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QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.

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I don’t want to gatekeep, but honestly, a lot of people making this comparison clearly know very little about ARGs other than from Wikipedia. I’ve designed and played ARGs for years and I don’t see players confusing the game with reality.

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QAnon is an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). It was set up that way and is managed that way. QAnoners are playing an ARG and refuse to stop for the very reason transreality gaming can be hazardous: you can forget what's game and what's reality. QAnoners are lost in a dangerous game.

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I want to spend the last few minutes talking about QAnon, a group that believes there are folks coming after Trump and that he’s going to save people from a cabal of pedophiles, something along those lines. I’m curious how you began to be interested in QAnon and whether they fit the definition of a cult.

I gained interest when it became apparent that they were highly organized and that they were involved in activities in which they were targeting people, issues, politicians, et cetera. I think that QAnon fits the criteria for a destructive cult with one exception. We don’t know who Q is. Who is the person that perpetuates these conspiracy theories and drops them online? According to the organization or according to the followers, Q is some high-level, top-secret clearance individual in government with access to secrets that none of us could ever access without Q.

But that isn’t necessarily the truth. It’s very likely just a myth, and Q could be a person or a collective or just a scam. What’s interesting is that like many cults, Q uses a front organizational name in order to attract attention and recruits. They pose behind the moniker “Save the Children.” Now, there’s a real organization called Save the Children that is very reputable and it’s been around for a very long time. But QAnon would like to take that mantle and say, “Oh, we’re trying to save children from this pedophile conspiracy that includes all kinds of political leaders, et cetera.” And at times, this can be very volatile, when you look at the QAnon demonstrations and you see how people don’t question anything that is coming from QAnon by and large.

And they are also very invasive, even deceptive, about who and what they’re all about. They don’t want to divulge some of the more bizarre aspects of their conspiracy theories, but would rather say, “Oh we’re just here to save children,” when in reality that’s not all that they’re about.

Do you find it concerning that some of the behavior you’ve seen in cults has started to make its way into our mainstream politics?

Yeah, it’s very scary. It’s scary to think that someone in a position of power is making decisions based on their acceptance of conspiracy theories that have been repeatedly debunked and disproven. And what kind of national secrets or what position in national security will a person have who’s elected to congress and how will it affect their thinking and their performance on the job if they’ve bought in bizarre conspiracy theories perpetuated by QAnon.

It’s a real conundrum and a real problem and I don’t think it’s going to get better. I think before it does get better, it’ll get worse.

We started by talking about how the internet can be a fertile recruiting ground for cults, and what do you know? This is something that lives almost entirely online and now it’s seeping into the physical world.

What I said about cocooning yourself in a bubble online, in an echo chamber, is exactly what so many QAnon supporters do.

They feed off of each other, they reinforce each other, they follow each other on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, and they watch each other on YouTube. Now, some of the social media platforms are beginning to regulate this and purge some of it from their platforms, but by and large, these people can create their own alternate reality online, which is very scary.

I’ve dealt with them trolling my sites, trolling my social media, and when I interact with them, they’re so detached from reality, it’s almost impossible to communicate. Very much like a person that’s delusional and under the undue influence of a cult.

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But some people wouldn’t remember we were playing a game. They’d use tools to look up information about a website’s owner and then call that person up or, in some cases, go to their house, a sort of 2001-era doxing. When this happened in 2001, my fellow moderators and I would put a stop to that behavior whenever it happened. “This isn’t part of the game,” we’d say. Other players would look for security vulnerabilities in the game’s web servers and hack their way in. We’d say the same thing: “We’re playing a game. We’re supposed to be able to solve this. You’re peeking behind the curtain. We don’t need to cheat.” But the nature of these games reinforced that behavior. In ARGs, some addresses to physical locations, hidden in images, emails and behind codes to break, were real and in-play. At the end of the day, if you really want to, you can turn anything in to a location if you want to massage numbers enough into the requisite GPS coordinates. Traveling to the right locations would yield sweet progression of the story, narratives and yet more puzzles to solve in exciting ways: USB sticks, maps, audio recordings, more clues. More cards to put up on the wall. More connections to make. Even if you lived hundreds or thousands of miles away, the power of the group was that there would inevitably be someone who lived close enough and was motivated enough to drive, bus or travel by any means necessary to track down that clue. There was drama in watching the chase. Every single person playing was in the part of the guy in the chair, the trope skewered in 2017’s Spiderman Homecoming, providing technical support to the superheroes. And next time, you could be the superhero, too.

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A game design approach to stopping people from “playing” QAnon might be to start making it boring. But again, I worry about the environmental factors. QAnon has to be less boring that the rest of your life. What if the rest of your life isn’t really that great? What if TV and videogames are always going to be interesting than even a more-boring QAnon? Put more clearly: you’re in a dead-end job (if you even have one, in our pandemic times). The job prospects in your area aren’t even that great to begin with. You’re socially isolated. Until recently, most things were closed anyway. Government, at all levels, isn’t doing much to help you, and even if it has promised to help you, none of that help has actually arrived. Bills keep coming, because nobody’s helping you out with rent. But you could be a winner at this game. You could discover that new piece of evidence, that connection no-one else has seen before. You could throw it out onto a forum or Twitter or Facebook and get the rush of social approval. You get to lose yourself in it because it keeps going, and going, and going. And as you’re doing this and reading and researching, every piece you learn works together to explain the world to you, and explain why the world’s been so shitty to you. There’s actual TV that agrees with it! Everything else? That’s lies. It is as if the story, the hook, the teaser and trailer were evolutionarily selected for disadvantaged and dispossessed people in fear.