GameStop is no longer just a place you buy video games. Now it is the game. All thanks to Reddit inspired day traders i.e. millennials with Robinhood accounts who are hellbent on screwing over established Wall Street players who shorted the stock. To them there’s no real plan here. Most of them have no idea what they are doing or why. Don’t know a single thing about GameStop’s actual financial situation. But they don’t have to know anything to make money. Just identify a stock that’s been shorted, buy some initially to raise the price, get the power of the crowd to help you keep sending the stock higher, force those who shorted the stock to have to buy it back to cover their positions, causing the price to go even higher, and then sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
It’s actually kind of genius. Whether or not it’s legal is another question. The SEC and various state regulators may explore collusion charges. The Biden Administration is said to be looking into it. But then again is this any different than all the supposed legal ways that established Wall Street players manipulate the stock market every single day? Why shouldn’t some random Joe from Reddit get in on the fun as well? And the fun is the whole point. Yet another example of how real life is turning into a video game.
The premise is simple really. Figure out a way, either from creating a viral conspiracy theory, or driving up the price of a stock, or some other method, to influence real world events. Only some people are playing the game. The rest of us are just collateral damage.
It all started with QAnon, the mysterious deep state conspiracy group that believed someone named Q, was leaking actual information about what is really going on behind closed doors in Washington. Millions of people played along, following every bread crumb no matter what rabbit hole it lead to. Even if the end result was game over; a failed insurrection attempt that saw most of the most fervent Q supporters wind up in jail.
Wired sums it up best:
“When QAnon emerged in 2017, the game designer Adrian Hon felt a shock of recognition.
QAnon, as you very likely know, is the right-wing conspiracy theory that revolves around a figure named Q. This supposedly high-ranking insider claims that the deep state—an alleged cabal led by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros and abetted by decadent celebrities—is running a global child-sex-trafficking ring and plotting a left-wing coup. Only Donald Trump heroically stands in the way.
It’s nonsense, of course. But what intrigued Hon was the style of nonsense.
It is addictively participatory. Whenever Q posts about the conspiracy, he (or she or they) leaves clues—’Q drops’—on image boards like 8kun that are cryptic and open-ended. One in 2019, for example, read: “[C] BEFORE [D]. [C]oats BEFORE [D]. The month of AUGUST is traditionally very HOT. You have more than you know.” Since the clues are oblique, it’s up to the followers of QAnon to interpret them. They instantly begin Googling the phrases, then energetically share their own exegeses online about What It All Means. (August is when Trump will finally imprison Clinton!) To belong to the QAnon pack is to be part of a massive crowdsourcing project that sees itself cracking a mystery.
Which is what gave Hon the shock of recognition: QAnon was behaving precisely like an alternate-reality game, or ARG.
ARGs are designed to be clue-cracking, multiplatform scavenger hunts. They’re often used as a promotion, like for a movie. A studio plants a cryptic clue in the world around us. If you notice it and Google it, it leads to hundreds more clues that the gamemaker has craftily embedded in various websites, online videos, maps, and even voice message boxes. The first big ARG—called The Beast—was created in 2001 to promote the Steven Spielberg movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence and began with a reference to a ‘sentient machine therapist’ in the credits listed on the movie poster.
Hon was a student when The Beast was released, and he became obsessed. He even moderated a discussion forum where players shared clues. They solved the puzzle in about five months, and Hon was so inspired that he created his own firm to make ARGs, launching Perplex City (his most well-known game) in 2005. He’s run several others since.”
The idea that QAnon is just a game makes a lot of sense. It’s certainly a lot more plausible than believing the actual conspiracy theories that the phenomenon has spawned. In a way QAnon as game is the ultimate conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory about the conspiracy theory. Which is all fine and dandy if it’s just a harmless game, just a harmless Easter egg hunt the way the movie versions are. But now that the entire stock market system is on the verge of collapse? Now that people are literally trying to overthrow the government? Well, now it’s clear that the game has gone too far.
The problem is that we’re likely just entering the beginning of the game, just at the start of this new trend of turning real life into a video game. I’m not sure where we go from here or what will come next. But I do know one thing for sure: we’re in for a wild ride.
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