Saved by Stuart Evans and
Reality Is Just a Game Now
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
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
ARGs can keep going because there are a myriad of possible solutions to puzzles in the game world. Debunking only ever eliminates one small set of narratives, while keeping the master narrative, or the idea of it, intact.
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
What role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons pioneered was using the same gameplay mechanics not to fight tabletop wars but to tell stories, centered not on armies but on individual characters of a player’s own creation. The point of playing was not to beat your opponent but to share in the thrill of making up worlds and pretending to act in... See more
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
“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 delight when 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 wit... See more
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
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.
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
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 d... See more
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
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 wor... See more
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
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.
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
Digital discourse creates a game-like structure in our perception of reality. For everything that happens, every fact we gather, every interpretation of it we provide, we have an ongoing ledger of the “points” we could garner by posting about it online. Sometimes, something will happen in real life that provides such an outstanding move in the game... See more
The New Atlantis • Reality Is Just a Game Now
ARGs are not about establishing the facts within consensus reality. They are about finding the most compelling model of reality for a given group. If your ads, social media feeds, Amazon search results, and Netflix recommendations are targeted to you, on the basis of how you fit within a social group exhibiting similar preferences, why not your mod... See more