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Category Archives: Alternate Reality Game
Ong’s Hat: Is Princeton Opposed to Satire?
On May 31, 2021, Princeton’s elite educational institution, through their journal, TORTOISE: A JOURNAL OF WRITING PEDAGOGY, published an excerpt of a paper by one of their freshman students, Jayaditya Deep. The article is titled, The Fiction of Ong’s Hat: Too Good to be False.
In this paper, Jayaditya Deep, who likes to be called Jojo,” levels criticism regarding two pieces of satire, one written by me about 30 years age and another written by me about 20 years ago. Both articles are in out-of-print publications. “Jojo” uses archive.org links as his reference in this piece. The criticism never once mentions that the articles are satire and treats them as if they are not. These articles are not murky as to their intention as humor, but satire, clearly written and published as such.
Additionally, it looks like our little friend “Jojo” has taken to marking up the Wikipedia pages for Ong’s Hat to share his humorless view of the universe. I’m quite aware that he is obviously a person on some kind of quixotic crusade and desperate for attention, so this will be the last I mention it unless they decide to become stalkerish, as these crusaders sometimes do. Oh, and I did him a favor and made a correction to his “additions” since he erroneously listed the publication of The Incunabula Papers as 1898. 😀
PDF of Article
Why Did This Entire Village of Scientists Disappear One Day?
About Thoughty2
Thoughty2 (Arran) is a British YouTuber and gatekeeper of useless facts. Thoughty2 creates mind-blowing factual videos about science, tech, history, opinion, and just about everything else.
If QAnon Is a Game, How Do You Stop Playing?
This is Part II of our look at QAnon. Click here for Part I. As part of the NYU/StartEd New Media Accelerator, we are joining with faculty from the NYU Carter Journalism Institute to talk about QAnon Friday, Feb. 19 on Clubhouse. Join us!
Ever hear of Ong’s Hat? Not the charming little town in New Jersey that we all know and love, but the internet conspiracy. Actually, Ong’s Hat is most likely the first internet conspiracy, which is interesting because it started well before the internet was even in the hands of the average citizen. Today, many credit the sprawling, transmedia experiment — and its foundational documents known as The Incunabla Papers — as the first Alternative Reality Game (ARG), creating the template for massive experiential mysteries underwritten by sources as unlikely as Brigham Young University, Microsoft, and the rock band Twenty-One Pilots. Ong’s Hat was a much less coordinated affair, beginning as crude Xeroxed pamphlets, then skipping around on zines delivered in the mail, radio, bulletin boards, CD-ROM, and back to the internet. While the ghost town that gave the game its name is real, the science fiction tale that lurched around for years, involving Princeton scientists, quantum theory, multi-dimensional travel, and much more, is a work of collaborative fiction by a small group of outsiders and pranksters. But this long-forgotten experiment has become relevant again because it gives us clues into what’s going on with some of the most politically and socially radicalized people in the world.
The January 6 deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol was energized by many people who follow QAnon to varying degrees. Last month, we wrote that understanding the movement in religious or cultish terms was a seductive mistake, and that it’s best understood as an ARG that has a found purchase with huge swaths of alienated and postmodern Americans. While most games are harmless, Ong’s Hat turned quite dark before its chief storyteller shut it down, and we’d argue that the real-world violence coming from QAnon disciples is following that same arc. Hopefully, there are some lessons in previous experiments like Ong’s Hat that can help us blunt the destructive force of this movement, avoid more violence, and bring people back to a shared reality and basic set of facts. READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE: https://medium.com/caseworx/if-qanon-is-a-game-how-do-you-stop-playing-1489a388de75Coming Soon: Highly Strange
We’re producing our first original on high strangeness. In it we explore the psyche of “strange” through the stories of three people in highly strange situations.
Season One – “Information Golem” looks at the life of Joseph Matheny as he dreams up what perhaps becomes the world’s first online ARG (Alternative Reality Game) known as Ong’s Hat. Launched in the 90’s as an innocent social experiment around story and information, things quickly went left of field. The oddities that surrounded Ong’s Hat are curiosities Joseph still struggles to understand to this day. Joseph has gotten alot of attention lately from the press because of the Quanon craziness and White House uprising. More recently he was featured on Slate Magazine’s Decoder Ring series. Also there’s news of a upcoming Netflix feature on conspiracy creation he’ll appear in. His story touches on the issues that seem to dovetail at the volcanic crossroads where personality and mental health meets randomness and free information. Lots of unruly yet relevant questions get born there.
Listen to “Highly Strange” on Spreaker.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/41996383
The Mystery of Ong’s Hat – 3V Off The Books
LINK TO SHOW: https://soundcloud.com/3vpodcast/the-mystery-of-ongs-hat-3v-off-the-books
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Thanks for listening! If you liked this episode be sure to leave us a five star (or not) review! Also if you have any feedback or ideas for future episodes be sure to hit us up! Thanks again and have a kickass day!paranormalPodcasttrue crime3v podcaongsinternet mysteryongmysteryComedydrunkconstheoryconspiracy theoryThe Mystery of Ong’s Hat – 3V Off The Books by 3V Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Ong’s Hat and the construction of a suspicious model reader
It’s refreshing to see someone make an attempt to understand what I was trying to do with Ong’s Hat and it’s encouraging to see them get it mostly right. Too many so-called journalists have focused on the more sensationalist aspects of my attempt, in the early days of the Internet, at an avant-garde art installation that was not constrained by space and time.
In this paper, I have brought together concepts from media studies and semiotics of interpretation in an attempt to analyze a complex media phenomenon and its unforeseen persuasive power. This analysis could be built upon to analyze similar phenomena such as conspiracy theories and fake news.
Link to the full paper: https://letreraria.com/2019/01/13/ongs-hat-and-the-construction-of-a-suspicious-model-reader/
Did An Alternate Reality Game Gone Wrong Predict The Rise of QAnon?
https://youtu.be/brijcd-8oWE
In this fragment of SCHISM we interview the creator of ‘Ong’s Hat’, the first Alternate Reality Game, and ask what his experiences can teach us about the rise of QAnon. Is it possible that the ability to co-create and distribute our own narratives about reality could be altering its basic fabric? And has Noam Chomsky’s concept of ‘manufactured consent’ produced by centralized authority and corporate media now been outmoded by a new era of ‘manufactured dissent’, powered by networks, meme culture and supercharged shitposting?
LINK: https://youtu.be/brijcd-8oWE
More Gunderson, Finders, QAnon, et. al
Back by popular demand, this episode features more dirt on Ted Gunderson. It starts out pretty straightforward, with digital forensic investigator Ed Opperman talking about his experience with the disgraced former FBI agent. Then public satanist Lucien Greaves talks a bit about his investigations into the Satanic Panic, including his experiences with ol’ Ted. Finally, Joseph Matheny comes on for a wide-ranging chat about QAnon, the Finders as metaprogramming, the gameplay-theater-ceremonial magick nexus, and more! Things start out pretty down-to-earth, but by the end of the episode, there is plenty of esoterica for you to chew on. Get ready to have your mind blown, then press play…
link to show: https://anchor.fm/failedstateupdate/episodes/25–More-Gunderson–Finders–QAnon–et–al-elcm3k/a-a3k0etn
But for chrissake, if you haven’t listened to the previous episode (24), please be sure to, so you don’t get too lost…
Grey Faction (Lucien Greaves) website: https://greyfaction.org/
Lucien Greaves on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucienGreaves
Joseph Matheny website: https://josephmatheny.com/
Joseph Matheny on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ongshat1
Joseph L. Flatley website: https://www.lennyflatley.net
Joseph L. Flatley on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennyflatley
Failed State Update Newsletter: https://lennyflatley.substack.com
This is not a game
By Tom Dove
Link to the entire article: https://medium.com/@illexical/this-is-not-a-game-44142be5ff2c
Ong’s Hat.
A funny little name. A name on a map of a town that can’t be found.
Emerging on the nascent public internet at some indeterminate point in the late nineties, Ong’s Hat was the prototype for what would become a genre of participatory literature called the alternate reality game, or ARG. An ARG is part adventure story, part puzzle, part esoteric mystery, part scavenger hunt, part online community, all quite weird. They are mostly played on public forums, to capture the widest audience, but their content often spans multiple platforms, and typically multiple media. There have been many thousands of ARGs now, tiny and massive, but one of them was first, and it was wilder than the rest.
Ong’s Hat was by turns surreal, goofy, cosmic, and sinister, drawing heavily on classic counterculture and conspiracy theory lore. In the very early days of the worldwide web, it was doing something in a dispersed form that Mark Z. Danielewski would shortly be hailed as a postmodern genius for doing in the novel House of Leaves: playing adeptly with our ideas about how and why we find things to be true. What makes us believe a thing is real? The course of the game, its story, exists only in inaccurate second-hand reports and archived materials stripped of context now. By accident or by design, all the original online content has long since subsided into the digital sands, but the ghost of Ong’s Hat haunts us still.