When we made the Year Zero ARG, the experts at 42 (including @elanlee who worked on The Beast) taught us that you can’t try to TRICK the players. The suspension of disbelief relies on an unspoken agreement that it’s all just a game. The players of Qanon never got that memo... https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1290799890944024576

By “trick” I mean, our instinct at the beginning was to say “can we fake some real-world events to make people think some of the stuff in the game is REALLY happening?” But you can’t, because then you turn the players against you, they will work together to disprove your lies.

So you never try to trick the players, you avoid that antagonistic relationship by creating a shared suspension of disbelief and the players are much more excited to come along for the ride knowing it’s a game. Qanon is a dangerous perversion of that dynamic. They think it’s real

and there’s no one they trust to convince them it isn’t, because unlike a traditional ARG, the hive mind playing the game is the same hive mind making up the rules. There’s no way out, just deeper and deeper into the alternate reality. And it’s scary how people get sucked in.