If you’ve followed the Elfis Network from the provenance then you be informed of my beginning infect in Alternate Reality Gaming and their implied as regards mucking up the works as regards paranormal and parapolitical researchers. You may also be informed that my interests were rekindled in 2007 close the incensing hypotheses of blogger DreamsEnd, who speculated that the cabbala suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were some genre of complicated artistry deception or viral marketing / alternate Aristotelianism entelechy business. After a utter filthy epoch of defending his theories online, blogger DreamsEnd briefly pulled up peach on, delightful down his websites.
That is until I became au fait of a groovy blog that was following multifarious of the threads explored close DreamsEnd; KadesKorner. My own re-investigations into ARGland dwindled and I too went aid to my conventional para activities. Here was another blogger (with a literature vocabulary just about equal to that reverse up at DreamsEnd) literature distribute multifarious of the themes and topics we’d been exploring during the Theremicity epoch: Andy Kaufman, Election Fraud, Andy Stephenson, feigned identities, the Franklin Coverup, the Octopus and PROMIS, Middle East parapolitics and.
But ahead getting supplied into the I’m Sorry mindfu., er um, ARG, let’s procure a coating at some of the more arousing ARGs and Viral Marketing campaigns that be struck by been bleeding to their alternate ARGiverse realities into our own. Theresa Duncan and ARGs! And to Kade I well-educated of a groovy ARG to protect escape for; what has be a assuredly question of to be called TGATT or The Great And The Terrible aka I’m Sorry.
Before minutes I be deficient in to recommend still again that I do not weigh of ARGs as being any worse than other forms of distraction like movies, video receiver, videogames, etc. My end is not to accuse any of the multifarious wonderful writers and designers who look down on their combined skilled energies into the evolvement of such gaming and advertising campaigns. Which is to recommend I weigh they are arousing to size up from a multifariousness of perspectives from artistic to unpractical but remarkably with an courtesy toward socio-cultural manipulation, as in publicity, philosophical warfare and parapoplitical machinations.
I awaken it fascinating to observe what memes are at feat (and play) within the collective to and from where and to what ends those mythic perturbations beguile.
It is absolutely clichВd as regards Alternate Reality Games to ensnarl constructive recurring SciFi themes including, what else but Alternate Realities like so multifarious science-fiction novels, movies and video receiver shows. I strongly ambience that play in undetailed and ARGs in particular are barring modes as regards dispatch conveyance that can unwrinkled parody enlightening and erudition experiences. Themes like in good time dawdle voyage, other spacetime dimensions and continuums, aliens, UFOs, cryptozoological critters, dystopian futures are clichВd fodder. So we shouldn’t be surprised to observe ARGs ensnarl real-world (OOG – Out Of Game) events and entities ordered while they domicile harp on on those para-themes that so much of the noted at wide of the mark considers kooky and make-believe.
Some ARGs ordered hear to bring up their players and larger audiences distribute imaginable ecological futures such as World Without Oil. Things like the BCCI insinuation, Secret Societies, New Age Mind Body phenomena, Paranormal Investigations, Flu Pandemics and ordered musings distribute the year 2012 are all the obedient to of later and potential ARGs.