At the start of November, I ran a seminar for a university transmedia course on ARGs, Alternate Reality Games. I was looking specifically at examples of three ARG-like projects had been taken as real, with disturbing effects. This post lists some of the links that I referred to. Another will follow with some thoughts on ARGs.

• I then moved on to my three examples, the first of which was Ong’s Hat. Gizmodo produced an excellent overview, Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real. The Ong’s Hat story was created by Joseph Matheny, and his story is excellently told in the two-part Information Golem podcast.

• Read the rest of the Orbific article here: https://orbific.com/writing/some-links-on-args/

• Note: I have collected all three parts of the mentioned  podcast mini-series here: https://josephmatheny.com/2022/07/05/information-golem-new-mini-series-from-toowi-arts/