About:
A Game of You
This story is completely fictional. It was written for an Alternate Reality Game on the Fear Mythos forum entitled "Nine is God." If you are reading this, then the probability is that you are playing or have already played this game. Or possibly, you just clicked a random link and started reading this not knowing what an Alternate Reality Game or the Fear Mythos was.
Very well, then, I shall educate you: an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a type of interactive fiction. It is designed to tell a story -- but the story is distributed around various secret websites and blogs and audio files and the audience, the players of this game, have to figure out where the pieces of this story are and piece them together. The players are not just passive observers in this story, they are part of it. Player actions determine the outcome of events.
According to philosopher Marshall McLuhan, this makes an ARG a "cool" medium. A "hot" medium is one that enhances one sense, such as vision, so that all you have to do is look, observe. A "cool" medium, on the other hand, requires you to interact, participate. "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."
One of the seminal works of 'cool' is a movie by Haskell Wexler called Medium Cool. It's the story of a fictional cameraman played by Robert Forster. But the events that the fictional character interacts with are real: he is actually there at the 1968 Democratic National Convention riot. This is real. But he is not. The viewer knows this and thus has to figure out for themselves just how much of what he is seeing is truth and how much is fiction.
An ARG works in a similar way. One of the mottos of ARGs is: This Is Not A Game. The players must treat what is happening as real or else there is little impetus to act. So the line between reality and fiction blurs.
"Nine is God" is not only an ARG, but also a celebration of the third anniversary of the Fear Mythos. The Fear Mythos is a collection of blogs and vlogs and stories about creatures called "the Fears," eldritch and inhuman, representing our worst fears come to life. The Fear Mythos also, then, plays around with the boundary between reality and fiction. Many of the characters in the Fear Mythos stories are based on our actual selves. Some stories have the Fears come to life because we made them up -- a recursive paradox, signified by the phrase "We made it all up, but it all came true anyway."
That's a good word for what both the Fear Mythos and an ARG represents: paradox. The philosopher E. M. Cioran wrote about depression and suicide, alienation and existential angst, but in a paradoxical way. He wrote about them not with despair, but with joy: "Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?"
Cioran is a problematic philosopher to talk about. For one thing, he was a fascist and admired Hitler. He was heavily interested in the Romanian far right group called the Iron Guard, which committed atrocities against Jews until they themselves were eradicated for being a bit too enthusiastic.
Perhaps a better philosopher to talk about is Julian Dipere, author of The Perfect Paradox and Our Apocalypse. Dipere wrote about various paradoxes, including some that didn't even have names until he named them. "A paradox is merely another example of cognitive dissonance: that ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in our head and still go on living. It is this ability, not opposable thumbs or self-reflection, that separates us from the animals from which we evolved. For we are paradoxes ourselves, whole and yet empty, waiting to be filled."
An Alternate Reality Game is a paradox: on the one hand, it is a game. The stakes are made up, the characters aren't real. On the other hand, you must believe it is real in order to play. You must immerse yourself. You must make it Not A Game.
This story is written in the second person. The main character is only ever addressed as You. Their name is never said, their gender is never mentioned. They could be You, the Reader. (They have a character, they are not entirely faceless - so perhaps they could be You, the Reader, with only some contradictions.) There are characters in an ARG, but the main characters are You.
This is a Game of You.
The name of this story is the symbol of the empty set. The empty set is perhaps the perfect paradox: it is a set with nothing inside. And yet, it can't be nothing, because by there being a set, it must be something, even if that something contains, in fact, nothing. That's not the only symbol that represents it: it's also shown as {}. A set of empty brackets. But the brackets aren't really empty, are they? There is space between them. They hold the nothing inside.
The Fear Mythos is a set of stories, of games. Sometimes they are set in a separate universe from ours. Sometimes they are set in a universe so close to ours it is almost indistinguishable.
Could, though, there be a story set in the real world? A story set here?
But the Fears aren't real, you protest. Of course they are not. But if there is a story set here, wouldn't that make the Fears real? Perhaps not. That would be a contradiction, a paradox. But paradoxes are real, so why not the Fears? "What we know about paradoxes could fit within the smallest measurement possible," Dipere wrote.
"There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright," Cioran wrote. "These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' the alehouse," Shakespeare wrote.
Of course. These paradoxes are merely fodder for riddles and stories. Nothing will ever come of them. Unless, of course, you use a paradox as part of a game, in order to trick the players into believing things that aren't real. You trigger their cognitive dissonance and suddenly, they believe.
"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy," Marshall McLuhan wrote.
This story is fictional, but isn't it possible that all fictional worlds are real somewhere, in some place of existence? Couldn't, then, this book be real? Couldn't this game we play together be real? Could the lines between reality and fiction blur so much that they break?
After all, this is a Game of You.
The game is still going. The game hasn't started. The game is long over. Perhaps there was never a game at all. Perhaps I made all of this up, McLuhan and Cioran and Dipere. Perhaps none of them ever existed. Perhaps they all existed and I just made up the quotes.
This is a cool medium. This is not a game and this is only a game.
This is a Game of You.
Very well, then, I shall educate you: an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a type of interactive fiction. It is designed to tell a story -- but the story is distributed around various secret websites and blogs and audio files and the audience, the players of this game, have to figure out where the pieces of this story are and piece them together. The players are not just passive observers in this story, they are part of it. Player actions determine the outcome of events.
According to philosopher Marshall McLuhan, this makes an ARG a "cool" medium. A "hot" medium is one that enhances one sense, such as vision, so that all you have to do is look, observe. A "cool" medium, on the other hand, requires you to interact, participate. "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."
One of the seminal works of 'cool' is a movie by Haskell Wexler called Medium Cool. It's the story of a fictional cameraman played by Robert Forster. But the events that the fictional character interacts with are real: he is actually there at the 1968 Democratic National Convention riot. This is real. But he is not. The viewer knows this and thus has to figure out for themselves just how much of what he is seeing is truth and how much is fiction.
An ARG works in a similar way. One of the mottos of ARGs is: This Is Not A Game. The players must treat what is happening as real or else there is little impetus to act. So the line between reality and fiction blurs.
"Nine is God" is not only an ARG, but also a celebration of the third anniversary of the Fear Mythos. The Fear Mythos is a collection of blogs and vlogs and stories about creatures called "the Fears," eldritch and inhuman, representing our worst fears come to life. The Fear Mythos also, then, plays around with the boundary between reality and fiction. Many of the characters in the Fear Mythos stories are based on our actual selves. Some stories have the Fears come to life because we made them up -- a recursive paradox, signified by the phrase "We made it all up, but it all came true anyway."
That's a good word for what both the Fear Mythos and an ARG represents: paradox. The philosopher E. M. Cioran wrote about depression and suicide, alienation and existential angst, but in a paradoxical way. He wrote about them not with despair, but with joy: "Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?"
Cioran is a problematic philosopher to talk about. For one thing, he was a fascist and admired Hitler. He was heavily interested in the Romanian far right group called the Iron Guard, which committed atrocities against Jews until they themselves were eradicated for being a bit too enthusiastic.
Perhaps a better philosopher to talk about is Julian Dipere, author of The Perfect Paradox and Our Apocalypse. Dipere wrote about various paradoxes, including some that didn't even have names until he named them. "A paradox is merely another example of cognitive dissonance: that ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in our head and still go on living. It is this ability, not opposable thumbs or self-reflection, that separates us from the animals from which we evolved. For we are paradoxes ourselves, whole and yet empty, waiting to be filled."
An Alternate Reality Game is a paradox: on the one hand, it is a game. The stakes are made up, the characters aren't real. On the other hand, you must believe it is real in order to play. You must immerse yourself. You must make it Not A Game.
This story is written in the second person. The main character is only ever addressed as You. Their name is never said, their gender is never mentioned. They could be You, the Reader. (They have a character, they are not entirely faceless - so perhaps they could be You, the Reader, with only some contradictions.) There are characters in an ARG, but the main characters are You.
This is a Game of You.
The name of this story is the symbol of the empty set. The empty set is perhaps the perfect paradox: it is a set with nothing inside. And yet, it can't be nothing, because by there being a set, it must be something, even if that something contains, in fact, nothing. That's not the only symbol that represents it: it's also shown as {}. A set of empty brackets. But the brackets aren't really empty, are they? There is space between them. They hold the nothing inside.
The Fear Mythos is a set of stories, of games. Sometimes they are set in a separate universe from ours. Sometimes they are set in a universe so close to ours it is almost indistinguishable.
Could, though, there be a story set in the real world? A story set here?
But the Fears aren't real, you protest. Of course they are not. But if there is a story set here, wouldn't that make the Fears real? Perhaps not. That would be a contradiction, a paradox. But paradoxes are real, so why not the Fears? "What we know about paradoxes could fit within the smallest measurement possible," Dipere wrote.
"There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright," Cioran wrote. "These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' the alehouse," Shakespeare wrote.
Of course. These paradoxes are merely fodder for riddles and stories. Nothing will ever come of them. Unless, of course, you use a paradox as part of a game, in order to trick the players into believing things that aren't real. You trigger their cognitive dissonance and suddenly, they believe.
"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy," Marshall McLuhan wrote.
This story is fictional, but isn't it possible that all fictional worlds are real somewhere, in some place of existence? Couldn't, then, this book be real? Couldn't this game we play together be real? Could the lines between reality and fiction blur so much that they break?
After all, this is a Game of You.
The game is still going. The game hasn't started. The game is long over. Perhaps there was never a game at all. Perhaps I made all of this up, McLuhan and Cioran and Dipere. Perhaps none of them ever existed. Perhaps they all existed and I just made up the quotes.
This is a cool medium. This is not a game and this is only a game.
This is a Game of You.