Unlike a board game, this kind of world-building has no natural boundary. Players can become entranced and awe-struck at the sheer scale of information available to them, and seek to assimilate it into building the grandest narrative possible. They try to generate a story in which all of the facts they have piled up make sense.

Alternate reality games dictate what is and is not important in the unending deluge of information — what gets points and what doesn’t. What falls outside of or challenges the story of a given game is not so much disputed as ignored, and whatever fits neatly within it is highlighted. Wanting to understand the facts in perspective cannot alone... See more

“Confirmation bias” names the idea that people are more likely to believe things that confirm what they already believe. But it does not explain the emotional relish we feel, the sheer delightwhen something in line with our deepest feelings about the state of the world, something so perfect, comes before us. Those feelings have a lot in common with... See more

You do not have to surrender your commitment to facts to participate in an alternate reality. You just have to engage with one, in any way. If you are a user of digital systems, if you allow them to provide you recommendations, if you train them on your preferences, if you respond in any way to the likes, downvotes, re-shares, and comment features... See more

it is becoming more and more difficult, and unlikely, for people playing different games to even talk to each other. Indeed, a common conceit of some media games is that “nobody is talking about this.” We are losing a shared language. It is not that we arrive at different answers about the same questions, but that our stories about the world have... See more

Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

As the media ecosystem produces alternate realities, it also undermines what remains of consensus reality by portraying it as just one problematic but boring option among many.

So what if an alternate reality game really did keep on going, if it had no end point? It would amount to a simulation of the world. All aspects of “reality” that fit into the simulation, including some produced artificially by players for fun and profit, would be incorporated. If the game had no boundary, at some point you could think that the... See more

To play an alternate reality game is to be drawn into a collaborative project of explaining the world. It is to lose, even fleetingly, one’s commitment to what is most true in the service of what is most compelling, what most advances a narrative one deeply believes.