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Short thread updating my QAnon-looks-like-an-ARG (alternate reality game) piece:
1/ QAnon supporter Margorie Taylor Greene won a Georgia Primary runoff tonight. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-georgia-runoff-qanon-conspiracy-theory/index.html
1/ QAnon supporter Margorie Taylor Greene won a Georgia Primary runoff tonight. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-georgia-runoff-qanon-conspiracy-theory/index.html
2/ Me last week, on QAnon looking like an alternate reality game:
"Games don’t let you have a shot at running for congress, for one... While eSports are making money for gamers, if QAnon is a game, its winners are getting ready for public office." https://danhon.substack.com/p/qanon-looks-like-an-alternate-reality
"Games don’t let you have a shot at running for congress, for one... While eSports are making money for gamers, if QAnon is a game, its winners are getting ready for public office." https://danhon.substack.com/p/qanon-looks-like-an-alternate-reality
3/ Shorter version of my piece: alternate reality games are deliberately designed conspiracy theories, made to be played by tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of people. Viewed through that lens, QAnon shares a lot of similarities.
4/ One aspect of massively multiplayer games (Bartle, 1996) is the drive for achievement combined with socialization (along with "killing" and "exploring"). QAnon as a sort of political game offers a unique prize of potential public office for "achievement".
5/ Designed ARGs deliberately use behavior like apophenia -- our drive to see patterns -- and how groups of people treat information "dumped" out onto the internet. Both these topics excellently explored by Mols Sauter:
https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/
https://limn.it/articles/the-illicit-aura-of-information/
https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/
https://limn.it/articles/the-illicit-aura-of-information/
6/ I have no idea how much Taylor "plays" QAnon; she certainly knwos how to play to the audience though.
& one thing about QAnon is that its players can now write her into its canon.
Full newsletter piece here agin: https://danhon.substack.com/p/qanon-looks-like-an-alternate-reality
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& one thing about QAnon is that its players can now write her into its canon.
Full newsletter piece here agin: https://danhon.substack.com/p/qanon-looks-like-an-alternate-reality
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