantity of
scholarship. In 1993, Hans Carlsson and Eric van Damme defined a “global game” as “an
incomplete information game where the actual payoff structure is determined by a random draw
from a given class of games and where each player makes a noisy observation of the selected
game” (Carlsson). While a deep analysis of the game theory at work here is beyond the scope of
this chapter, it is important to point out the dual meaning present in Chen’s use of the term global
game. The phrase has a deeper resonance than perhaps Chen expected: while the spread of
rumors was modeled as a global game in the mathematical sense, Trump and his associates were
engaged in the play of a game with global, or planetwide, implications, viewed from a game
design perspective. The language of one discipline unexpectedly reveals a truth about another.
Chen et al.’s mathematical model for rumor spread, with its assumption that rumors are
heard by all citizens at once instead of passed on sequentially, is especially strong when it comes
to examining the actions of the Trump administration, as many of the statements questioning the
legitimacy of the election were made on Twitter, by the president himself, and the tweets were
pushed to his nearly 89 million followers simultaneously, each appearing in real-time has he
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made them. Extending the logic of their argument, political revolution can be conceived of as
the transition from an alternate reality game to actual political reality, and in this case, Trump
was forcefully attempting to replace reality with the alternate one in which he had won the
presidential election. To place this within the framework presented at the beginning of the
chapter, the goal was to transition from the second tier of misinformation games to the third.
Ultimately, the attempt was foiled by the president’s own party, as state-level Republican
officials refused to manipulate the results of the votes. He was further frustrated when members
of his cabinet declined to attempt to overturn the results, as attorney general William Barr stated
he found no evidence of election fraud. The situation was well-summarized by artist duo Dissent
& Company on their website Is This A Coup?, writing that there was “no reason to believe that
Trump has lined up conspirators who have any actual power to change the results” (Heiko). This
is not to say that the ramifications of the conspiracy were resolved, as Trump by many accounts
succeeded in convincing 70% of Republicans that the election had not been free and fair (C.
Kim). While an immediate political revolution was averted, the situation is by no means
resolved and there remains ample space in the national situation for a second, more effectively
coordinated attempt in the years to come.

Design Complicity
It is easy to see why the connections between ARGs and conspiracy theories took so long
for developers and designers to catch onto. The primary conceit of an ARG is to pretend the
fictional is reality. “I just basically played along, assuming that they were playing along, and in
some cases it turned out they weren't,” Matheny told me. It was not until believers showed up at
his home to demand answers that it became clear things needed to be shut down, and even then,
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this event seemed to be an isolated incident. It was not as though Daniel Myrick and Eduardo
Sánchez, directors of The Blair Witch Project (1999), had gone through similar harassment, and
theirs was a film which similarly played with the conceit that the events it depicted were reality
and invented a fictional new American legend, and they had an exponentially larger audience to
boot. However, now that the veil has been lifted, the question of how to address the problem
cannot be avoided. Although the question of how to definitively solve viral misinformation is
beyond the scope of this paper (and realistically any paper,) the first steps that ARG developers
and designers, marketing teams and producers, and all those involved in the production of this
type of entertainment need to take are both straightforward, effective, and clear. I have largely
drawn these conclusions from my own personal work, first designing the ARG for Frog
Fractions 2, and more heavily from Dared My Best Friend, both of which exposed to me the
potential pitfalls inherently associated with mishandling this type of game. Some of these ideas
also grew from conversations in the International Game Developers Association’s Game Writing
Special Interest Group.
The first, and most basic step that must be taken, is that all games productions should
have an ethics department or policies similar to the established in the Dared project, and any
individual working on the project must be able to flag any aspect of the project as an ethical
concern. This currently does not exist in most studio environments, which has led to, to choose a
recent example, games like Call of Duty: Cold War deploying an ARG and accompanying
marketing campaign that boosted the rhetoric of Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, using footage
of Bezmenov from a 1984 conversation with far-right conspiracy theorist and recent alt-right
recruiter G. Edward Griffin. In the full interview, Bezmenov implies that America’s
commitment to diversity and equality is a weakness that makes it a prime target for Soviet
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invasion. Bezmenov has become an intellectual idol of some on the far right, and his inclusion
was hailed as a sign that the developers of Call of Duty were on their side. The advertisement
warns the viewer to “KNOW YOUR HISTORY” before the word history is replaced with
ИСТОРИЮ as English is overtaken by Cyrillic (IGN). If Activision did not wish to endorse the
views that Bezmenov espouses, this trailer would have been internally flagged as an ethical
violation before ever releasing. The ethical policies must be specific in their requirements and
enforceable – if an executive can unilaterally overturn the ethical concerns of their team, the
policy will not be effective. The policy must also be crafted carefully to avoid running afoul of
concerns about free expression and creative production, as the goal would be to prevent
unintended messages or consequences that arise from carelessness or ignorance during a work’s
production.
Some game studios have attempted to implement something similar to what I have
described above. “I believe we had that kind of thing while I was at ubisoft,” a former employee,
speaking anonymously to me, said, “but regarding all the last year stuff... it wasn't really that
effective,” they continued, referencing a series of scandals around sexual harassment, worker
abuse and executive misconduct that rocked the company in 2020 (Anonymous). When I asked
about how effective the position had been, they explained that, “From my point of view this is
just a failsafe position. If some issue (sic) arise, there's "someone to blame". I've yet to see
concrete philosophical changes motivated by this kind of mesures. (sic) I can't speak in details,
but I've heard of cases where people in the inclusivity position dismissed some inclusivity
content because the company/public "wasn't ready". I'm careful not to name any names here. It
makes for some good PR material without really addressing the root problem… For Ubisoft… it
always has felt like it was a fail safe option, and from what I've heard it has not changed that
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much since I've left.” My subject here highlights one of the biggest pitfalls that can arise if
having a policy is the only step a studio takes: it is very easy for the wrong person to be put in
the job of monitoring, and it is even easier for any concerns that are raised to be dismissed by
executives.
33
This is why the Dared production allowed all employees to raise flags directly to
management instead of being processed through an individual,
34
and why each concern needed to
be reviewed in conversation with the management team. While the system is not foolproof and
can still be compromised by other abuses and problems in one’s workplace, and it is not the only
step that must be taken, but it establishes a baseline process for addressing the content of one’s
work before production closes and the proverbial horses have left the barn.
As one might expect, there were some challenges in writing this chapter in late 2020 and
early 2021 that might not arise when conducting research that does not deal with real-world
political events that are unfolding over the same period covered by the writing process. There
were many times when I simply had to wait and see what would happen, as the possible futures
that might have unfolded were too many for me to realistically anticipate. Some, such as the
reelection of Donald Trump, seemed entirely plausible and would have required a complete
redrafting of the latter half of this chapter, while other events that might have seemed less
predictable, such as the January 6 insurrection at the United States capital, were entirely
anticipated by the framework I present at the chapter’s outset. This chapter does not, in the end,
seek to assign blame to various artists, designers, or creative individuals when it comes to
building systems that have since been commandeered by malicious political actors. It would be

33
The situation of independent studios is much harder to address in the same way, due to the much smaller scale of
development and the vastly lower number of employees involved, such that many times an individual might hold
multiple developer positions. This is not to say that systems of accountability do not need to be put in place across
all levels of development, as the case of abuse at independent studio Fullbright shows (Carpenter), but that the
largest, most visible operations should seek to remedy their systemic failings as an example to all other developers.
34
It is understood here that the difference in the scale of production between the Dared project and a AAA video
game is enormous, but I believe that it is critical nevertheless to not filter employee concerns through multiple levels
of communication.
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entirely unreasonable and disingenuous to expect the early ARG trailblazers to have foreseen the
consequences, sometimes decades later, of the misappropriation of the principles they pioneered.
If I had to choose two goals for this chapter as it journeys out into the world, the first would be
that it serves as a high-level blueprint for understanding, in part, the period of the 2020 American
political era, placing the events within a historical and cultural context that runs in parallel and is
complementary to the narratives that might be found in contemporary mainstream press
documentation and any professional historical analysis that may emerge in the future. The
second goal would be to help any who read it not only understand but prepare for similar events
that could unfold down the line. As I have said, many possible and plausible outcomes might
have easily occurred in the place of what did; by understanding the forces that led us to this
moment in history, we will be better prepared to face any subsequent challenges. This is not
meant to read as a trite cliché, much like noting those who fail to understand history are doomed
to repeat it, but plain common sense: a lack of understanding on the part of those who produce
entertainment as to the longer-term impacts their work has on the public that consumes it has
been a notable contributing factor, though obviously not the only or largest factor, to the toxic
polarization and cultural splintering that, at the time of writing, threatens many western
democracies today. By setting a piece of the puzzle into place, we move closer to overcoming
these challenges, and in the next chapter, I will highlight various ways in which democracies can
and are being strengthened using the same tools and methodologies that are currently being
leveraged to attack them.

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Chapter 4: ARGs for Good?
Reclaiming Design and the Future of Democracy

In the prior chapter, I examined the methodologies by which conspiracy theories and
games could be utilized to subvert modern liberal democracies, fomenting unrest, violence, and
revolution. Readers may at this point feel discouraged, and understandably so: the cat is out of
the bag. There is no realistic way to rewind or remove widespread knowledge about how to
effectively leverage participatory propaganda and ARG-like engagement techniques for
malicious political ends. That said, the picture is not entirely grim. In this chapter, I will
demonstrate the ways that these selfsame design tools and methodologies which I have, to this
point, interrogated within the context of negative action, can (and have) been used constructively,
both to act as counterprogramming to the malicious actions previously covered and also to help
determine a workable roadmap for potential future actions. To that end, this chapter will cover
two major subjects. I will initially focus on practical real-world applications of game design and
logic that have been leveraged to build sustainable, participatory democratic processes and
systems. Finally, I will discuss game design and education. These two fields, democracy and
education, are arenas in which game design in particular can, and in some cases already has,
been deployed to effect positive change.
Methodologically, much of this chapter’s research mirrors that of Chapter 1, in that it
draws from my insights and intuitions from years working as a game designer, especially on
ARGs, while seeing that experience supplemented by the voices of others, both from published
research and personal interviews. Rhetorically, this chapter may be taken, alongside Chapters 2
and 3, as an echo and extension of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing on paranoid and reparative
readings. Sedgwick’s work, especially in the year 2021 as much of the planet is still subject to
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the ravages of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, rings especially urgent. Writing of a
conversation that occurred during the AIDS epidemic, Sedgwick asked her friend about the
possible origins of HIV, given rampant conspiracy speculation at the time (echoes of which can
be found in today’s theories about the birth of COVID-19 in a Chinese laboratory). Sedgwick
quotes her friend as saying, “I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose
we were sure of every element of a conspiracy…. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those
things – what would we know then that we don’t already know?” (123). As Sedgwick explains,
this question opened her eyes to the possibility of moving past questions about whether a fact is
true or not, and onto what having knowledge of that fact does. Critiquing paranoid readings of
texts, Sedgwick champions what she calls reparative practices, which exist even within
supposedly paranoid works of criticism. This dissertation project as a whole contains that
duality, reading games, and specifically the ARG as a form, in both ways. Whereas prior
chapters performed a reading of ARGs within the hermeneutics of suspicion, examining the form
with a level of skepticism born from a fusion of my own design experience alongside
observation of the American political landscape of the early 21
st
century, this chapter performs a
reparative reading, looking to examine how ARGs can be used in activist ways to build positive
futures, reduce systemic oppression and combat the negative implementations previously
outlined.

ARGs for Democracy?
Design principles have been applied to democratic processes for many years. One
example from the world of graphic design is the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Design for
Democracy initiative. As DiSalvo describes,
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“According to its Web site, DfD ‘applies design tools and thinking to increase
civic participation by making interactions between the U.S. government and its citizens
more understandable, efficient and trustworthy’ (AIGA 2008). The programs within the
DfD initiative are broad reaching. The Get Out the Vote program solicits nonpartisan
graphic design to promote voter registration and participation; the Government Officials:
Get Help program provides design services to ‘make government more accessible,
transparent, and efficient’ (AIGA 2008) […]. The efforts of DfD have had direct,
measurable, and laudable effects.” (DiSalvo 8-9)
With other creative disciplines seeing success in applying their design principles and practice
toward solving problems with democratic systems (in this case, low voter turnout), it seems
obvious that games and game design can be utilized similarly. In the next segment of this
chapter I will discuss how games and game-like interactive systems are already being used to
address questions around the future of democracy in the 21
st
century, as well as some of the
challenges these systems face from anti-democratic forces.
Before examining how games intersect and influence political democracy, it is prudent to
first briefly consider how democracy, as a concept, influences games and game design.
Democracy is not a quality that is inherent to games – most games are decidedly undemocratic in
their play, insofar as they are played as finished products. Democracy may enter the
development process depending on the methodological predilections of an individual creator or
studio, but this is not assured. Despite this, there are some games in which the democratic
process is the point – consider the classic party game Mafia (Dimitry Davidoff, 1987), the game
show Survivor (Charlie Parsons, 1997), or modern digital reimaginings such as Among Us
(Innersloth, 2018) or Gnosia (Petit Depotto, 2019). For these titles, the play manifests over a
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series of rounds as a democratic voting process where (at least) one player is chosen for
elimination until a winner is determined.
Several ways that games and game-like implementations can serve the cause of
democracy were described by political scientist Josh Lerner in his book Making Democracy Fun:
How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics. Published in 2014, the book
took several years to write and is historically situated in the late-2000s-to-early 2010s period.
Acknowledging that global democracy appears to be in decline, Lerner writes that “Despite
widespread popularity, democracy is suffering from less engagement, less trust, and less power.
After reviewing several causes of these problems, I focus on one that has been mostly neglected:
democratic participation is relatively unappealing” (5-6). Concentrating his attention at the local
level as a “key space for reconnecting citizens with government” (6), Lerner’s book outlines
several real-world examples where games or game-like methodologies have already been
successful at strengthening democracies and democratic systems. The book is dated in several
ways; although the lack of prescience as regards future politics does not diminish the broad ideas
Lerner presents about combating a decline in the power of democracy as a system, those ideas
require updating with additional context from the intervening years between then and now,
before the remaining pieces of his argument can be extended into the present.
In outlining the reasons he believes democracy is in decline, Lerner identifies three
primary causes: disengagement, distrust, and disempowerment. The social conditions around
these three factors have notably altered since the publication of Lerner’s book, and none to a
greater degree than the question of disengagement. A shallow reading of the current political
moment would seem to belie that American engagement with democracy is declining; in fact,
surely it must be the opposite. After all, the trend of disengagement has, as of 2020, seemingly
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reversed in the United States, with the 2020 presidential election breaking records for voter
turnout. Organizations such as Fair Fight Action, founded by former Georgia senate minority
leader Stacey Abrams, have seen success in combatting voter suppression and Fair Fight has
been credited with registering enough voters to enable Joe Biden’s razor-thin electoral victory in
the 2020 presidential election. Both the executive and legislative branches have made enabling
access to the ballot box a top legislative priority in response to state-level attempts to restrict
voting access by right-wing lawmakers. Regardless of one’s political leanings, it would appear
to an observer that investment in voting and issues around voting are of utmost interest to the
American public, based upon the time, energy, and expenditures of their elected officials. In a
personal interview, Lerner acknowledged these facts but argued that although participation is up
in national elections, participation in overall government has not been solved.
While the emotional investment and participation of American citizens in federal
elections appears, for the moment, to be at an all-time high, the same cannot be said for local
politics. This is even while setting aside concerns over whether it is healthy for democracy when
a major political party is actively engaged in restricting access to voting. Long gone are the days
when Tip O’Neill could claim that “all politics is local.” It is now the norm for people to be
unaware of who their local representatives are, what they stand for, and who is in charge of the
state, district, or even town-level governance that in many ways plays a much larger role in their
day-to-day lives than the federal government. Out of personal curiosity, I decided to engage in
an impromptu experiment, albeit one that was not particularly scientifically rigorous, and
investigated the local Democratic and Republican Committee party web presences for my
hometown of Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. The pages were largely similar, and both contained
basic rhetoric about the parties, a list of the currently-elected officials, and information about
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how to find one’s polling place. Photographs of elected officials were blurry. There was no
easily-found summary of what the Committees were doing, and only the most basic accounting
of the political accomplishments or goals of any individuals pictured.
Across both pages, there was scant information about how a resident might even begin to
get involved in the politics of Lower Merion. In this regard, the pages were both unhelpful or
uninformative. Comically, on the Democratic Committee’s website, a link entitled “Get involved”
leads to a donation link and a fillable webform for those who are interested in participating in
exactly three ways: making phone calls, sending text messages, and volunteering on Election
Day. The party’s calendar of upcoming events was entirely bare for July 2021, with June and
August having a single event, a general meeting with no visible way to attend (the location was
simply listed as “Zoom”). The Republican party’s website fared slightly better: the “Support”
link took one to a fundraising page but also allowed the user to take a survey where in addition to
the volunteering options offered by Democrats, one could also express interest in fundraising,
hosting events and mail-in ballot watching. The Republican events calendar had six events in
July, four in June, and one in August, with real-world addresses listed for most.
The Republican Party’s somewhat superior (though not by much) user experience might
be a reflection of the current state of politics in Lower Merion. Situated within Montgomery
County, the region was historically a Republican stronghold and one of the last holdouts of the
Eastern Establishment. It is relatively diverse, being “home to Valley Forge and high school
home court to the late Kobe Bryant, […] with affluent towns like Gladwyne, more urban areas
like Norristown, and rural, Republican pockets in the northern tip” (Terruso). In the late 20
th

century, growing disaffection towards the GOP led to a seismic realignment towards the
Democratic Party. Today, Montgomery County is a “powerful Democratic stronghold” and one
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that Representative Madeleine Dean called “the lynchpin for the state.” In 2020, Joe Biden
increased his voter margin by 50% over Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Thus it may be that the
Republican Committee feels it needs to try harder to win voters, especially given the somewhat
unusual political demographics of the township. And yet, my experience navigating the web
presence of my local government is not atypical for most jurisdictions in the United States: an
opaque system staffed by people I have never met and whose decisions, due to the lack of
transparency, can often seem arbitrary. Federal politicians have gotten very good at telling
voters who they are and what they want to do if elected. They have large megaphones through
major media outlets and deep pockets from fundraising to help spread their message. Is it any
wonder that local governance seems irrelevant in comparison, and that the American citizenry is
disengaged from these systems?
35

Distrust, the second of Lerner’s three factors, is, much like disengagement, likewise
slippery when it comes to the specifics: since the final years of George W. Bush’s administration,
the number of Americans who claim to trust the government has been approximately 30% or
lower, with individual party breakdown varying depending on whether they held the reins of
power. For example, in 2020, 28% of Republicans claimed to trust the government, up from
11% in 2015 (Pew 2020, Pew 2019). This makes sense; Donald Trump rode to electoral victory
in part due to his outsider status and his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington politics,
and once he became the establishment the trust dynamic was changed. Trump supporters (and
later, QAnon adherents) trusted Trump, and so when Trump became the government they trusted
him, if not the system as a whole. Partisan trust in government waxes and wanes as control of

35
Readers might suppose that the trend of COVID-19 denialism that currently courses through the Republican party
may play a critical factor in the GOP’s decision to hold more events, but Montgomery County is a relative anomaly
compared to the national party; many of the Republican voters identify as what have historically been known as
“Rockefeller Republicans,” Eastern Establishment holdouts voting liberally on many social issues while maintaining
conservative stances on financial questions.
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the White House shifts, but as the Pew Research Center’s analysis of their data indicates, the
degree of shift is itself dictated by the party in power:
Since the 1970s, trust in government has been consistently higher among members of the
party that controls the White House than among the opposition party. However,
Republicans have been much more reactive than Democrats to changes in political power.
Republicans have expressed much higher levels of trust during Republican than during
Democratic presidencies, while Democrats’ attitudes have tended to be more consistent,
regardless of which party controls the White House (Pew 2019).
The Pew data shows a remarkable consistency in rising distrust in government that cuts across
age, racial and ethnic boundaries. The decline in trust in government is broadly uniform across
Millennial, Gen X, Baby Boomer, Silent, and Greatest Generation populations, and while whites
have tended to have a stronger trust in government during Republican administrations and
minorities during Democratic ones, the overall trend toward distrust remains relatively unvaried
irrespective of the president’s political party.
Disempowerment is perhaps the thorniest issue, and of the three points, the one that
remains the most potent today. When Lerner writes that “Democracy – or at least representative
democracy – is the political norm in much of the world, emerging as a new common sense” (7),
he did not foresee the rise of far-right authoritarian and illiberal movements across the world, not
just in places like China or Russia, but within the United States, Great Britain, and other western
powers. Lerner told me that distrust of government and democracy has grown far worse. He
believes that the erosion of trust in the United States is so great that polling might not be able to
keep up; ten years prior there would not have been an explicitly anti-democratic movement the
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way we see today, as state governments controlled by the Republican Party move to curtail
voting rights and poll access.
In digging into the actions of antidemocratic actors in 2021, Lerner describes a causal
link between the rise of neoliberalism in the late 20
th
century and the January 6 attack on the US
Capitol, where right-wing donors, acting under the rhetoric of defending personal liberties,
funded networks across media, academia, and politics, with the goal of holding onto power
(“Foundations”). This parallels a subject that arose during my own discussion with him; that
pro-democracy philanthropies which wish to combat right-wing political influence must
themselves operate as democracies internally, instead of the oligarchies that they often are.
Noting the rhetoric of those who stormed the Capitol as claiming to be defenders of democracy,
he writes that “foundations are one of the most durable bastions of oligarchy. They are generally
governed by a small group of benefactors and professionals, who are disproportionately white,
wealthy, and male. […] Each year, they teach thousands of employees and grantees to accept
oligarchic rule as common sense. Like the Capitol insurgents, they justify anti-democratic
practices in the name of democracy” (“Foundations”). “They are undermining the democratic
practices that they allegedly promote,” Lerner told me, “and you make a similar analogy to game
design, that if the game design industry is practicing exploitative, manipulative practices, that is
undermining and training people in that mode of engagement. It is training people to be
exploitative, to be manipulative” (Personal Interview).
If, as Lerner claims, the trust in government is one of the critical weaknesses in modern
democracies, then there are additional lessons that can be learned from game design to help
rebuild faith in the system. Chris Hazard, who earned a Ph.D. studying trust and reputation in
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game theory before moving into commercial game design, outlines the basics of both of these
concepts. “Reputation,” he explains,
is measuring something about you, it’s measuring a skill, an attribute that can be
measured via statistics. It’s something that is looking at your past performance, and if
you’re not going to change anything about yourself, it’s going to give you the same
results over and over and over again. You can count on it. However, trust is what you’ll
do in the future given a new context. If you use statistics to measure trust you’re not
going to get a good example, you’ll have somebody who builds up their reputation,
they’re this great person, and then they embezzle $60 billion, and they’ve just spent all of
their capital. So how do you predict how somebody is going to do in a new situation.
And this is what trust is (Hazard).
How, then, does a game designer build trust with players? In a successful game, the player must
trust the designer to some degree, or they would be unwilling to engage with the game in the first
place. For example, players must believe that the game will provide some sort of reward,
commonly fun or entertainment, (though these are not necessarily the only possible rewards).
They must trust that the game designer will not waste their time, or that if the game does seem to
waste their time, that it is doing so for a greater purpose.
Trust has long been modeled by game theorists and utilized by economists, and when
talking about trust and games, the existence of so-called “trust games” can become confusing,
especially given the existence of games like the “trust fall” that are often played as corporate
teambuilding exercises. In contrast to these sorts of activities, within game theory, trust games
are “an experimental, incentivized measure of trust”; when conducted in a laboratory setting they
use mathematical models “with the aim of isolating the essence of trust and trustworthiness”
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(Alós-Ferrer). A video game implementation of a trust game scenario, The Evolution of Trust,
was created by game designer Nicky Case in 2017 and is available online at
https://ncase.me/trust/. Case draws from David Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, using
the 1914 Christmas truce of World War I as a leaping-off point to educate players about various
ways that trust develops and degrades. The tongue-in-cheek opening of the game highlights the
game’s goal and tone, as Case writes,
During World I, peace broke out. It was Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Despite
strict orders not to chillax with the enemy, British and German soldiers left the trenches,
crossed No Man’s Land, and gathered to bury their dead, exchange gifts, and play games.
Meanwhile: it’s 2017, and the West has been at peace for decades, and wow, we suck at
trust. Surveys show that, over the past forty years, fewer and fewer people say they trust
each other. So here’s our puzzle: Why, even in peacetime, do friends become
enemies? And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends? I think game
theory can help explain our epidemic of distrust – and how we can fix it! So, to
understand all of this… …let’s play a game.
Case’s game plays out as a iterated implementation of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game
where two players can either choose to cooperate with each other or betray their partner’s trust
If both players betray one another, they both lose with a severe penalty, and if they both
cooperate they similarly lose (but with a lesser penalty). If only one person betrays the other, that
player wins and the betrayed player loses, with the worst possible penalty. The video game
implementation allows players to visualize and play through repeated iterations of this trust game
scenario, with a variety of rule alterations, before leading players to the conclusion that
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compounding factors such as miscommunication, a decline in social interaction in the 21
st

century, and human error have all contributed to a more distrustful world.
Case’s cartoony visuals and humorous writing keep the play of The Evolution of Trust
relatively light-hearted as they demonstrate the ways in which trust degrades, even in an
atmosphere of cooperation and peace. This is especially applicable to nations in the twenty-first
century and their relationship to their citizens, as discussed above. Thus, for direct-democracy
platforms such as the ones highlighted above to succeed, one must address several major hurdles
to widespread adoption of new democratic platforms: distrust of both technology and the
governments that utilize it. One might seek to discern from whence this paranoia arises in an
effort to quell it. In Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics,
Fig 1: Screen capture from The Evolution of Trust. Image captured by the author.
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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues it “stems from the reduction of political problems into
technological ones—a reduction that blinds us to the ways in which those very technologies
operate and fail to operate” (3). Chun describes much of the distrust around the internet and
what she calls “fiber-optic networks” as a new variety of agoraphobia. She argues that it is
“manifested by those who long for consensus and rationality, this latest form [of agoraphobia]
masks fear as nostalgia: rather than admitting their fear of open spaces, these agoraphobics claim
that the masses or identity politics have made post-(variable date) public spaces unlivable”
(Chun, 247). Some of this anxiety is well-founded; “virtually all Internet traffic travels over the
systems of one company… Cisco Systems” (254), Chun notes while invoking Orwell’s big
brother metaphor as she discusses the lie of a supposed “happy internet” (255). It is no wonder,
then, that many feel suspicious of technology corporations, while simultaneously paradoxical
that, in the United States, private industry consistently ranks as more trustworthy than congress
(Gallup).
Sasha Costanza-Chock writes that “popular narratives of design, technology, and social
change are dominated by techno-utopian hype about ever-more-powerful personal devices,
‘intelligent’ systems, and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ on the one hand, and totalizing pessimistic
accounts of digital surveillance, disinformation, and algorithmic injustice, on the other”
(Costanza-Chock, xvi). The latter side of this dichotomy is the source of a particularly potent
form of distrust, coming, as one might expect, from technologists and digital advocates whose
ideas are rooted in right-wing philosophies. Any governmental integration with the internet runs
the risk of bumping up against what David Golumbia describes as “cyberlibertarianism,” a
worldview which he writes is “compatible with a wide range of political viewpoints” (5) but
whose “slogans and beliefs… incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they
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manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately seem to come from
the right” (4). The belief that governments should not regulate the internet, and that any
governmental oversight or interface with internet systems leads to the curtailing of freedom is
widespread, though as Golumbia notes, the use of “‘freedom’ [is often] identical [to] the use of
‘free’ in the phrase ‘free market’: that is, free from government regulation” (6). Fear of
government control over online spaces dates at least to the 1990s, when “Paul Krugman wrote a
New York Times column about… [how i]nternet technology is ‘erasing boundaries’ and
undermining government power” and Nicolas Negroponte stated that “It’s not that laws aren’t
relevant, it’s that the nation-state is not relevant” (Goldsmith and Wu, 3). This sort of statement
does not sit well, of course, with authoritarian governments. A powerful example is that of
Yahoo, which, following a cyberlibertarian victory in French courts over the issue of the sale of
Nazi memorabilia,
36
capitulated in 2002 to the Chinese government’s demand that Yahoo “filter
materials that might be harmful or threatening to party rule. The Chinese government, in effect,
asked Yahoo to serve as Internet censor for the Communist party” (9). Market access to China
was (and remains) effectively restricted by a company’s willingness to set aside the
cyberlibertarian values that many technologists hold, and today the largest technology companies
have done so to maximize their profits: firms such as Apple and Microsoft have set up what
Jacob Helberg describes as a “one company, two systems” operation, a setup that he argues is

36
In the 2000 case, Ligue contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme et Union des étudiants juifs de France c. Yahoo! Inc.
et Société Yahoo! France (LICRA c. Yahoo!), the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism
(LICRA) argued that Yahoo! was facilitating the sale of Nazi memorabilia, in violation of French legal code.
LICRA sought the removal of the links to offending webpages. The case was especially notable because Yahoo!,
with its servers located in California, argued that they were not subject to French law even if French citizens could
use their service. Ultimately, the court ruled that Yahoo! must filter the content on its French-language pages and
provide its French users a warning that if they utilize links from other nations’ Yahoo!’s services, they may violate
French law (Reuters) – a loss for Yahoo, but a far narrower and ultimately relatively inconsequential result relative
to what the plaintiff sought. The case would continue into the United States over the next few years, and Yahoo
would eventually cave to social pressure over hosting objectionable material (Hu).
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unworkable in the long term: “tailoring one’s principles to make them compatible with the
CCP’s dictates makes them systemically incompatible with American values” (Helberg).
Might it be that these “American values” may be less of a help than a hindrance in a 21
st
-
century democracy? This dissertation has until this point been primarily concerned with the
affairs of American politics, and while I have drawn upon some international examples, they
have not played a pivotal role in my argumentation. Now, it is worth looking more closely at
other nations and how they have dealt with similar challenges to their democratic systems. If we
turn our gaze away from the United States, we can see multiple emerging approaches that are
succeeding in the promotion of participatory democracy and directly working to address
concerns around disengagement, distrust, and disempowerment. Notably, these systems are not
weighed down by the first-past-the-post horserace nature of American politics, the all-or-nothing
nature of which severely limits the modes of expression electoral power and influence can take.
By adopting some version of the platforms and methodologies from the below-highlighted
examples to an American setting, all of which have been significantly influenced by principles of
game design, it may be possible to build a more stable 21
st
-century version of American
democracy.
The first prominent example of a thriving participatory democracy platform is vTaiwan.
Following the success of Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Movement, in which students and activists
successfully protested an economic trade bill between Taiwan and China, the government invited
the activists to build a platform to allow the government to reach the nation’s youth more
effectively. The tech collective g0v, which played a large role in the protests, built vTaiwan out
of tech produced at the community’s hackathons (Pomeroy). VTaiwan is a platform where
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policy experts collaborate with the public to crowdsource solutions to the problems that arise
during governance.
G0v had used game-like integrations in their software to drive civic engagement in the
past; Tom Atlee describes one particular initiative, launched in 2014, which drove everyday
citizens to aid in the digitization of the country’s campaign finance records, which were all on
paper. By leveraging crowdsourcing as a methodology, the group was able to do the
government’s job for it, condensing and digitizing the records themselves and organizing them
into spreadsheets, which became a kind of game:
They used OpenCV, a computer vision library, to split the giant project into bite-size
tasks each of which only took five seconds to do. Inspired by games like Farmville and
Candy Crush on Facebook, g0v added a countdown timer, a progress bar and status
badges people could earn. Many people spent the whole night digitizing those single
spreadsheet cells because each one took them only five seconds and they got an instant
reward – and were told “Thank you for saving the country.” Each person knew that
thousands of other people were playing the game just like they were. And g0v had
designers who designed everything very nicely.” (Atlee)
Within 24 hours, over ten thousand people had digitized over 300,000 records. (Lee)
One example of the platform’s success was a 2015 law over the legalization of the sale of
alcohol over the internet, which had stalled over concerns that it would become too easy for
children to make illicit purchases. At that point, “a group of government officials and activists
decided to take the question to… vTaiwan. […] Within a matter of weeks, they had formulated a
set of recommendations. Online alcohol sales would be limited to a handful of e-commerce
platforms and distributors; transactions would be by credit card only; and purchases would be
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collected at convenience stores, making it nearly impossible for a child to surreptitiously get hold
of booze. By late April [2016] the government had incorporated the suggestions into a draft bill
that it sent to parliament” (Horton). vTaiwan is powered in part by Pol.is, an online discussion
platform where although anybody can post a comment or response about an issue, responding to
other users’ comments is prohibited; the only way users can interact with each other’s posts is to
vote them up or down. Although the system is not foolproof, the goal is to remove much of the
incentive for online trolling, as it is much more difficult to provoke an inflammatory or outraged
response from one’s target. As Horton highlights, the methodology has had success in diffusing
polarized situations. During a discussion about how to regulate ride-sharing company Uber,
which had recently clashed with local taxi drivers, the debate began with strong pro- and anti-
polarization amongst vTaiwan users. However,
as the groups sought to attract more supporters, their members started posting comments
on matters that everyone could agree were important, such as rider safety and liability
insurance. Gradually, they refined them to garner more votes. The end result was a set of
seven comments that enjoyed almost universal approval, containing such
recommendations as “The government should set up a fair regulatory regime,” “Private
passenger vehicles should be registered,” and “It should be permissible for a for-hire
driver to join multiple fleets and platforms.” The divide between pro- and anti-Uber
camps had been replaced by consensus on how to create a level playing field for Uber
and the taxi firms, protect consumers, and create more competition.
vTaiwan’s suggestions eventually influenced the final regulation passed by the government.
The system which vTaiwan represents is not, of course, invulnerable, and its reach has
been relatively modest, influencing only a few dozen bills (Horton). It is dependent upon the
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support of the Democratic Progressive Party, which may lose power in a future election,
throwing the project’s continued existence into jeopardy (Pomeroy). Even within the party, its
existence is somewhat precarious, and is threatened by a competing system named Join, which
also uses Pol.is. Join also has the direct backing of the government instead of merely the
government’s blessing. Both vTaiwan and Join are overseen by Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital
Minister and a member of g0v. Tang “describes [Join] as a vTaiwan within the government—
‘basically the same … process, but with senior career public servants instead of g0v volunteers’
at the heart of the platform.” Join also has a much larger userbase: over five million, compared
to vTaiwan in the low hundred-thousands (Horton). Despite the differences in the platforms,
however, the success of both indicate that Taiwan’s experiments with participation and
democracy, fed with the early influence of game design principles, bear out a strong example of
how these tools can be repurposed to reimagine the systems of the past for a modern era and
combat polarization within established democracies.
A critic of Taiwan’s success with these digital democracy platforms might suggest that it
is only due to the unique situation of Taiwan as a nation that such efforts could find success.
Taiwan, they might argue, has a population of only 23 million people, about as many as the state
of Florida. Furthermore, the nation exists under existential threat from the Chinese Communist
Party, which desires to assert itself over the island and reintegrate it into the territory of the
Chinese mainland; thus there is a strong philosophical incentive to prove democracy works better
than the Chinese system of government. If this argument were true, we would not see similar
systems reaping successes in other nations. However, this is not the case. In 2016, the city
council of Barcelona, Spain, established the platform Decidim. Decidim “explicitly aim[s] to
assert its citizens’ ‘digital sovereignty’ by emphasising civic participation, social impact and
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public return” (Thornhill). Much like vTaiwan, Decidim still struggles to build a userbase that
represents the majority of the population it addresses – in 2019, about 40,000 people used the
platform in a city with a population of over 1.5 million – but both platforms serve as strong
proofs-of-concept, racking up successes when it comes to raising civic participation in
democratic problem-solving. Additional nations have also experimented with their own
participatory democracy platforms. Better Reykjavik, in Iceland, collects the top ideas submitted
to the platform each month in partnership with the city council and responds directly to the
authors of the submissions. In Brazil, the Chamber of Deputies “hires ‘legislative consultants’
who act as communicators but also technical translators between the people who participate
online and the complex aspects of law-making in the Chamber” (Bass). Another platform,
CONSUL, initially developed by the Madrid city council, has spread to over 100 governments,
ranging from the local to the national level, in places as varied as Columbia, New York, France,
and Uruguay. CONSUL provides its adoptees with toolsets for enabling citizen participation in
votes, budget planning, collaborative legislation, and more. Documentation from the software’s
beta phase describes the platform’s reach: “The CONSUL project is also working together with
supranational and international institutions and NGOs like United Nations Development Program,
Open Government Partnership, the World Bank, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, Unión de
Ciudades Capitales Iberoamericanas, Nesta, Participatory Budgeting Project and others. These
entities are working to let citizens have a voice in projects like the rebuilding of Mogadishu and
the drafting of a constitution in Somalia, the reunification of Cyprus, the localization of the
Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda.” (Joinup).
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Of particular note regarding Decidim is that the platform has already faced
misappropriation. Pablo Aragón
37
, one of the board members of the project, noted that because
the software is available freely via the software hosting website GitHub, it would be trivial for a
malicious actor to abuse Decidim for unintended purposes. He described the situation to me,
explaining,
You cannot sue them, because this is free software … you cannot do a legal action
because [of] the license. But you can do a moral action. You can do a moral action, and
that already happened. There was a case that the Chilean government, they decided to
start using Decidim when all the protests were happening; I think it was 2018, right?
When also the police forces of the Chilean government, they were kind of like having
very violent incidents against the population. So they decide to open Decidim, the
government … and there was a discussion … and finally there was a public statement …
against the use that was being done by the Chilean government.
The reasoning for the decision was outlined in the statement itself, which explained that “the
Government of Chile contacted Decidim Team in Barcelona, asking for help in setting up the
platform, to start a survey among its citizenry. After knowing this intention, and the preliminary
reports from human rights organisations, which indicate regular violations of the rights of
demonstrators in recent weeks (including torture and sexual violence), the Decidim Team
decided not to support this participatory washing operation. It won’t offer support to similar
operations in the future, either.” The actual impact of such a moral action, however, is
questionable; although Decidim refused to provide support to the government, it is possible that

37
Aragón also works for the Wikimedia foundation, another organization that has seen success in developing open,
democratic processes, this time in the realm of information dissemination. Wikipedia is a strong example of a
platform that despite its open nature, strongly resists the manipulation of vandals or saboteurs looking to spread
misinformation.
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Chile went forward with its plans to use the platform regardless. Aragón told me that he’s not
sure that anybody working for the Chilean government ever read Decidim’s statement. This
highlights another shortcoming of these platforms: they require voluntary government buy-in to
succeed. “Increasing citizen voice is not enough unless voice comes with teeth,” says Micah
Sifry. “If the elected officials or government bureaucrats don’t believe they have to listen to the
input, the whole thing becomes a bit of a wheel-spinning exercise. So you have a deeper
problem of, does the government, local or national, actually believe the public matters? Do they
feel they have to listen to whatever form of input they’re getting? And so you can’t solve that
problem merely by bringing in a digital communications tool” (Allfather, “Global Democracy”).
Sifrey also feels that platforms like Decidim have poor scalability – very good for localized
populations, but unable to serve the needs of tens of millions of citizens at once, let alone even
larger populations – the best solution, he feels, is “the federated approach, which devolves more
agency downward and collects input upward.” The question of scalability may be solved in time,
however, as I will discuss later in this chapter.
Much of what is described above may be thought as a form of gamification, the act of
adding game-like elements (points and scoring, leaderboards, badges or awards, etc) to non-
game activities. Might not “players” be motivated to have the most discussed or up-voted
proposal on vTaiwan, or in the case of g0v’s records digitization project, to “score” higher by
digitizing the most documents? Aragon told me that gamification was an intentional facet of
Decidim’s development, drawing experience and design input from activists, academia, and
industry early in the project’s development. The benefits of gamification as a path to a better
reality and a path to changing the world were championed by Jane McGonigal, who specifically
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cited the ARG Chore Wars as helping her and her husband maintain a tidy household (120).
38
In
the intervening decade since the publication of her book Reality is Broken, however,
gamification as a force for good has come under significant scrutiny. A skeptic might point out
how gamification has been abused in the past, such as by casinos to encourage repeat players, or
by political extremist and terrorist groups; Jarrett Brachman and Alix Levine have written that
“Hard-line Islamist sites have been increasingly building in gamified elements to their forums,”
and explained how Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda cleric, “has been able to take advantage of the
incentives of online gamification to real-life terrorist recruits” (Brachman and Levine). If
nothing else, these concerns offer evidence that the systems work, even if such ways are
undesirable. Indeed, a failed American example of an attempt to gamify politics can be seen in
the group Win the Future, founded in part by Mark Pincus, founder of mobile social games
company Zynga. Win the Future was held back by the naivite of its managers and Silicon Valley
ethos. Speaking of an hourslong meeting he had with Pincus, Sifrey explained that
He [Pincus] saw everything through the lens of his own success, so the fact that Zynga
had built a bunch, a portfolio of online games suggested to him that we could gamify
politics, and that the trick was figuring out how to convince a large number of people to
be invested in the political game as they were in things like Farmville. And so for
example, he kept harping on this idea that they had succeeded in getting people to be so
fanatic about games like Farmville that they would spend thousands of dollars buying
credits inside the game, and so to his mind all we needed to do was figure out how we
could get two million people to pool their money to create a new third party. Literally.

38
It is worth noting that McGonigal’s definition of ARG is much broader than the one I use in this dissertation; she
describes an ARG as “a game you play in your real life (and not a virtual environment) in order to enjoy it more”
(120). I argue that this definition is overly broad, as using gamelike systems to alter one’s reality is not identical to
role-playing the existence of a fictional reality, and this fictional component is a necessary factor. Whether Chore
Wars or not is an ARG is a separate discussion beyond the purview of this chapter’s discussion.
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… he only knew one thing, he knew that he had built successful mass online games. …
His thinking to a certain degree is frozen at the moment at which he became rich
(Allfather, “Global Democracy”).
Yet despite these objections and failures, there are some fundamental differences between
the best participatory democracy platforms and the shallow gamification efforts most frequently
seen across commercial entertainment, marketing efforts, productivity applications, and in the
boardrooms of Silicon Valley tech wizards, in that achieving success on these democracy
platforms requires significant, non-gamified work. This combines, as Mark J. Nelson describes,
ethos from the two global political titans of the 20
th
century. “Gamification of work presents
itself as a new movement,” he explains. “Two precursor movements, however, have had quite
similar goals. The Soviet Union’s extensive experiments with workplace-based ‘socialist
competition’ hoped to use the power of games and competition to replace capitalist competition
with something that would be simultaneously more engaging and humane, yet would motivate
high productivity. In a different country and era, the 1990s-2000s American management trend
of ‘fun at work’ proposed reimagining the workplace as a fun and playful locale…” (Nelson).
The descriptions of Lenin’s proposals for Soviet factories being granted points based on
performance, with commendations for reaching point goals, should sound familiar to anybody
who has attempted to use, for example, a gamified weight loss or exercise application. The
adoption of similar methodologies by American capitalists may seem baffling, but as Nelson
explains, by offering non-monetary incentives, managers hope workers might be enticed to work
for free, while also noting concerns that some types of workplace productivity behaviors are
impossible to incentivize with money, thus requiring happy workers.
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Philosophical interest in gamification as a form of economic inducement to happiness by
both leftist socialists and dedicated capitalists should not surprise readers who recall the opening
of Chapter 2 and the discussion of Major Brown: the ARG, which gamifies the real world, is
also inextricably linked to sales and marketplace activity. Ultimately, an “ARG for democracy,”
or indeed any system designed to promote the health of a nation’s liberal democratic structures is,
just like conspiracy theories or disinformation campaigns, selling a version of reality. The above
examples illustrate various implementations that have had a degree of success at pushing back
against the forces outlined in the prior chapters.
Other researchers have once more turned to game theory in an attempt to improve
democracy and voting systems. To briefly note an example, Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl have
written multiple articles with a number of collaborators about what they call “quadratic voting,”
a system where
Every citizen would receive an equal annual allotment of “voice credits” that they could
use to vote in a range of collective decisions from elections to the school board to
referenda on membership in international organizations. Every citizen could choose how
many votes, up or down, she wants on any given issue or candidate, as long as she has
enough vote credits to afford it. Crucially, the costs of votes would be quadratic in the
number of votes acquired” (Radical Markets Website).
This approach, Weyl argues in a paper with Stephen P. Lalley, results in Nash equilibria, as well
as maximizing overall voter (player) welfare, writing that “the utilitarian welfare losses of the
mechanism as a proportion of the maximum possible welfare tends to zero as the population size
becomes large” (Lalley). As the last chapter indicated, a deep analysis of the game theory at
play is out of the scope for this work, it is important to note that such research is being done and
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producing exciting results that reinforce this section’s main argument: the possibilities that
emerge when games and democratic systems are combined can result in stronger democracies
which are more deeply engaging to and supportive of the populations which participate in them,
while at the same time are more resilient to the direct attacks on their power structures that have
defined the early 21
st
century.
At this point, we have reviewed both how games and technology might be leveraged to
promote the healthy growth of western-style liberal democracy in the 21
st
century, as well as
identified several of the challenges that any efforts to do so still face. For the second half of the
chapter, the discussion will move from democracies to education, the other major arena in which
ARGs and game-like systems have the potential for widespread transformative success.

ARGs for Education?
As discussed in the prior chapters, the ARG form is an especially powerful tool for
disseminating information in such a way that messaging may be easily replicated and organically
spread beyond the original recipients of the message. Players are highly engaged and dedicated
to solving problems to advance the game state. While Chapter 3 demonstrated how the form is
subverted to spread conspiracy and incite political revolution, one might wonder what could
happen if, instead of attempting to deliver merely a fictional entertainment experience, the
content of the ARG forced players to engage with new ideas and concepts, putting the game
masters in the role of educator as well as puppetmaster. There is good reason to believe that
such an educational effort might be highly successful; it has been previously discussed how the
play of an ARG resembles the work of academic research.
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The premise that games might be useful in education is not new or novel; “edutainment”
video games have existed for decades, and scholars, designers, and educators have experimented
with many styles of game-teaching in search of the most effective educational methodology.
Often, the crux of an approach is experiential, due to video games’ immersive nature as a
medium. To give one example, “The inverse square law of gravitational attraction is no longer
something to be understood solely through an equation. Instead, students can gain virtual
experience walking in a world with a mass smaller than that of Earth, or they can plan manned
space flights – a task that requires understanding the gravitational forces in different parts of the
solar system” (Schaffer et al, 106). Simulations are effective enough teachers that the United
States military has funded the development of games such as America’s Army (2002) to be used
as combat training simulators. Other approaches have focused on integrating concepts and ideas
into play, and presenting it within an engaging narrative, as with the game The Logical Journey
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of the Zoombinis (TERC, 1996). Designed by MIT professors Chris Hancock and Scot Osterweil,
the pair wrote that by presenting mathematics as “not… a sterile, disconnected endeavor, but
rather as a set of patterns and principles that can help us make sense of situations. A story
context can help make the pieces of a puzzle more interesting, and more accessible” (4). These
approaches to educational video games are just two from among a constellation of work that
remains a hot field of research across several disciplines. Work on ARGs as an educational tool
has been far less explored relative to other types of games; as Hu et al. noted in 2016, “the usage
of ARG in education area [sic] is still at its early stage” (1). Of special note in Hu et al.’s
literature review is the inclusion of a work of Chinese scholarship on ARG education, implying
that the ARG form is flexible enough to catalyze learning experiences outside of the western
cultural contexts in which it was initially developed. Of course, the first question any educator
would ask about a new teaching tool is whether it works, and if so, how effective it is at
delivering the intended curriculum. Luckily, preliminary results are encouraging: despite the
field’s nascent state, several studies using ARGs for education have proven promising, as ARGs
have shown to be effective tools for teaching a wide variety of subject matters.
The work of Elizabeth Bonsignore et al. bears out the supposition that ARGs can be effectively
utilized as learning platforms for seven major literacies, which she classifies as the United
Metaliteracies Framework (UMF). In their paper Alternate Reality Games as Platforms for
Practiciting 21
st
Century Literacies, Bonsignore and her team outline the UMF literacies and
conduct a review of several ARGs, interviewing ARG designers before concluding that although
“Our systematic evaluation of ARGs and our interviews with ARG designers and players have
Fig. 2. This image from the 2015 re-release of Zoombinis illustrates a level designed to teach
algebraic equations using only logic. Players must try to make the images of Zoombini
characters match by changing the variables of their appearance. (Image captured by author.)
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reproducibility or repeatability of any given ARG experience and the trouble with doing
community management work for an ARG with a global scale with an audience of millions.
This is of course to say nothing of the production cost. To recall McHugh’s comment in Chapter
2, without private investment, government funding or arts grants are required to produce an
effective project.

The question of scalability of ARGs for education was taken up by the ARG The Source
(2013), developed by Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, Peter McDonald, and Christopher Russell
as an experiment in gamification, with the goal of testing play scenarios for use in education.
Although only a small pilot experiment, The Source demonstrated several interesting facets of
ARGs that speak to a way in which participatory democracy and education can be mutually
reinforcing. The Source was deployed to 144 students aged thirteen to eighteen living on the
south side of Chicago, the vast majority of whom came from minority, underrepresented, or
Fig. 3. Bonsignore et al’s UMF Framework (Bonsignore, 26)
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historically disadvantaged backgrounds, and whose families had relatively low income. The
game’s content was “designed to promote STEM academic areas, twenty-first-century literacies,
and an awareness of social-justice issues” (Jagoda et al, 77), and the player subjects were chosen
in part because they are an under-studied group in the field of ARG research, as the design team
noted: “most studies of ARG players focus either on players of promotional or entertainment-
oriented games, like The Beast (2001) and The Lost Experience (2006). Of the subset of
educational ARGs emerging from the serious games movement, most exist primarily for college
students and seasoned players” (83). Even though the scale of the study was extremely small,
the results were promising, as the diverse skillsets demanded from ARG play combined with the
game designers’ ability to rapidly change or redirect play based on the needs of the audience led
to high student engagement, a logical result given what has been shown in previous chapters
about the ARG’s ability to draw players into its world and cause them to pursue success
doggedly, even if (as in the case of QAnon) such successes come at a steep social cost. Indeed,
when Jagoda et al. write that “in an ARG, no single player can experience every event, solve
each puzzle, or know every narrative detail. This constraint encourages players to take
ownership of aspects of the game” (78), they offer a strong social explanation for why ARGs
work so well for propaganda dissemination: “players” of participatory propaganda projects take
ownership of the propaganda, and the conspiracies become tied to their identity on a personal
level. If, as Jagoda et al. claim, this sense of player ownership over ARG content is an inherent
facet of the form, the reverse must be true as well: by using ARG–inspired systems to bolster
democratic systems of government, it gives citizens (“players” of democracy) a sense of
ownership over the political systems that control their lives. Indeed, The Source’s developers
contend that the bottom-up nature of interaction-driven play as seen in a small setting could be
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both reproduced at a larger scale and transferred to other settings (77). This bottom-up approach
mirrors Wanless and Berk’s description of participatory propaganda: a (seemingly) bottom-up
approach that encourages the target to be the agent of their own indoctrination.
Another notable integration of education and ARG is the game Reality Ends Here,
designed by Jeff Watson.
39
Reality works as evidence not only for the successful use of an ARG
in an educational setting but also to address the above-raised challenge of reproducibility and
repeatability. Generally speaking, it is considered quite difficult to successfully run a large-scale
ARG more than once. This is due to several factors inherent in the design of the form: the need
for extensive documentation of the game’s aspects to make playing accessible for newcomers
and manageable for veterans; the adaptable and ad-hoc nature of content generation, both by
game masters and players, which is common in the play of the ARG; and, paradoxically, the
innate secrecy that surrounds the specific mechanics and implementations of the game systems,
which drives players to endlessly discuss, usually publicly, these selfsame systems. Thus, those
attempting to re-run an ARG are faced with the unenviable task of overcoming a player’s ability
to simply conduct an internet search and instantly spoil the game’s progression, breaking the
veneer of alternate reality that drives the thematic core of the game. Despite these concerns,
Reality has been run nearly annually since its inception, with repeated success.
Originally designed as a doctoral thesis, Reality specifically looked to address what
Watson described as “designerly logjams that have afflicted ARGs since the early 2000s.” He
explained that,
By moving away from the time-sensitive and event-driven structure of traditional ARGs,
designers can create more open-ended games that work better as engines for participation
and community building. Doing so ultimately means replacing a text-centric storytelling

39
Watson served as an advisor on this dissertation project before his passing in November 2020.
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mentality with a systems-centric story facilitating approach. This kind of approach is not
an abdication of authorship or aesthetic responsibility; rather, it is a shift from the domain
of literal content creation to that of procedural content creation (34).
Watson’s suggestions echo implementations seen in video games such as Minecraft (Mojang,
2011) and Spelunky (Mossmouth, LLC, 2008) and which I discussed in a 2016 essay describing
tensions between what Jesper Juul refers to as “emergence games” and “progression games,” and
the relative strengths and weaknesses in delivering narrative content inherent to both forms.
Contrasting the two above-mentioned games with other titles which have more strictly authored
narratives, I wrote that “in both Minecraft and Spelunky, the narrative is literally created by the
interaction between player and game” (Bortnick).
40
These games, while they may present a
perfunctory story, have the narrative of their play emerge from the actions of the player: the
important story of Spelunky is not the presented pastiche of Indiana Jones-themed tomb robbery
but the unique events of a play session that were procedurally generated by the game’s
algorithms and then experienced by the player, whose interactions with that game’s complicated
environments produce unexpected, comical and often Rube Goldberg-esque results.
Watson’s innovation with Reality was to bring procedural generation of game content to
the ARG, a form historically bound tightly to a bespoke narrative that is slowly fed to players as
they complete puzzles. Since its creation, Reality has become integrated into the undergraduate
curriculum for incoming students of interactive media at the University of Southern California.
The game introduces new students in the School of Cinematic Arts to creative production,
prompting them, alongside a team, to create something – a film, game, live event, or other
similar work – in response to a series of prompts delivered by the Reality Committee, a group

40
A detailed explanation of how Spelunky’s procedural level generation systems work is available online at
http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/.
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comprising faculty members, alumni, and older students. These projects are, in game parlance,
called “deals.” Prompts, delivered in the form of cards, are acquired in various ways, such as
bycompleting puzzles and finishing set challenges. “Playing this game even very casually will
get you noticed by the Reality Committee,” reads the “Rules for Players” section of the game
manual. “The more you participate, the more the Committee will work to connect you with
unique experiences that are relevant to you. Even engaging just a little will open up new
opportunities and discoveries. Exactly what those are will become clear with time” (The Reality
Committee). The secretive nature of the game – required as part of the in-fiction nature of the
shadowy (again, see above discussions of the ARG’s historical reliance on conspiracy theory)
Reality Committee – ultimately led to the game being temporarily canceled in 2014 as
knowledge of its existence was deemed too widespread. The game was extraordinarily
successful in achieving its goal of compelling new students to produce large volumes of creative
output; in 2013, during the game’s third “Season” (as sessions of play were called), 191 students
produced 251 projects over 105 days (Wong, 2013).
The prompt cards form the core of Reality’s procedural generation system and are used
by players to construct the conditions under which their “deal” will be produced. Each card
contains a section of a prompt, and arrows that instruct players on how the cards can be
combined to assemble a full prompt. Different color borders delineate prompt openers,
modifiers, requirements, and caveats. Cards can branch in multiple directions at once, forming a
spider web of conditions that spreads across a table as new conditions are added. An example
prompt might read, in full (with pipes delineating where card breaks occur), “A story-rich space |
about transformation | involving a discovery | including coins | involving a band of outsiders |
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including a compass | involving a journey | from the archives [USC’s Hugh M. Hefner Moving
Image Archive] (see Fig. 4 for how this might appear during play). The procedural generation of
deal-making prompts mirrors that of a procedurally generated video game level; a prompt may
feature elements that players have seen before, but they are likely presented in a new context,
requiring a new idea or strategy to address.
Reality has been well-received by many of the students who played it, attesting firsthand
to its value as a core part of their freshman year’s educational experience. The value of the game
was manifold says Kevin Wong, who served as a student gamerunner for Reality in 2013; not
only was the work self-driven by the players, providing them with an opportunity to make media
outside of the formal structures of the classroom, but people felt freer as to what sorts of projects
they felt comfortable taking on because there was no instructor to impress. “There was an
Fig. 4: An example of a “deal” constructed from various cards in Reality (Wong)
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opportunity to make shitty work,” they told me. “There’s a sense of playfulness and chaos to
that which is valuable and encourages playful experimentation which is valuable in year one. …
What you’re graded on is not quality, but your interpretation of the cards, and that lends itself to
subversive, transgressive play” (Wong, 2021). They also noted that the game accelerated the
serendipitous formation of new relationships between students, which they felt was especially
valuable for new college students entering an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people, a
sentiment echoed by Esteban Fajardo, their fellow gamerunner that year. “For those of us who
were thinking about creative arts all the time and who craved social interaction, there was
nothing else like it,” Fajardo told me. “Within a few months I forged intense connections that
transformed my approach to art making. The depth of those memories weighs so large that the
six months of play time rival the rest of the years of college.” Ultimately, he explained why
Reality was and remains such a success: “Reality Ends Here is a particularly brilliant system, but
these systems are just guide-rails to what educators know already works: rewards for self-
direction, community interactions and close one-on-one instruction” (Fajardo).
This is not to say the game is without limitations or flaws. Wong pointed out that the
points-based nature of the game led to exploitative behavior where players looked to maximize
their scores, as at the end of each week extrinsic rewards were on offer. Opportunities to meet
with and socialize alongside famous USC alumni drove players to form deals with dozens of
cards in pursuit of extraordinarily high scores, which had the effect of alienating students who,
for various reasons, might not have as much time to dedicate to play. Fajardo also noted that he
does not believe the game would scale as well as other ARGs, nor did he think it would easily be
converted to other settings, citing a failed attempt to create a variant for usage at USC’s Marshall
School of Business. Nevertheless, it should be clear how Reality’s modular, lateral thinking
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requirements benefit students entering a program that looks to prepare them for a career in a field
heavily entrenched in creative and artistic production. The brilliance of Reality is that it teaches
by forcing players to do and create, rather than embracing direct instruction. It places the player-
students in charge of their own educational process, and much like The Source, gives them a
strong sense of ownership over the outcomes.

Uniting the Systems
At this point in the chapter, the above-assembled real-world examples demonstrate the
viability of utilizing game systems to radically reimagine democracies, while the ARG in
particular has demonstrated, albeit preliminarily, its vast potential as a tool for education. It is
somewhat shocking that while ARGs and ARG-like experiences have been considered for, and at
times directly utilized to teach curricula as varied as STEM lessons, sex education, foreign
languages and literacy, creative and empathetic thinking, and even disaster preparedness and
emergency safety (Hong), there seems to have been very little exploration of their role in
addressing one of the largest existential threats to modern western life: the attack by illiberal
forces on democratic systems and processes.
The case of The Source in particular touches many aspects of this dissertation’s project.
Of special interest is this conclusion that Jagoda et al draw:
…we see the chance for substantive player contributions as one major advantage of
ARGs over video games. Unlike more polished video games or virtual worlds, ARGs
(both in design and player contributions) frequently show their seams—the spaces
between media and their constructed nature. That very lack of polish, however, can invite
players to operate not merely as consumers, but also as increasingly invested coproducers
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of a shared experience. Moreover, the jagged transitions between media, which might be
lacking in an industry-level multimedia game, made players more aware of the discrete
media and their formal interactions throughout the experience (94).
The potential for ARGs as a platform not just for co-authored collaborative narrative but for
collaborative governance strikes to the heart of many issues covered at length above: players and
designers working together to produce a final product, over which both groups feel an inherent
sense of ownership.
Granting citizens ownership over the democratic process is the key to the success of
platforms such as vTaiwan. As g0v’s efforts have shown, even relatively light levels of
gamification can make a process inherently more engaging and interesting for the target audience
to interact with, when implemented responsibly. Although additional research is required, the
existing literature and case studies discussed above seem to indicate that an ARG-style
educational curriculum that feeds directly into a restructured system for direct citizen democracy
would go far in redressing the current polarization found in the American voter base.
The final takeaway of the chapter, then, is that it is imperative designers (and not just
game designers) effectively reposition their future works in such a way as to facilitate and
promote ownership of experiences as a path to social growth. It has been demonstrated by the
numerous above examples that the key to success in both education and democracy is directly
tied to the level of personal investment a player, student, or citizen has in their situation. It is
important to understand that both The Source and Reality Ends Here were produced with the
substantial institutional backing of wealthy universities, whereas programs like vTaiwan and
Decidim are backed by large governmental bodies. However, this does not mean that even
individual creators are unable to take advantage of lessons from both varieties of above example.
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As was shown in prior chapters, it is a feeling of ownership over the hobby of video game
playing in the first place that helped fuel the targeted harassment of Gamergate.
Drawing upon my own working experience, the best way that any designer, from the
individual up to the giant corporation, can induce a sense of ownership over a game’s material is
to draw upon the discussions of collaborative authorship and playtesting that I covered in
Chapter 2. Recall Jeffery Kim et al.’s statement quoted in that chapter, reiterated here: ARGs are
“specifically designed to tap into the power of collective problem solving through powerful
stories and participatory mechanisms.” In this light, Stern Electronics’ 1982 arguments before
the 2
nd
Circuit Court of Appeals seem prescient; by transforming the player into the author (or at
least, as in the case of playtesting, making the player into an essential collaborator versus merely
a consumer), the player’s sense of investment in the success of the work is enhanced. I have
observed this not only professionally but also anecdotally. I spent many hours creating and
building digital worlds while playing Minecraft in a small friend group, and I found that when an
impending software update introduced exciting new features but necessitated starting from
scratch, the desire to hold on and preserve what had been built strongly outweighed the desire for
an upgraded experience. My friends worked additional hundreds of hours to research
workarounds and build an “ark” that would allow us to carry our most beloved creations to the
new version. Imagine that sort of dedication and time investment now directed at the real-world
challenges of our modern era.
The goal of this chapter was not only to offer a counterbalance to the overwhelmingly
negative observations and argumentation of the rest of the dissertation, but also to provide
readers, whether they are academics, game developers, political scientists, educators, or simply
interested readers with a clear and visible path forward to addressing the problems that have
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concerned the entirety of this dissertation. By highlighting the pioneering work done by others
and analyzing its value in our current political moment, the present state of global democracy
appears a little less dire and a little more hopeful than it may have previously. Building
sustainable democratic systems for the twenty-first century will be a tremendous task with
uncountable facets, but I believe this task is not an insurmountable one, and should we succeed,
we stand to gain a more equitable, sustainable, and harmonious future not just for individual
nations, but for the world as a whole.

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Conclusion

In this short concluding chapter, I will look to address the project at large. I begin with a
brief overview of the project’s history and my thoughts on how the work evolved. From there, I
review the project’s goals and primary research questions before moving into a discussion of the
findings of the research and its place within the broader field. I also discuss the shortcomings of
my methodologies and the limitations of this particular work, as well as provide some
suggestions for future research that may follow on from here.
The journey of writing this dissertation was likely typical. I began with a reasonable plan
for the subjects that I wished to address, and a direction that I wanted to take the research, but
had no idea what the ultimate destination would be. Many of the ideas in my planning and
process material were discarded due to the project increasingly moving in different directions
than those I had anticipated, scope creep, and logistical issues. These cut concepts included a
range of content from early book history to materiality of digital objects to the development of a
specialized video game that would be used as a case study to examine how the market receives
ARG-like products from known ARG creators.
I did not set out to write about global concerns about and threats to democracy; I merely
wished to explore the relationship between “authors” and “readers” (or, in this case, “players”)
when it came to work that had been collaboratively authored. “Games present a new twist on the
collaborative formation of narrative by allowing the authorial process to continue in perpetuity,”
I wrote in my dissertation prospectus. “By drawing upon a rich history of author- and reader-
criticism coupled with material studies, we can reach a new understanding about how narrative is
formed – whether it is via a new conception of the author in a space where narrative is
continually formed and reformed, and of how digital objects and material concerns intersect
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within the world of a game.”
41
Looking back at this prewriting material alongside the above
chapters, it is clear how far from the original plans things drifted, while gratifying to see the
unexpected fruits of the work contain insights that may help communities outside of scholarly
circles address a piece of very large, societal-level concerns about how we live in the twenty-first
century. I am truly glad that things have turned out the way they did, as my own sense of social
responsibility would not have been satisfied if the work did not in some way at least aspire to
serve a greater good than the simple demands of scholarship.

Fig 1: The Key art for University Magician’s Society, a visual novel
game which was planned to release as part of this dissertation project

I set out to question the link between authors and readers, which transformed into the key
research question of the dissertation project: how do the game works that are created as
commercial entertainment influence our society? It is obvious, as with any work of popular art,
that both video games and alternate reality games have drastically influenced the fabric of our

41
Bortnick, Justin. “Penultimate_Draft_11_13.” 15 Nov 2018. University of Southern California, unpublished
manuscript.
176

social systems. Not merely entertainment products, they have contributed to changes in thinking
around marketing, artistic production and information dissemination. What has become clear
over the course of the writing process is that it is not only the works themselves that have been
highly influential, but the practices, tools and methodologies that have arisen to support the
production, manufacture and dissemination of these games.
Beginning with an examination of market-based trends in the western video games
industry, I found that, in the mid-2010s, an aversion to making political statements in games on
the part of large, multi-billion dollar development houses, combined with a public erasure of the
individuality of game developers working on a project led to an anonymizing of the game
development process which exacerbated existing toxic tendencies of some groups of internet
users. As targeting faceless corporations with threats is perceived as more morally acceptable
than targeting individuals, a harmful mode of rhetoric was established as the norm amongst
online gamer communities resulting in these communities curdling into something more toxic. I
outlined how these marketing decisions made by game studios served as a major aggravating
factor in the harassment campaign that would become Gamergate, and how Gamergate was itself
used as a gateway into more generalized far-right extremist political thinking.
Subsequently, I used my commercial work designing multiple alternate reality games to
explore what made the narrative of an ARG compelling, and drew a parallel between the ARG
player and the online conspiracy theorist. I explained how the best-designed ARGs lend
themselves to a form of collaborative storytelling, where the gamerunners are in constant
conversation with the players, negotiating the space between where the narrative needs to go in
order to conclude the game’s storyline and the route that players must take in order to reach that
conclusion.
177

I found that across the world, industrial-derived game production techniques were being
utilized in order to produce highly compelling misinformation; conspiracy theories, and
propaganda which look to befuddle the masses and undermine the established tenants of a
western-style liberal democratic system of governance. These works of misinformation are
received and redistributed by their audience of believers, who work to proselytize for their
beliefs by making the works custom-tailored to individualized social circles. Thus, the initial
work of production transforms into a work of re-production, with an ever-growing circle of
believers (equivalent to a commercial game release’s fans) producing more and more content in
order to spread their fictional truth. There is very little substantial difference between a fan-
author or fan-artist who produces derivative works based upon their favorite intellectual property
and a “fan”-conspiracy theorist who produces additional misinformation in service of their
chosen belief.
This project is, necessarily, not without weaknesses of its own. A major one is that due
to the removal of the custom-built game from the final project, I was forced to utilize only case
studies that were designed and conducted by other people, as opposed to doing my own
experimentation attuned to my specific research interests. Ideally, future research would involve
the creation of a game designed specifically to test my conclusions about industrial design
methodologies being highly effective in the spread of misinformation and propaganda, even
beyond what the Dared project attempted. I suspect that such research would be ethically non-
viable, however, were it to truly engage in the widespread dissemination of misinformation; as a
result, a happy medium would need to be found and tested instead.
I would also be remiss to not state that this work is not meant to be a one-size fits all
analysis or solution set to the problems that I address. It is one piece of a much larger puzzle that
178

extends beyond my own expertise and disciplinary training. Even within the fields of games and
game studies, there are those tackling similar issues from a different direction. For example,
John Roozenbeek and Sander Van Der Linden’s game Harmony Square (2020), uses inoculation
theory to, as its creators describe, “function[] as a psychological ‘vaccine’ by exposing people to
weakened doses of the common techniques used in political misinformation especially during
elections” (Roozenbeek). This work follows on from the designers’ prior game Bad News,
which attempted to examine fake news in a broader sense than simply relating to elections.
Similarly, the game Agents of Influence (Alerea, unreleased), designed by a group of students at
USC, combines inoculation theory with a targeting focused on middle-school aged students with
the goal of intervening early enough in their educational process that recognizing misinformation
becomes second nature as they age (Warker). These examples are just a few amongst a sea of
work that is attempting to address the rise of misinformation, conspiracy theory and threats to
liberal democracy in the games space.
Fig 2: Title screen from Harmony Square (Image captured
by author).
179

It is also worth commenting, briefly, on issues of safe spaces as they relate to
communities. At the core of this project are fundamental questions about the concept of
community: what is a community? What purpose, and for whom, does community serve? In my
teaching for undergraduate students, I usually explain the idea of the classroom (itself a kind of
community) through the metaphor of exercise. When one exercises, sore muscles the next day
are the sign of a successful workout – though they are a mild discomfort, they represent a
strengthening that benefits the body. However, one would not exercise to the point of injury –
that is unsafe, and serves no benefit to anybody. Similarly, while students may be exposed to
ideas in the classroom that they find uncomfortable, they should never be placed into a situation
where they feel they are not safe. Though game player communities are not classrooms in the
academic sense, my sense is that there is a need for commitment from responsible designers that
a player should never be put in an unsafe situation – physically, psychologically, emotionally or
otherwise – remains the same, if designers want the experiences they craft to be ethical.
Throughout the above dissertation I have examined online communities of game players
within a historical context, talked with game creators about the communities of production in
which they operate, interrogated fringe communities and what gives them such a strong grasp
over the lives of those who choose to participate within them, and looked forward in an attempt
to find answers about how we can build the communities of tomorrow in which we wish to live.
My thinking on these issues, informed by my experience participating in and managing online
communities, work and research I completed as part of the USC World Building Media Lab’s
Spaceship Earth 2050 project, in concert with the thought and work of the numerous critics and
theorists with whom I have engaged over the course of the project, has led me to the conclusion,
not novel whatsoever, that safety is the most paramount factor in the formation and sustenance of
180

a community. In other words, those who have the responsibility of managing a community are
necessarily obligated to ensure that the community under their care does not encourage or
facilitate harm – whether that harm is to oneself or others.
During the course of the Frog Fractions ARG, several players engaged in behavior which
was harmful either to other members of the community, our development team, or themselves.
As a new developer designing a game by the seat of my pants, I did not anticipate (or even know
that I should have anticipated) how players might take the game too far, become too engaged
with the work, or develop unhealthy fixations on certain aspects of the play or individual players.
Indeed, one player confessed partway through the play that his engagement with the game had
become unhealthy; he was constantly thinking about the potential next steps of play and
imagining how to advance the game’s narrative state. Thankfully recognizing this he stepped
back from play, realizing that the game was taking a negative toll on his personal life. Another
player became unhealthily interested in chatting with the game’s developers, going so far as to
candidly share his personal medical information without prompting, leading to significant
discomfort for me and negatively impacting my ability to run the game effectively. Even in
retrospect, I am not sure exactly what all of the changes I would have needed to make in order to
preclude all of these concerns would have been. However, these experiences, combined with my
evolving understanding of community participation as a result of the experiences I described in
the introduction and my observation of the evolving state of American politics, led to the
creation of the ethics code used in Dared and, eventually, this dissertation.
This research is just the beginning of a long road, both as an effort to push against
illiberal, antidemocratic forces and my own development as a professional academic. It is my
hope that those who have read the whole thing come away feeling not only educated about some
181

of the larger social forces at work both in the United States and abroad, but also hopeful for the
future and with an understanding about how designers can rethink the ways that we produce
creative work in order to combat the desires of those who would see our social systems upended
for personal gain, profit, or with the intent of inflicting misery. I always encourage students who
want to improve their worlds and become designers and thinkers to go out and make something,
anything, as the first step to achieving their goals. That is the case here too; we have to make the
future in which we want to live.

182

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Image Citations

Introduction

Chapter 1

Fig. 1: The Red Pages Podcast homepage as archived May 2014. Image captured by author,
2021.

Fig. 2: The Red Pages Podcast homepage in September 2021. Image captured by the author,
2021.

198

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why everybody in the video game world is fighting.” Vox, 13 Oct. 2014.
www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody-fighting.

Chapter 2

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Fig. 4: Image Capture of Team Zander website landing page. Image captured by author, 2021.

Chapter 3

Fig. 1: Screen capture from Robotics;Notes Elite. 5pb, 2014. Translated by Spike Chunsoft,
2020. Image captured by author, 2020.

Chapter 4

Fig 1: Screen capture from The Evolution of Trust. Image captured by the author, 2021.

Fig. 2: Screen capture from Zoombinis. TERC, 2015. Image captured by author, 2021.

Fig. 3: Bonsignore, Elizabeth, et al. Unified Metaliteracies Framework. From “Alternate Reality
Games as Platforms for Practicing 21st-Century Literacies.” International Journal of
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Conclusion

Fig 1: Key art from University Magician’s Society. Art by Miranda Jacoby and Jackie Nee,
Image created by the author, 2019.

Fig 2: Title screen capture from Harmony Square. Image captured by author, 2022.
199

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Unknown Photographer. Cropped from Composer Ryan Ike and Kellan Jett’s Cover Artwork for
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Unknown Photographer. David Libby. Connected Learning Summit 2018, 2018.
connectedlearningsummit2018.sched.com/speaker/david_libby

Unknown Photographer. Michael Lutz. sub-Q, 2014. sub-q.com/author-interview-michael-lutz/

Unknown Photographer. Cropped from Joseph Matheny. Goodreads, Date Unknown.
www.goodreads.com/author/show/460921.Joseph_Matheny

201

Kamal, Fuad. Cropped from Game designers Edmund McMillen (third from left) and Tommy
Refenes (far right) at Game Developers Choice Awards. Wikimedia Commons, 2012.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tommy_Refenes,_Edmund_McMillen_(7027115047)
.jpg.

Unknown Photographer. Cropped from Rand Miller. Road to VR, 2016.
www.roadtovr.com/embedding-a-story-within-a-place-with-obduction-rand-miller/.

Unknown Photographer. Cropped from Erica A Newman. PeerJ, Unknown Date.
peerj.com/EANewman/.

Unknown Artist. Johnnemann Nordhagen. Twitter, Unknown Date. twitter.com/johnnemann.

Unknown Photographer. Melvin Ok. Ace Translate, c.2019.
web.archive.org/web/20191018050619/http://www.acetranslate.com/aboutme

Unknown Photographer. Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly. Unknown Date. Image removed from
internet.

Unknown Photographer. Davin Pavlas. LinkedIn, Unknown Date.
www.linkedin.com/in/davinpavlas/detail/photo/.

Unknown Photographer. Shawn Pierre. Cultureworks, Unknown Date.
www.cultureworksphila.org/members/shawn-pierre.

Unknown Photographer. Tyriq Plummer. Twitter, 2017.
twitter.com/fourbitfriday/status/909525187418243072.

Unknown Photographer. Lucas Pope. Twitter, Unknown Date.
twitter.com/dukope

Unknown Photographer. Seth Rosen. Short for a Knight, Unknown Date.
www.shortforaknight.com/about.

Unknown Photographer. Cropped from A Personal Message from Civic Hall Co-Founder Micah
Sifry. Civic Hall, 2020. civichall.org/.

Unknown Photographer. David Sirlin. Twitter, Date Unknown. twitter.com/sirlin.

jeriaska. Cropped from Raigan Burns & Mare Sheppard (Metanet). Flickr, 2011.
www.flickr.com/photos/jeriaska/6219241825

Unknown Photographer. Brjann Sigurgeirsson. Twitter, Unknown Date.
twitter.com/brjannsigur.

Unknown Photographer. Jay Tholen. Twitter, Unknown Date. twitter.com/jaytholen.
202

Unknown Photographer. Cropped from Michael Townsend still hasn’t met Amir Rajan despite
their success working together. Cult of Mac, 2014. www.cultofmac.com/277035/dark-
room-iphone-top-paid-game/.

Unknown Photographer. Cropped from Joe Tung. Giant Bomb, Unknown Date.
www.giantbomb.com/joe-tung/3040-98095/.

Andy Weir. The Author of “The Martian.”. Washington Post, 2015.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2015/05/05/andy-weir-and-his-book-the-
martian-may-have-saved-nasa-and-the-entire-space-program/.

203

Appendix 1: Frog Fractions 2 ARG Collaborators

The following table lists all media that included an instantiation of the Eye Sigil during the Frog
Fractions 2 ARG. Titles below the divide were not authorized by Twinbeard but included the
sigil of their own initiative, and were given recognition retroactively despite their games not
containing any ARG clues. All entries are video games unless otherwise noted.

Game Developer
Bellular Hexatosis Neotenomie and Porpentine
Bit Bit Blocks Greg Batha
Bombernauts Eyebrow Interactive
Choice Chamber Studio Bean
Clockwork Empires Gaslamp Games
Crypt of the Necrodancer Brace Yourself Games
Duskers Misfits Attic
Firewatch Campo Santo
Flickers Neat Snake
Glitch City Zine Issue 3 (zine) Glitch City
Hot Tin Roof Glass Bottom Games
Kingdom of Loathing Asymmetric Publications, LLC
Legacy of the Elder Star Kickbomb Entertainment LLC
Legend of Dungeon Robot Loves Kitty
Mini Metro Dinosaur Polo Club
Moon Hunters Kitfox Games
Mos Speedrun 2 Physmo
Neon Struct Minor Key Games
Quadrilateral Cowboy Blendo Games
QWOP Bennet Foddy
Read Only Memories MidBoss
Reagan Gorbachev Team2Bit
Slide the Shakes Prettygreat
Soda Drinker Pro Showrunner Games
Sokobond Alan Hazelden and Harry Lee
Souls of Darkness (book) Gary Butterfield
The Magic Circle Question
There Came an Echo Iridium Studios
Wayward Sky Uber Entertainment
You Have to Win the Game Minor Key Games
Accounting Crows Crows Crows
Pony Island Daniel Mullins Games
Roblox Roblox Corporation

204

Appendix 2: Red Pages Podcast Interview Subjects

The following individuals are those who allowed themselves to be interviewed for the Red Pages
Podcast as of the completion of the project, and in doing so shaped the content of this
dissertation. Even if not every interview was directly quoted in the above text, each of them was
a valuable component in the project, and all of the interviews are publicly available at the listed
URLs and the full, ongoing podcast archive is available at http://www.redpagespodcast.com.

Tarn "Toady One" Adams
Tarn Adams is known for being one half of Bay 12 Games,
creators of the sprawling management and simulation program
Dwarf Fortress.
Episodes:
 Episode 19: Throw the Vampire Down the Well So My
Fortress Can Be Free (14 June 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/throw-the-vampire-
down
 Extrasode 2: Chatting with Tarn Adams (14 June 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/chatting-with-tarn-
adams
 Episode 70: Overpowered Webs (5 March 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/overpowered-webs

Dan Adelman
Dan Adelman is an independent video game biz-dev expert who
helps game makers market their products. He previously served
as the Indie Boss for Nintendo of America.
Episodes:
 Episode 27: The Biz-Dev Episode (6 September 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-biz-dev-episode
205

Chris Avellone
Chris Avellone is a game designer and writer recognized for his
work at Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment and on games such
as Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas and
Wasteland 2.
Episodes:
 Episode 14: Nothing New (28 April 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/nothing-new
 Episode 57: Nolan North Voices: You (23 July 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/nolan-north-voices-you

Paul Bellezza
Paul Bellezza is a product manager at Riot Games. In the past, he
founded indie studio The Odd Gentlemen and worked on the
game The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom.
Episodes:
 Episode 48: The Jabba Comparison (6 May 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-jabba-comparison

Anthony Burch
Anthony Burch is a writer and actor who co-created the online
web series "Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin?" and served as lead writer
on the game Borderlands 2.
Episodes:
 Episode 97: Germ Gun (22 July 2017)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/gun-germ

Ashly Burch
Ashly Burch is an actor and voice actor who co-created the online
web series "Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin?" and can be heard in
games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, Life is Strange and
Borderlands 2.
Episodes:
 Episode 85: Lying On Top of a Car (That is Also Yourself)
(19 November 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/lying-on-top-of-a-car-
that-is-also-yourself
206

David D'Angelo
David D'Angelo is a programmer at Yacht Club Games who
helped program the studio's first major release, Shovel Knight.
Episodes:
 Episode 41: Anime is for Nerds (21 January 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/anime-is-for-nerds

Ed Del Castillo
Ed Del Castillo is a game designer best known for producing the
Command & Conquer series of games at Westwood Studios
before founding his own company Liquid Entertainment, where
he produced the game Battle Realms.
Episodes:
 Episode 10: This Can't Be Teletype! (10 March 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/this-cant-be-teletype
 Extrasode 1: Chatting with Ed Del Castillo (10 March
2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/chatting-with-ed-del-
castillo
 Episode 63: Gargoyle Babies (17 October 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/gargoyle-babies
 Episode 91: Gamedev in India (20 February 2017)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/gamedev-in-india

Steve Circuiton
Steve Circuiton is a game designer currently developing the indie
platformer Tower of the Gorillion.
Episodes:
 Episode 4: xXxxWaRsOnGdOgFlEsHxxXx (22 December
2013)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/xxxxwarsongdogfleshx
xxx
207

Jim Stormdancer (née Crawford)
Jim Stormdancer is the founder of Twinbeard Studios and the
mastermind behind the Frog Fractions series of games.
Episodes:
 Episode 55: Frog Fractions 2 is a Yacht (25 June 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/frog-fractions-is-a-yacht
 Extrasode 3: Chatting with Jim Crawford (25 June 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/chatting-with-jim-
crawford
 Episode 68: Neil Degrasse Titan (28 January 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/neil-degrasse-titan

Jonathan "Jogo" Evans
Jonathan Evans is a game designer who has worked on titles such
as The Typing of the Dead: Overkill, SkySaga: Infinite Isles and
Crazy Taxi: City Rush.
Episodes:
 Episode 6: The Podcast of the Dead: OVERKILL (25
January 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/podcast-of-the-dead-
overkill

Nina Freeman
Nina Freeman is an independent game designer, streamer and
poet. She has designed independent games such as How Do You
Do It? and Cibele, and designed levels for Tacoma at Fullbright.
Episodes:
 Episode 15: Masters of Maybe Doing Sex? (10 May 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/masters-of-maybe-
doing-sex
 Episode 54: Chest Hair or Spiders (17 July 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/chest-hair-or-spiders

Bill Gardner
Bill Gardner is the co-founder of The Deep End Games where he
helped make Perception. Before that he served as lead level
designer on Bioshock at Irrational Games.
Episodes:
 Episode 53: We Were Irrational, But Now We've Gone
Off The Deep End (10 June 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/we-were-irrational-but-
now
208

Steve Gaynor
Steve Gaynor is the founder of Fullbright, the studio responsible
for Gone Home and Tacoma. He was previously the lead designer
on Minerva's Den, an expansion for Bioshock 2 at 2K Marin.
Episodes:
 Episode 78: Japanada (4 August 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/japanada

Elyot Grant
Elyot Grant is a co-founder of Lunarch Studios, makers of the
game Prismata.
Episodes:
 Episode 32: Liberty is ON HOLD (18 October 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/liberty-is-on-hold

Brandon Harrison
Brandon Harrison is a software engineer at Jam City, and
previously served as gameplay programmer at Bread Machine
Games and manager of the Philadelphia Game Lab.
Episodes:
 Episode 24: A Wraparound Hot Dog (9 August 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/a-wraparound-hot-dog

Judd Hollander
Judd Hollander was previously the Lead Production Tester at
Activision.
Episodes:
 Episode 7: The Yoda Chronicles (1 February 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-yoda-chronicles
209

S. A. Hunt
S.A. Hunt is an author of horror and fantasy novels such as The
Outlaw King series, Malus Domestica and The Fear Suit.
Episodes:
 Episode 20: They Liked It So They Put Two Rings On It
(28 June 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/put-two-rings-on-it

Renee Gittins
Renee Gittins is the creative director at the studio Stumbling Cat,
where she is working on the game Potions: A Curious Tale.
Episodes:
 Episode 105: The Hunt for Lenny Dean (10 January 2018)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-hunt-for-lenny-dean

Ryan Ike
Ryan Ike is a musician who has composed music for games like
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, West of Loathing and Frog
Fractions 2.
Episodes:
 Episode 77: Art Has No Meaning (7 July 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/art-has-no-meaning

Aaron Jessie
Aaron Jessie is an environmental artist at thatgamecompany
where he worked on Journey. He has also worked on games such
as The Evil Within and Defiance.
Episodes:
 Episode 72: How Sand Works (31 March 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/how-sand-works
210

Ben Johnson
Ben Johnson is a senior designer at Double Fine Games. He also
has worked on games such as Dead Space and Perception, and
helps run the Babycastles video game nonprofit in New York.
Episodes:
 Episode 56: Hog-with-Tusks and Curly Beard (8 July
2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/hog-with-tusks-and-
curly

Zack Johnson
Zack Johnson is the founder of Asymmetric Publications,
developer of games such as Kingdom of Loathing, Word Realms
and West of Loathing.
Episodes:
 Episode 12: Orc Fatigue (5 April 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/orc-fatigue
 Episode 50: Ipecac Mountain (21 May 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/ipecac-mountaine

Jeff Kaplan
Jeff Kaplan is the vice president of Blizzard Entertainment and
the lead designer and game director of the game Overwatch.
Episodes:
 Episode 125: Chatting with Jeff Kaplan (31 January 2019)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/chatting-with-jeff-
kaplan

Greg Kasavin
Greg Kasavin is a writer and designer at Supergiant Games,
where he has worked on Bastion, Transistor and Pyre. Before
that he was the editor-in-chief at GameSpot.
Episodes:
 Episode 35: The One-Year Podcastversary (12 November
2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-one-year-
podcastversary/
211

J.P. LeBreton
J.P. LeBreton has worked on games such as Broken Age,
Bioshock and The Cave. He is possibly the world's leading expert
on DOOM.
Episodes:
 Episode 73: The Doom that Came to SEGA Sarnath (4
May 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-doom-that-came-to-
sega-sarnath

David Libby
David Libby is the chief technology officer at TERC, a research
and education group that developed the game Zoombinis.
Episodes:
 Episode 46: Blueberries, not Eggplants (15 April 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/blueberries-not-
eggplants

Michael Lutz
Michael Lutz is an academic and game designer who has made
games such as The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, My Father's
Long, Long Legs and The Tower of the Blood Lord.
Episodes:
 Episode 37: Edutainment Ecco (27 November 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/edutainment-ecco

Joseph Matheny
Joseph Matheny is a programmer, game designer and the creator
of Ong's Hat, the first modern alternate reality game.
Episodes:
 Episode 154: Chatting with Joseph Matheny (29
September 2020)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/chatting-with-joseph-
matheny
212

Edmund McMillen
Edmund McMillen is an independent game designer who has
made games such as Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac and
The End is Nigh.
Episodes:
 Episode 11: The Catma Sutra (30 March 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-catma-sutra

Rand Miller
Rand Miller is the co-founder of Cyan and has produced games
such as Myst and Obduction.
Episodes:
 Episode 80: The Tripod (29 August 2016)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-tripod

Erica Newmann
Erica Newmann is an ecologist who served as the ARG Closer for
the game Frog Fractions 2.
Episodes:
 Episode 89: The Meaty Nugget (30 January 2017)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-meaty-nugget

Johnnemann Nordhagen
Johnnemann Nordhagen is the founder of Dim Bulb Games,
producer of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. He also worked
on games such as Bioshock 2 and Gone Home.
Episodes:
 Episode 126: Where the Podcast Tastes Like Wine (9
February 2019)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/where-the-podcast-
tastes-like-wine
213

Melvin Ok
Melvin Ok is a translator and localizer who has worked for
companies such as Microsoft, SEGA, Konami and Capcom.
Episodes:
 Episode 3: Controlled Substance: Dog (3 December
2013) http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/controlled-
substance-dog

Michal "Kayin" O'Reiley
Michael O'Reiley is an independent game developer best known
for making I Want To Be The Guy.
Episodes:
 Episode 23: The Nathan Drake Problem (24 July 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-nathan-drake-
problem

Davin Pavlas
Davin Pavlas is a psychologist who serves as the director of
insights at Riot Games.
Episodes:
 Episode 43: League of Casuals (1 March 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/league-of-casuals

Shawn Pierre
Shawn Pierre is an independent developer who organizes the
Philadelphia Game Mechanics.
Episodes:
 Episode 150: Philly Game Mechanics (11 July 2020)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/philly-game-mechanics
214

Tyriq Plummer
Tyriq Plummer is an independent developer who is the creator of
Catacomb Kids and has done pixel art for games like Crypt of the
Necrodancer: Cadence of Hyrule.
Episodes:
 Episode 130: Young Phat Thor (22 May 2019)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/young-phat-thor

Lucas Pope
Lucas Pope is the award-winning designer of independent games
Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn.
Episodes:
 Episode 132: The Monkey's Paw (23 June 2019)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-monkeys-paw

Seth Rosen
Seth Rosen is an independent game developer who has worked on
titles such as Bioshock Infinite, Don't Starve and Nectar Vector.
Episodes:
 Episode 21: You Got Screeched (5 July 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/you-got-screeched

Micah Sifry
Micah Sifry is the founder of Civic Hall, an organization
dedicated to helping kickstart the use of technology for public
civic good, and has written widely about democracy, movements,
organizing and tech.
Episodes:
 Episode 160: Democracy and Gamification (13 August
2021)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/global-democracy-and-
gamification
215

Dave Sirlin
Dave Sirlin is the founder of Sirlin Games and has produced
games such as Yomi, Puzzle Strike and Chess 2.
Episodes:
 Episode 29: The Hero was a Wristwatch (30 September
2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-hero-was-a-
wristwatch

Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns
Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns are the founders of Metanet
Software, developers of games such as N, N+ and N++.
Episodes:
 Episode 47: Pancake Ninja (22 April 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/pancake-ninja

Brjann Sigurgeirsson
Brjann Sigurgeirsson is the founder of Image & Form, developers
of the popular SteamWorld franchise.
Episodes:
 Episode 17: The Greased, the Bolts and the Rusty (31
May 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-greased-the-bolts-
and

Jay Tholen
Jay Tholen is the founder of Tendershoot and the creator of the
games Dropsy and Hypnospace Outlaw.
Episodes:
 Episode 129: The Sad Clown and the Happy Internet (14
April 2019)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-sad-clown-and-the-
happy-internet
216

Michael Townsend
Michael Townsend is the founder of doublespeak games,
developer of games such as A Dark Room and Gridland.
Episodes:
 Episode 33: In the Year 2020, WinAmp Returns (29
October 2014)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/in-2020-winamp-returns

Joe Tung
Joe Tung is the co-founder of Theorycraft Games. In the past he
was a Senior Producer at Riot Games and an Executive Producer
at Bungie, working on the Halo franchise.
Episodes:
 Episode 48: The Jabba Comparison (6 May 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/the-jabba-comparison

Andy Weir
Andy Weir is the New York Times bestselling author of The
Martian and Artemis.
Episodes:
 Episode 60: Looking at Matt Damon (1 September 2015)
http://redpagespodcast.com/listen/looking-at-matt-damon

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The extension of our reality

Asset Metadata

Creator Bortnick, Justin Andrew (author)

Core Title Communities of reality: game design, narrative and political play

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 03/18/2022

Defense Date 03/03/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alternate reality games,authorship,bannon,collaborative authorship,Communications,conspiracy theory,creative practice,democracy,design,design methodologies,election,ethnography,Fascism,game design,game play,gameplay,Games,Hannah Arendt,Harassment,hate speech,hatespeech,independent games,Information,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,podcast,Political science,Politics,propaganda,qanon,red pages podcast,Totalitarianism,Trump,video game industry,video games

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gambrell, Alice (committee chair), Dane, Joseph (committee member), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member), Watson, Jeff (committee member)

Creator Email bortnick@usc.edu,jabortnick@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC110816142

Unique identifier UC110816142

Legacy Identifier etd-BortnickJu-10442

Document Type Dissertation

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Source 20220321-usctheses-batch-916 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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