Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump seemed to be offering some support for a conspiracy theory movement called QAnon. When asked about it, Trump said that its followers quote love our country. Meanwhile, over seventy supporters of quanon have run for Congress in the cycle. One of the candidates, Marjorie Green, has won the Republican nomination and is almost certain to be elected to the House of Representatives. Here to discuss the emergence of quanon and its distinctive character with US is Adrian Han. Adrian is the founder of a London based game company called six to Start. He's been a journalist as well as a game designer, and he says that part of the way we should understand QAnon's success is to realize that in the way that it functions, it works a little bit like a game. Adrian, I wanted to talk to you about a topic on which you've become i would say, a leading public intellectual, and that is a deeper understanding of what is going on in the universe of QAnon, particularly why this immersive experience of conspiracy resonates in a contemporary moment in particular, And I wonder if you would start by just saying a little bit about your interesting, creative and I think quite personally informed theory of what's going on. So I think the thing that struck me about QAnon is the way in which people describe how they discovered and how they really came to believe in it. Q obviously encapsulates so many different theories and ideas, you know, five G conspiracies or charge trafficking. But the thing that a lot of people say when they begin to believe in q and on is they say they did their research. A catchphrase that when here is a lot, I did the research, or I did my research right, and now'll tell other people you should do your research if they are skeptical about q andon. You know, I just kept seeing that again and again and again, and I think we all know what that looks like. It looks like someone typing into Google or Facebook q and on right and quanon plus charge trafficking or that sort of thing, and they get a list of results, you know, news stories perhaps or blog posts, but usually the highest racking stuff will be or has been, conspiracy theories and pretty unreliable material, and that's what passed us for research, and it reminded me of a particular type of games that I make and that has been popular in the past, called alternate reality games. And those games are unique because they are trying to make a really immersive experience for players. So unlike again like Fortnite or Candy Gross that you play on a console or a TV or a moa, alternate reality games try to tell their stories across as many media and platforms as possible, so you might get phone calls in these games, or you might meet real world actors, or you might go to websites and that sort of thing. So they're trying to mimic reality or create an alternate reality. And the way in which a lot of alternate reality games start is by seeing a strange phrase or picture or signed somewhere in the real world, like in a newspaper or a movie trailer, and then you google it and the creators of that game will have seeded some web pages or some YouTube videos or similar with interesting results that lead you down this rabbit hole. And we would literally call it rabbit hole when we design these games in order to kind of drow you into this really interesting fictional world. And it really struck me to see the similarities, at least in how people ended quanon with alternate reality games, which actually quite old. Now many fascinating things here. Let's start with the phrase I did my research or do your research, and you mentioned it from most people that just involves googling. I wonder if it doesn't go it a little bit more deeply, because what you're describing in the context of the alternate reality games, when they're well built, as I'm sure yours are, is that a person who's playing the game doesn't just google, which is the beginning step, but then goes deeper and begins to search out the clues, and then the game becomes more immersive. I'm imagining as he or she goes down rabbit holes, finds more clues, and essentially builds up a universe of meaning that you've seeded for or for her. Presumably, when the QAnon people say I did my research, they don't judst me in the initial search. They mean digging down and having the experience, in scare quotes of discovering layers of meaning I mean, I think if a player is playing an alternate reality game and it goes months and months and can't find another clue, that probably won't hold the player's attention. I'm just guessing Similarly, in QAnon, the person has to be able to say, aha, I found yet another validator, I found yet another validator. Right. It needs to be sufficiently messy, but not too messy so that it just seems like it's completely constructed. And I think that people want it to reflect the complexity of reality. So you will see contradictory ideas in QAnon, and you'll see contradictory posters. And that's why often when people point out contradictions in q and on, that doesn't magically mean that people stop believing, because people kind of enjoy trying to tease out the different sort of possibilities and contradictions within the conspiracy theory. And so I think that when it comes to the experience that people have when they're research in QAnon and when they're playing alternate reality games, it's like you're a detective. It's actually quite pleasurable to go down these different fabbit holes and to see one idea here and to follow what seems like a clue and to what do YouTube video from six months ago saying well, if you look in the background of this photo here and you can see someone making this hand signal, and you might think, oh, I've seen that before in another photo, and you start to create your own connections as well as following connections that people have made for you. The obvious difference between QAnon and the Alter Reality game is that in QAnon, no one has constructed, No person, no team of designers has actually constructed the game. So when the Easter eggs are discovered, they're not discovered. They're invented or made by the active interpretation of the person who is quote unquote doing his or her research, and by the community that says, aha, you found this, and this is indeed an Easter egg. That interests me in the psychological question of design for you, when you are designing a game like this, how much validation do you give the player, the user when he or she has found one of your Easter eggs, to know you actually found an Easter egg here? And then the question from there would be how is it working for people from whom no one has done the design. I think that's a really good question. So with alternate reality games, you don't want to be giving so much feedback that they feel that they're playing a video game. That's not what people play these games for. Where you get but you don't want achievement bad just appearing immediately. At the same time, if you don't give that kind of feedback eventually, then often what happens is they just get completely down the long path because they following something that seems believable and maybe is somewhat internally consistent, but is not the path that you want them to go down. So we would have we'll be having to monitor the player forums and player chat rooms all the time, which was full time twenty four seven job really to make sure they didn't get too far off track, and we would use whatever means we had available to sort of steer them correctly. And that's because they're playing these games collectively. They're playing the games collectively. That's hugely important. I think it may be lost on a lot of listeners like me, but if people are playing collectively, they're creating meaning collectively, and that might really matter for understanding how QAnon is working. That's right. Most alternate reality games take place in real time with everyone proceeding at the same rate. So it's not like a game or even a multiplayer game where you can proceed at different rates. The whole world of the alternate reality game is unfolding at the same rates for every single player. That means that if someone solves a puzzle, it is effectively solved for everyone. So you know, that means that it is a different kind of experience, and people can solve puzzles extremely quickly basically, so we have to make games and stories and puzzles that are sufficiently compact one person or ten people console them on their own. You need a community of thousands or hundreds of thousands to solve them. And on the one hand, that sounds just ridiculous who would want to play such a complex game. But there is something really compelling about being part of a solving community that allows you to feel like you're working towards a bigger purpose. And even if you can't solve a particular puzzle, you can maybe contribute a small part of that. And one of the really interesting things about alternate reality games is often the players come up with better theories and ideas of how the story should proceed than we have done ourselves, and some writers might just try and ignore that and try and keep going down the same path, the same story path that you've planned out six months ago. But if you see the players getting really excited about particular development or particular prediction, what we try to do is incorporated back into the story in real time, which means that we might have to rewrite entire websites or emails, or we've record phone calls, and that is something that people find really pleasurable because it makes it feel like they are part of a living world. And I think that's something that is kind of interesting with QAnon because it's always hamping to incorporate new information about news, about politics. It's not a conspiracy theory about how Edian's built the pyramids where the facts aren't really changing. It's a real time conspiracy theory, and that requires a different kind of construction of understanding the world. Dan, I want to ask you about directions of influence and interchange. You've been I think very careful. Everything that I've read of yours has shown great care in not saying one is causing the other. Here, QAnon is caused by alter reality games or the games have contributed to QAnon. You've just pointed to similarities, and I want to push on that a little bit. One past interpretation I could imagine is that QAnon is popular in many of the ways that conspiracy theorists have always been popular, because it is a mode of interpreting the world around us, and in the end, that's what religion has always done in a way, it's what science does, that's what some kinds of philosophy do, makes an effort to create a coherent narrative out of the phenomena that we encounter every day, which taken on their own, don't intuitively seem to cohere with each other. And on that view, the reason for the similarity between your games and QAnon is that your games are also really good proxies for what it's like to interpret the world around us, So they're appealing for sort of the same reasons that quanan is appealing, but without any sense of mutual encounter or influence. The other stronger hypothesis would be that actually, there's something about our moment in time and something about the way that the use of the digital world interacts with conspiracy theory that brings a closer similarity. Then would otherwise have existed. Between these two realms, which are those views do you tend towards. I think it's definitely true that the technology that we used and the types of social interactions that we took advantage of for alternate reality games are the same that people are using in q and on the community filtering aspect of YouTube and a reddit and of four chant is so important to the spread of things like QAnon, where if you didn't have the ability for people to up vote and to promote specific attractive ideas, it would just be a complete madouse. Honestly, it would just be thousands of thousands of people talking to each other and no way to filter that. But because we have these systems which are still pretty crude, I mean, up voting is pretty crude for people to identify attractive ideas. It allows a kind of evolutionary process to occur on a far faster time scale than what have happened if you're just doing everything with paper, and I think that's something that is really underestimated. We'll be back in a moment. I want to ask you about what you might call the regulatory impulse. You could imagine a person who is a good old fashioned, mainstream small l liberal, which I sometimes am, who says, you know, these kinds of conspiracy theories. We have to allow them to sundregate our society because we believe in freedom of expression. On the other hand, we don't have to promote their spread to the point where they have a substantial, dangerous and even eventually violent effect in the world. So the regulatory impulse says, thank you, Adrian for your wonderful diagnosis. You've helped us see why this works. Let's shut it down. Let's try to block it's viral. Let's try to block groups where people are discussing it. If the problem is that everyone is saying it together, let's make it harder for them to do. So where do you come down on the what I would call the regulatory impulse, And I'm trying to be neutral in describing that impulse. So Facebook and Twitter have been making efforts to try and reduce how quickly qun on can be amplified. So if you search for q and on YouTube, it will come up a disclaimer. If you search q and on accounts on Twitter, then you can't find them. I think that's clearly going to help. At the margin, I don't really think it does anything for people who are already into Q on on and to be honest, I think that we've already started seeing these sorts of ideas spread in private message groups and WhatsApp that are harder to control. I think that we all need to have a discussion about what role we want A small number of companies due to regulate speech. Basically Facebook, Twitter, Google, and I should say just full disclosure for listeners and for you that I have advised Facebook on some of their speech related issues. So I have a stake in this too, and I agree that there ought to be a conversation. But I guess what I'm asking you is, what would you like to contribute to that conversation. I think there needs to be more public regulation now exactly what that is. I think that there should be a discussion in democracies about what kind of speech we think is acceptable and how we should promote it or not. You know, I think there are things you can do at that technological level. At the same time, this is a symptom. It's not the cause. It didn't happen because of Facebook. You know, people believe in things like q and on because they have completely lost trust in government and authorities. And so while I think that there is probably some level of public regulation that should be introduced, I suspect that the only way you really get around this is by trying to figure out how you can restore trust, not necessarily in governments, because I think the governments have demonstrated a lot of comments recently have demonstrated that they aren't really to be trusted in certain areas. But I think you need to have trust in some institutions and some people, and the way that they can establish trust is through great a degree of transparency and great a degree of involving the community in how they gather data and how they interpret data. And when I say that to be really specific, you know, I think there's some really good examples of this. One is the COVID Tracking Project in the US, which is trying to create one of the more comprehensive databases of COVID cases and cover statistics in America. And they are going to publicly available information. But importantly, you can go and look at the entire chain of where they gather the information, which websites, how they archived, at how they process it. It's all open source. You can go into the chat rooms and talk to the people. So if you think that, oh no, this particular piece of information collected from Florida is wrong, I think it's inflated. You can see the footnotes about why it's there. Now are people going to drill down that far? Most people aren't. But I think that if you're able to quickly answer questions about, oh, well, these covered figures completely fake, if you can say no, they're not fake. Oh no, we did make a mistake last week, but here's our response to that. Rather than just stonewalling or saying, well, you're my political opponent and I don't believe you, then you can establish that trust. And I think that where this wraps around alternate reality games is the process of collecting that data and interpreting that data. It's not as fun as playing an a arg but it resembles it because it is a collective effort that cannot be done by one person. It can't just be done by software. It requires humans working together, and if you get the right people, it can feel like a very fulfilling process. And that's why I think that getting everyone involved in that project is so important. Could you say more about whether there are other productive things that alternate reality games can contribute here. And I'll tell you, I'll sor put my cards in the table. What the philosophical question behind it is. To me, it seems like what's appealing about those games is that you're interpreting the universe and you know that there was a designer. So you may not get the answer, but you can try to get the answer. And there is an answer out there, which is how the world looks to religious believers. And I would include in that some very dogmatic religious believers in science, but it's not how the world functions a lot of the time, on a lot of the questions we care most about, there isn't a design out there? Is there a way that playing those games makes us believe or reinforces our belief that there must be a design? And if so, is that a good thing? I mean, if we believe that there is a design, maybe we would be more inclined to trust the authorities. Or is it the other way around that the more we play games, the more we acclimate ourselves to what is sometimes called, fancily the hermonutic of suspicion, this idea that the way I see the world is that I'm always suspicious of whatever data is presented to me. Can playing algies need to more sort of conspiratorial thinking or the other way By the way, I don't want to pre judge it. They could, I wouldn't they able to disprove that. I think that algies aren't really that popular anymore, so I don't think there's that much of a cause on link though it was quite difficult to make money from them. Now I would put it a different way. I think that when you play these games, you can feel like you can solve anything, and that's partly because the puzzles have been designed to be solved. But I do think that they can train you. They're like training wheels in the best case, for understanding how to use certain types of tools, how to organize groups online, how to share information and template information that actually can be used for good. And I do think that they are kind of kind of like hopeful games because they do you only solve them by working together, and I think that's kind of a really lovely thing. I wanted to ask you just about the broader question of the role of gaming in our society, particularly in this COVID era. You know, until COVID began. I, like a lot of parents of young kids, tried to limit the amount of time my kids who were playing games. I thought it was fine in some bound, but I didn't want it to swallow up their lives. Suddenly they were at home, they weren't able to see their friends because of social distancing. The games were one way in which they could interact with other human beings, and suddenly they seemed far superior to any activity that was not interactive. And I don't think I'm unique in having gone through this trajectory. Do you have a sense of how the gaming community more broadly, the industry in the community more broadly, are being affected by or thinking about this strange historical moment that we're in. I mean, games are booming. It's one of the few areas that's doing well in the economy, along with just TV and streaming. There is a massive amount of people playing games now. We can see that in the stats of simultaneous players of big games. Consoles at the switch are just selling out. Exercise games, interestingly in Japan are selling out extremely quickly. You know, people are saying that games are very good way of socializing. That is not just having endless zoom calls basically. You know. The other interesting thing about games, I would say is that unlike TV shows, which can be consumed in a lockdown but can't really be created and lockdown as effectively, games can be created and consumed very well in a lockdown. A lot of games companies are pretty well suited to working remotely because it's all just on our computers. You don't have actors or all things of that. And so the great of production has not really slowed down for games. And so while everyone's watching TV, there are a a lot of new TV shows coming out, but there are a lot of games coming out, and that's really a now the industry to thrive in this strange moment. Do you, yourself, in your own life, or when you're advising people whom you know, have some ideas about proper ratio of human time that should be spent on And I'm including interactive games here, I mean obviously in a lockdown, when one doesn't have the option of in person socializing, it may be better to socialize through a game than not to socialize at all. In fact, I tend to think that that's the case. But when an af we return to some capacity for social interaction. Do you have a general view on whether it's a bad thing. As a proportion of all their social interactions, the percentage that are happening mediated via games are high versus slow. You know, I think this is a really hard question to get right, because it really depends on what time window you're looking at. I think there's a temptation to go and say, well, you should spend two hours a day or one hour a day, or have a many hours of screen time a day or week or a month. I had one summer where I feel like I just played Civilization Too for about a three months straight and I didn't really do anything else. And then I had times where I don't play any games at all and I just spend all my time going out. I think it is okay to go through these phases and recognize them as phases rather than things that last for years. There are ways to combine playing online games with social interaction. I mean, you can go to conventions in some ways. Maybe the answer is to kind of push through. If you've got someone who is incredibly into World of Warcraft or the League of Legends or Fortnight, you know, you can indulge that to some extent, and you can say, hey, how about we go and meet some Fortnite players in the real world, and that is a social direction and people can make really good friends there. And so I think it's rather than saying, well, the game is wrong, it's more the way in which you experience the game is wrong or not wrong, but perhaps excessive. But the people are still people, and you can meet the people through the game, but you can also meet the people in real life, and I think that's something that is we should all be reminded of. Do you think when our various social distancings that are over, that increased game playing will continue as a trend or will it decline slightly or do you think it would return to its pre COVID levels. I think it will decline slightly. But we're at an interesting point in gaming right now, with the release of a whole bunch of new consoles and technologies which are probably going to be quite attractive to people, and there's a lot more investment going on to games. They're just going to get better and more interesting. And I know that everyone always sorts about the futual reality is coming next year, but it is coming, and it's get very good, and I think that there's already been a huge run of sales on the reality headsets. It wasn't quite there for this pandemic, but God help us if we have another pandemic of five years. But if we do have another pandemic of five years, VR is probably going to be the place where a lot of people are spending their time. And while maybe it'd be better to meet people in the real world, VR is probably second best, even before games. Adrian, I want to thank you for your time and for your really really unusual and insightful angle on this hard question. It's a great pleasure to hear your fascinating views. Thanks so much. Adrian Han's very thoughtful perspective is a reminder that although conspiracy theories are resolved as human consciousness, they evolve and develop in the light of cultural understandings and changing technology. Site into the way that alternate reality games and QAnon have something in common is valuable to me because it opens up our thinking about both topics. It opens up our thinking about what a conspiracy theory is and how conspiracy theorists are trying to understand, interpret and make sense of the world. And it also opens our perspective into how certain kinds of games, like alternate reality games, can generate meaningful community and an experience of investigation, thought and analysis. Beyond that, Adrian really got me thinking about the social experience of gaming more generally. Of course, he doesn't think that we should spend all of our time online, but he does take and advance the view that social engagement through games can be a meaningful form of interaction, especially when we're cut off from other forms of social interaction by COVID. Understanding a complex phenomenon like QAnon is not a simple thing. To really understand it, we would need to understand psychology, sociology, history, technology, and a wide range of other specialties, probably even neuroscience and religion. But trying to get one view of one part of the elephant is a valuable way to try to make sense of this phenomenon, one that, for better or for worse, probably for worse, is going to have a meaningful effect on our political lives. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Jane Cott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez and our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Clodwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feld I also have a new book out called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. I'd be delighted if you checked it out. I read a column from Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original state of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump seemed to be offering some support for a conspiracy theory movement called QAnon. When asked about it, Trump said that its followers quote love our country. Meanwhile, over seventy supporters of quanon have run for Congress in the cycle. One of the candidates, Marjorie Green, has won the Republican nomination and is almost certain to be elected to the House of Representatives. Here to discuss the emergence of quanon and its distinctive character with US is Adrian Han. Adrian is the founder of a London based game company called six to Start. He's been a journalist as well as a game designer, and he says that part of the way we should understand QAnon's success is to realize that in the way that it functions, it works a little bit like a game. Adrian, I wanted to talk to you about a topic on which you've become i would say, a leading public intellectual, and that is a deeper understanding of what is going on in the universe of QAnon, particularly why this immersive experience of conspiracy resonates in a contemporary moment in particular, And I wonder if you would start by just saying a little bit about your interesting, creative and I think quite personally informed theory of what's going on. So I think the thing that struck me about QAnon is the way in which people describe how they discovered and how they really came to believe in it. Q obviously encapsulates so many different theories and ideas, you know, five G conspiracies or charge trafficking. But the thing that a lot of people say when they begin to believe in q and on is they say they did their research. A catchphrase that when here is a lot, I did the research, or I did my research right, and now'll tell other people you should do your research if they are skeptical about q andon. You know, I just kept seeing that again and again and again, and I think we all know what that looks like. It looks like someone typing into Google or Facebook q and on right and quanon plus charge trafficking or that sort of thing, and they get a list of results, you know, news stories perhaps or blog posts, but usually the highest racking stuff will be or has been, conspiracy theories and pretty unreliable material, and that's what passed us for research, and it reminded me of a particular type of games that I make and that has been popular in the past, called alternate reality games. And those games are unique because they are trying to make a really immersive experience for players. So unlike again like Fortnite or Candy Gross that you play on a console or a TV or a moa, alternate reality games try to tell their stories across as many media and platforms as possible, so you might get phone calls in these games, or you might meet real world actors, or you might go to websites and that sort of thing. So they're trying to mimic reality or create an alternate reality. And the way in which a lot of alternate reality games start is by seeing a strange phrase or picture or signed somewhere in the real world, like in a newspaper or a movie trailer, and then you google it and the creators of that game will have seeded some web pages or some YouTube videos or similar with interesting results that lead you down this rabbit hole. And we would literally call it rabbit hole when we design these games in order to kind of drow you into this really interesting fictional world. And it really struck me to see the similarities, at least in how people ended quanon with alternate reality games, which actually quite old. Now many fascinating things here. Let's start with the phrase I did my research or do your research, and you mentioned it from most people that just involves googling. I wonder if it doesn't go it a little bit more deeply, because what you're describing in the context of the alternate reality games, when they're well built, as I'm sure yours are, is that a person who's playing the game doesn't just google, which is the beginning step, but then goes deeper and begins to search out the clues, and then the game becomes more immersive. I'm imagining as he or she goes down rabbit holes, finds more clues, and essentially builds up a universe of meaning that you've seeded for or for her. Presumably, when the QAnon people say I did my research, they don't judst me in the initial search. They mean digging down and having the experience, in scare quotes of discovering layers of meaning I mean, I think if a player is playing an alternate reality game and it goes months and months and can't find another clue, that probably won't hold the player's attention. I'm just guessing Similarly, in QAnon, the person has to be able to say, aha, I found yet another validator, I found yet another validator. Right. It needs to be sufficiently messy, but not too messy so that it just seems like it's completely constructed. And I think that people want it to reflect the complexity of reality. So you will see contradictory ideas in QAnon, and you'll see contradictory posters. And that's why often when people point out contradictions in q and on, that doesn't magically mean that people stop believing, because people kind of enjoy trying to tease out the different sort of possibilities and contradictions within the conspiracy theory. And so I think that when it comes to the experience that people have when they're research in QAnon and when they're playing alternate reality games, it's like you're a detective. It's actually quite pleasurable to go down these different fabbit holes and to see one idea here and to follow what seems like a clue and to what do YouTube video from six months ago saying well, if you look in the background of this photo here and you can see someone making this hand signal, and you might think, oh, I've seen that before in another photo, and you start to create your own connections as well as following connections that people have made for you. The obvious difference between QAnon and the Alter Reality game is that in QAnon, no one has constructed, No person, no team of designers has actually constructed the game. So when the Easter eggs are discovered, they're not discovered. They're invented or made by the active interpretation of the person who is quote unquote doing his or her research, and by the community that says, aha, you found this, and this is indeed an Easter egg. That interests me in the psychological question of design for you, when you are designing a game like this, how much validation do you give the player, the user when he or she has found one of your Easter eggs, to know you actually found an Easter egg here? And then the question from there would be how is it working for people from whom no one has done the design. I think that's a really good question. So with alternate reality games, you don't want to be giving so much feedback that they feel that they're playing a video game. That's not what people play these games for. Where you get but you don't want achievement bad just appearing immediately. At the same time, if you don't give that kind of feedback eventually, then often what happens is they just get completely down the long path because they following something that seems believable and maybe is somewhat internally consistent, but is not the path that you want them to go down. So we would have we'll be having to monitor the player forums and player chat rooms all the time, which was full time twenty four seven job really to make sure they didn't get too far off track, and we would use whatever means we had available to sort of steer them correctly. And that's because they're playing these games collectively. They're playing the games collectively. That's hugely important. I think it may be lost on a lot of listeners like me, but if people are playing collectively, they're creating meaning collectively, and that might really matter for understanding how QAnon is working. That's right. Most alternate reality games take place in real time with everyone proceeding at the same rate. So it's not like a game or even a multiplayer game where you can proceed at different rates. The whole world of the alternate reality game is unfolding at the same rates for every single player. That means that if someone solves a puzzle, it is effectively solved for everyone. So you know, that means that it is a different kind of experience, and people can solve puzzles extremely quickly basically, so we have to make games and stories and puzzles that are sufficiently compact one person or ten people console them on their own. You need a community of thousands or hundreds of thousands to solve them. And on the one hand, that sounds just ridiculous who would want to play such a complex game. But there is something really compelling about being part of a solving community that allows you to feel like you're working towards a bigger purpose. And even if you can't solve a particular puzzle, you can maybe contribute a small part of that. And one of the really interesting things about alternate reality games is often the players come up with better theories and ideas of how the story should proceed than we have done ourselves, and some writers might just try and ignore that and try and keep going down the same path, the same story path that you've planned out six months ago. But if you see the players getting really excited about particular development or particular prediction, what we try to do is incorporated back into the story in real time, which means that we might have to rewrite entire websites or emails, or we've record phone calls, and that is something that people find really pleasurable because it makes it feel like they are part of a living world. And I think that's something that is kind of interesting with QAnon because it's always hamping to incorporate new information about news, about politics. It's not a conspiracy theory about how Edian's built the pyramids where the facts aren't really changing. It's a real time conspiracy theory, and that requires a different kind of construction of understanding the world. Dan, I want to ask you about directions of influence and interchange. You've been I think very careful. Everything that I've read of yours has shown great care in not saying one is causing the other. Here, QAnon is caused by alter reality games or the games have contributed to QAnon. You've just pointed to similarities, and I want to push on that a little bit. One past interpretation I could imagine is that QAnon is popular in many of the ways that conspiracy theorists have always been popular, because it is a mode of interpreting the world around us, and in the end, that's what religion has always done in a way, it's what science does, that's what some kinds of philosophy do, makes an effort to create a coherent narrative out of the phenomena that we encounter every day, which taken on their own, don't intuitively seem to cohere with each other. And on that view, the reason for the similarity between your games and QAnon is that your games are also really good proxies for what it's like to interpret the world around us, So they're appealing for sort of the same reasons that quanan is appealing, but without any sense of mutual encounter or influence. The other stronger hypothesis would be that actually, there's something about our moment in time and something about the way that the use of the digital world interacts with conspiracy theory that brings a closer similarity. Then would otherwise have existed. Between these two realms, which are those views do you tend towards. I think it's definitely true that the technology that we used and the types of social interactions that we took advantage of for alternate reality games are the same that people are using in q and on the community filtering aspect of YouTube and a reddit and of four chant is so important to the spread of things like QAnon, where if you didn't have the ability for people to up vote and to promote specific attractive ideas, it would just be a complete madouse. Honestly, it would just be thousands of thousands of people talking to each other and no way to filter that. But because we have these systems which are still pretty crude, I mean, up voting is pretty crude for people to identify attractive ideas. It allows a kind of evolutionary process to occur on a far faster time scale than what have happened if you're just doing everything with paper, and I think that's something that is really underestimated. We'll be back in a moment. I want to ask you about what you might call the regulatory impulse. You could imagine a person who is a good old fashioned, mainstream small l liberal, which I sometimes am, who says, you know, these kinds of conspiracy theories. We have to allow them to sundregate our society because we believe in freedom of expression. On the other hand, we don't have to promote their spread to the point where they have a substantial, dangerous and even eventually violent effect in the world. So the regulatory impulse says, thank you, Adrian for your wonderful diagnosis. You've helped us see why this works. Let's shut it down. Let's try to block it's viral. Let's try to block groups where people are discussing it. If the problem is that everyone is saying it together, let's make it harder for them to do. So where do you come down on the what I would call the regulatory impulse, And I'm trying to be neutral in describing that impulse. So Facebook and Twitter have been making efforts to try and reduce how quickly qun on can be amplified. So if you search for q and on YouTube, it will come up a disclaimer. If you search q and on accounts on Twitter, then you can't find them. I think that's clearly going to help. At the margin, I don't really think it does anything for people who are already into Q on on and to be honest, I think that we've already started seeing these sorts of ideas spread in private message groups and WhatsApp that are harder to control. I think that we all need to have a discussion about what role we want A small number of companies due to regulate speech. Basically Facebook, Twitter, Google, and I should say just full disclosure for listeners and for you that I have advised Facebook on some of their speech related issues. So I have a stake in this too, and I agree that there ought to be a conversation. But I guess what I'm asking you is, what would you like to contribute to that conversation. I think there needs to be more public regulation now exactly what that is. I think that there should be a discussion in democracies about what kind of speech we think is acceptable and how we should promote it or not. You know, I think there are things you can do at that technological level. At the same time, this is a symptom. It's not the cause. It didn't happen because of Facebook. You know, people believe in things like q and on because they have completely lost trust in government and authorities. And so while I think that there is probably some level of public regulation that should be introduced, I suspect that the only way you really get around this is by trying to figure out how you can restore trust, not necessarily in governments, because I think the governments have demonstrated a lot of comments recently have demonstrated that they aren't really to be trusted in certain areas. But I think you need to have trust in some institutions and some people, and the way that they can establish trust is through great a degree of transparency and great a degree of involving the community in how they gather data and how they interpret data. And when I say that to be really specific, you know, I think there's some really good examples of this. One is the COVID Tracking Project in the US, which is trying to create one of the more comprehensive databases of COVID cases and cover statistics in America. And they are going to publicly available information. But importantly, you can go and look at the entire chain of where they gather the information, which websites, how they archived, at how they process it. It's all open source. You can go into the chat rooms and talk to the people. So if you think that, oh no, this particular piece of information collected from Florida is wrong, I think it's inflated. You can see the footnotes about why it's there. Now are people going to drill down that far? Most people aren't. But I think that if you're able to quickly answer questions about, oh, well, these covered figures completely fake, if you can say no, they're not fake. Oh no, we did make a mistake last week, but here's our response to that. Rather than just stonewalling or saying, well, you're my political opponent and I don't believe you, then you can establish that trust. And I think that where this wraps around alternate reality games is the process of collecting that data and interpreting that data. It's not as fun as playing an a arg but it resembles it because it is a collective effort that cannot be done by one person. It can't just be done by software. It requires humans working together, and if you get the right people, it can feel like a very fulfilling process. And that's why I think that getting everyone involved in that project is so important. Could you say more about whether there are other productive things that alternate reality games can contribute here. And I'll tell you, I'll sor put my cards in the table. What the philosophical question behind it is. To me, it seems like what's appealing about those games is that you're interpreting the universe and you know that there was a designer. So you may not get the answer, but you can try to get the answer. And there is an answer out there, which is how the world looks to religious believers. And I would include in that some very dogmatic religious believers in science, but it's not how the world functions a lot of the time, on a lot of the questions we care most about, there isn't a design out there? Is there a way that playing those games makes us believe or reinforces our belief that there must be a design? And if so, is that a good thing? I mean, if we believe that there is a design, maybe we would be more inclined to trust the authorities. Or is it the other way around that the more we play games, the more we acclimate ourselves to what is sometimes called, fancily the hermonutic of suspicion, this idea that the way I see the world is that I'm always suspicious of whatever data is presented to me. Can playing algies need to more sort of conspiratorial thinking or the other way By the way, I don't want to pre judge it. They could, I wouldn't they able to disprove that. I think that algies aren't really that popular anymore, so I don't think there's that much of a cause on link though it was quite difficult to make money from them. Now I would put it a different way. I think that when you play these games, you can feel like you can solve anything, and that's partly because the puzzles have been designed to be solved. But I do think that they can train you. They're like training wheels in the best case, for understanding how to use certain types of tools, how to organize groups online, how to share information and template information that actually can be used for good. And I do think that they are kind of kind of like hopeful games because they do you only solve them by working together, and I think that's kind of a really lovely thing. I wanted to ask you just about the broader question of the role of gaming in our society, particularly in this COVID era. You know, until COVID began. I, like a lot of parents of young kids, tried to limit the amount of time my kids who were playing games. I thought it was fine in some bound, but I didn't want it to swallow up their lives. Suddenly they were at home, they weren't able to see their friends because of social distancing. The games were one way in which they could interact with other human beings, and suddenly they seemed far superior to any activity that was not interactive. And I don't think I'm unique in having gone through this trajectory. Do you have a sense of how the gaming community more broadly, the industry in the community more broadly, are being affected by or thinking about this strange historical moment that we're in. I mean, games are booming. It's one of the few areas that's doing well in the economy, along with just TV and streaming. There is a massive amount of people playing games now. We can see that in the stats of simultaneous players of big games. Consoles at the switch are just selling out. Exercise games, interestingly in Japan are selling out extremely quickly. You know, people are saying that games are very good way of socializing. That is not just having endless zoom calls basically. You know. The other interesting thing about games, I would say is that unlike TV shows, which can be consumed in a lockdown but can't really be created and lockdown as effectively, games can be created and consumed very well in a lockdown. A lot of games companies are pretty well suited to working remotely because it's all just on our computers. You don't have actors or all things of that. And so the great of production has not really slowed down for games. And so while everyone's watching TV, there are a a lot of new TV shows coming out, but there are a lot of games coming out, and that's really a now the industry to thrive in this strange moment. Do you, yourself, in your own life, or when you're advising people whom you know, have some ideas about proper ratio of human time that should be spent on And I'm including interactive games here, I mean obviously in a lockdown, when one doesn't have the option of in person socializing, it may be better to socialize through a game than not to socialize at all. In fact, I tend to think that that's the case. But when an af we return to some capacity for social interaction. Do you have a general view on whether it's a bad thing. As a proportion of all their social interactions, the percentage that are happening mediated via games are high versus slow. You know, I think this is a really hard question to get right, because it really depends on what time window you're looking at. I think there's a temptation to go and say, well, you should spend two hours a day or one hour a day, or have a many hours of screen time a day or week or a month. I had one summer where I feel like I just played Civilization Too for about a three months straight and I didn't really do anything else. And then I had times where I don't play any games at all and I just spend all my time going out. I think it is okay to go through these phases and recognize them as phases rather than things that last for years. There are ways to combine playing online games with social interaction. I mean, you can go to conventions in some ways. Maybe the answer is to kind of push through. If you've got someone who is incredibly into World of Warcraft or the League of Legends or Fortnight, you know, you can indulge that to some extent, and you can say, hey, how about we go and meet some Fortnite players in the real world, and that is a social direction and people can make really good friends there. And so I think it's rather than saying, well, the game is wrong, it's more the way in which you experience the game is wrong or not wrong, but perhaps excessive. But the people are still people, and you can meet the people through the game, but you can also meet the people in real life, and I think that's something that is we should all be reminded of. Do you think when our various social distancings that are over, that increased game playing will continue as a trend or will it decline slightly or do you think it would return to its pre COVID levels. I think it will decline slightly. But we're at an interesting point in gaming right now, with the release of a whole bunch of new consoles and technologies which are probably going to be quite attractive to people, and there's a lot more investment going on to games. They're just going to get better and more interesting. And I know that everyone always sorts about the futual reality is coming next year, but it is coming, and it's get very good, and I think that there's already been a huge run of sales on the reality headsets. It wasn't quite there for this pandemic, but God help us if we have another pandemic of five years. But if we do have another pandemic of five years, VR is probably going to be the place where a lot of people are spending their time. And while maybe it'd be better to meet people in the real world, VR is probably second best, even before games. Adrian, I want to thank you for your time and for your really really unusual and insightful angle on this hard question. It's a great pleasure to hear your fascinating views. Thanks so much. Adrian Han's very thoughtful perspective is a reminder that although conspiracy theories are resolved as human consciousness, they evolve and develop in the light of cultural understandings and changing technology. Site into the way that alternate reality games and QAnon have something in common is valuable to me because it opens up our thinking about both topics. It opens up our thinking about what a conspiracy theory is and how conspiracy theorists are trying to understand, interpret and make sense of the world. And it also opens our perspective into how certain kinds of games, like alternate reality games, can generate meaningful community and an experience of investigation, thought and analysis. Beyond that, Adrian really got me thinking about the social experience of gaming more generally. Of course, he doesn't think that we should spend all of our time online, but he does take and advance the view that social engagement through games can be a meaningful form of interaction, especially when we're cut off from other forms of social interaction by COVID. Understanding a complex phenomenon like QAnon is not a simple thing. To really understand it, we would need to understand psychology, sociology, history, technology, and a wide range of other specialties, probably even neuroscience and religion. But trying to get one view of one part of the elephant is a valuable way to try to make sense of this phenomenon, one that, for better or for worse, probably for worse, is going to have a meaningful effect on our political lives. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Jane Cott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez and our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Clodwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feld I also have a new book out called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. I'd be delighted if you checked it out. I read a column from Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original state of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. 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