I’m not a gamer, but a facebook friend who is shared this article and I thought it was interesting.
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
The author describes one of the very first games he designed in which players were supposed to explore a creepy basement to find clues. The game was derailed by the fact that three random pieces of wood looked like an arrow. Players were sure that it was a clue and they couldn’t get past that point in the game.
In most ARG-like games apophenia [see below] is the plague of designers and players, sometimes leading participants to wander further and further away from the plot and causing designers to scramble to get them back or (better yet) incorporate their ideas. In role-playing games, ARGs, video games, and really anything where the players have agency, apophenia is going to be an issue.
QAnon is a mirror reflection of this dynamic. Here apophenia is the point of everything. There are no scripted plots. There are no puzzles to solve created by game designers. There are no solutions.
QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding.
Apophenia (I love learning new words) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
At its best, the ability to perceive patterns is the most important tool in the adaptive toolkit of our species. It is what allows us to learn and make innovations. And if we tend to err on the side of sensitivity rather than specificity, that too is probably advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint.
At its worst however, when it runs rampant and perceives patterns where none exist, the result is conspiracy thinking and even schizophrenia. The word apophenia was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, who studied the mentation of schizophrenics.
I am reminded of the quote from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum:
A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars [or Freemasons or Illuminati] …There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”