Nancy Guthrie and the gamification of crime
Note: Not sure I agree with all this author’s conclusions, but here it is in the spirit of “food for thought.”
Joseph Matheny learned the hard way what happens when this kind of thing works too well. His Ong’s Hat project, which started in the late 1980s as a collaborative fiction about renegade Princeton scientists who’d discovered interdimensional travel, is widely considered the first alternate-reality game. Matheny planted the story across the then-nascent web – and, perhaps to a great and fatal error, sent it to the conspiracy talk radio show Coast to Coast AM – embedding it in the texture of the real media ecosystem so that participants couldn’t easily distinguish the game from genuine conspiracy.
It worked, and then it kept working after he wanted it to stop. By 2000, true believers were showing up on his lawn demanding the truth about dimensional portals. He had to end the project in 2001, and even then, participants refused to accept his confession, accusing him of covering up the cover-up. Matheny has since said of QAnon that they’re using his methods “and I don’t like that,” which is about as concise a summary of the problem as I’ve come across.
Once you build a game that blurs fiction and reality, you don’t get to decide when people stop playing.
LINK: https://spectator.com/article/nancy-guthrie-and-the-gamification-of-crime/?edition=us
PDF Archive of the article
https://www.mediafire.com/file/07056rmsot83ohg/Nancy_Guthrie_and_the_gamification_of_crime.p
More Awards for This is Not a Game
TINAG continues to rack up awards.
AUDIO – NON-FICTION
This Is Not A Game: Season 1, ‘Portal to Utopia’ and ‘Joseph Matheny’ – Marc Fennell with Emma Weatherill
Alex Lee and Suren Jayemanne hosted the awards, held annually by the Australian Writers’ Guild to recognise achievements across feature film, television, documentary, theatre, interactive and gaming, audio, stand-up comedy, animation, and children’s television.
Running list of awards: https://josephmatheny.com/2025/04/30/this-is-not-a-game-with-marc-fennell/
Some free listening material
As many of you know, I always make a free digital version of my work available for free after a year of selling it through commercial channels. Some unscrupulous players have taken that to mean that those works are available to be taken, resold, and reused without permission. I shouldn’t have to explain this, but one more time for the folks in the back:
You’re free to download the free versions for your personal use. You are not allowed to resell, remix, or include in any collections without my express, written permission. There are legitinmate, legal copyrights on all my works, for that very reason. The free versions are distributed under the following Creative Commons agreements (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International) and are also legally copyrighted, registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. Look it up. I'm happy to offer my work for free; I’m much less than happy for people or corporations to profit from it.
Anyway, now that’s out of the way, here are some torrents I found for my audio works, available for free. These are offered for free in the proper spirit of free sharing, as I intended for the works.
They are torrents, so if you don’t know what to do with that, here is an FAQ. Enjoy.
The Audiobook of This is Not a Game
Award-winning documentary about the Ong’s Hat project.
https://audiobookbay.lu/abss/this-uis-not-a-game-marc-fennel/
Ong’s Hat: The Beginning
https://audiobookbay.lu/abss/ongs-hat-the-beginning-joseph-matheny-2/
Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT
https://audiobookbay.lu/abss/ongs-hat-compleat-joseph-matheny-sequoyah-kennedy/
Xen: The Zen of the Other
Archive.org version
https://archive.org/details/ezra-buckley-xen-the-zen-of-the-other-audio
