Ludic Literacy: Cicada 3301 & Qanon
Bryant McGill on our Gamified World.
Part of my induction into Cicada 3301 has been a LOT of reading, some of it review of things from long ago, some new material.
I just finished Gamification: QAnon, Cicada 3301, and the need for "Ludic Literacy" to Navigate a Gamified World by Bryant McGill, and then I found this Soundcloud presentation. The article is a broad, smart presentation, the nineteen minute podcast is a sort of formulaic thing for those who are largely new to this world.
McGill posits that we need Ludic (playful) Literacy in this area, and I agree.
Attention Conservation Notice:
This is a mixture of Shall We Play A Game? and the backstory that involves Conspiracy Brokers, with a heavy dose of self care.
Keeping It Light:
One of the lessons I learned the hard way, by doing myself some serious harm in 2012, was this bit of advice from an old friend.
If what you’re doing doesn’t feel like a game, if it’s lighting up your fight/flight reaction, you’re doing it wrong.
Recovery from that period took *years* and there are still some things I just know I have to hand off immediately. These days, when I detect signs of burnout, I will spend 48 to 72 hours closing out current tasks, and then just duck. The big warning sign for me is inappropriate humor. If I laugh at horrors, it’s time to back off.
I used to read all of Washington Post daily, less the lifestyles and sports sections. I cancelled my subscription in early November, read about three articles by mid-month, and I haven’t touched it since, despite having a subscription that’s still live until May. I knew it was going to produce a steady stream of infuriating nonsense about which I could do precisely nothing.
Given the regularity with which I demonstrate my adherence to these means of self preservation, I hope you’ve picked up on it and started doing it for yourself.
SWPAG isn’t meant to have stuff like this happening, but the internet being what it is, arrangements must be made in advance …
Playtime:
There is value to reading about a given structure, but if you can play with it in a simulation before doing that, your learning will be enhanced. The very first piece of software I ever wrote for money was a simulation of corn growth - the plant needs to score enough growing degree days to reach maturity. This starts at around 50F, peaks at 86F, and shuts down at 104F. You can look at a graph on a page and it might stick, if you do that after messing with parameters in a sim, it’s much more likely you’ll retain it. I have and it’s been nearly forty years.
Cicada 3301’s initial puzzle required all sorts of digging, research, and skills to tease apart. Qanon was similar in some ways, but syncretic - which I’ve seen expressed as “Yes, and …” There were no wrong answers, anyone could expand the lore in any direction they chose, subject only to it exciting a sense of discovery in others. This is the perennial problem for projects using these methods; Emmy winning designer Jim Stewartson’s top concern in any environment was apophenia. People who see patterns where none exist are often subject to paranoid, delusional thinking.
The puzzle designer’s puzzle is this: how to create an environment that facilitates this ludic literacy, while resisting the impulses of clinical paranoids who turn up … as well as those who search for and then weaponize such people. That’s been mentioned here, in Scientology’s Dullest Tool, but Ron is by no means the only weaponized weirdo out there. I saw a couple such folks jailed for their obsessions when I lived in D.C., and there was a similar trail for Cesar Sayoc, the MAGA Bomber.
Conspiracy Brokers:
The very first ARG-like construct I created were the Conspiracy Brokers. This was a malign “psychic snare” for conspiracy nutters that were bothering me, which contained an embedded “therapeutic double bind”. If they believed that the conspiracy brokers existed at all, they’d already lost.
My influences at the time were pretty broad, despite my being newly arrived. I had read Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken, along with every paper by or about her I could find. I’d been sent out to read Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, which I absolutely loved. I had explored the background of Ong’s Hat, and had the benefit of interacting with some very sharp players in the field.
It pleases me to occasionally hear from folks who tell me they’re part of Conspiracy Brokers. The encounters are always a bit spooky, but I’m glad they’re enjoying whatever it has become.
Shall We Play A Game?
I’m delighted that Cicada 3301 has not just taken me in, but also started deploying resources to make Shall We Play A Game? more than just a complex theory I’ve had. Thus far there’s just some code for easy access steganography, a delivery system for the actual game (puzzle?) itself. This is going to be generalized - I need it for what I’m doing, but if we do a good job others will find it useful, too.
There’s another technology component that I’m going to float the next time we meet. Most systems in the world trim EXIF data from images to protect those uploading them, but it would be great if there were a system that would 1) accept EXIF under certain circumstances and 2) resist algorithmic dehumanization. If you noticed Anders Puck Nielsen: Responsible Social Media last November, maybe you even caught the fact that I’d been predicted Social Media’s Federated Future … since 2009.
There are a variety of Fediverse platforms that offer all sorts of media options, we’ll need to explore which ones are suitable for the purpose of puzzle distribution. Getting off the corporate platforms will be a good move for the human race in general, and would-be players in particular. There are a variety of troubles that afflict even well managed corporate platforms like Bluesky, or even this one. Problems that would be quickly and easily dispatched when you’re on a first name basis with the system’s operator.
Conclusion:
We might not even need EXIF. I haven’t yet run the code for the steganography, but even if that feature is not important, escaping the clutches of corporate social media IS. The ability to use Alt Text provides a lot of the same functionality in terms of encapsulating plain text with an image, but there are specific features like latitude/longitude that would be much more useful if handled in a standardized fashion.
I’ve still not said precisely what SWPAG actually IS … and I’m not sure I ever will. Perhaps at some point in the future, when it reaches certain conditions, that will make sense, but for the start it’ll just mix in with whatever people are doing with the steganography … and whatever Fediverse network(s) get picked as first venues. This is important; I think much of the trouble the Cicada puzzle faced has to do with the choice of 4chan as the initial point of release.
Last Thursday night was the first time I really got to present the core of what I’ve been building. The response was … there’s a pleasing level of intricacy, in terms of what Cicada 3301 expects, but I suspect a lot of my singular viewpoint will be squeezed out.
And I’m fine with that, because after all, we’re just playing …
