QAnon Is a Game: Misunderstanding the Radical Moment
As I was preparing to responsibly celebrate New Year 2021 by binging Real Housewives of New Jersey with my wife — no judgments, please — I saw an interesting tweet by Mark Pincus, Co-Founder of Zynga Games. He let me know that, after 11 years, Facebook was shutting down the rabidly successful FarmVille. Now I had never played FarmVille, though one of my favorite things to get angry about in the late ’00s was other people telling me about playing FarmVille. Still, this doesn’t stop me from appreciating its success. “The real innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible to busy adults, giving them a place to express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative,” Pincus wrote. The numbers are hard to argue with at over 20M active users in 2008, and a slew of product innovations that are commonplace today. Love or hate it , the game has been enormously successful.
As a former media producer who spends most of his time with entrepreneurs today, I easily forget that most adults in the world don’t get many opportunities to be creative. They don’t have the time, often lack the skills, and certainly don’t have an audience. The underreported factor of social media’s explosion was not simply that you could connect with others, but that you could augment your own identity. A working mother in Georgia isn’t likely to learn the guitar or watercolors, but creating a Pinterest board or even curating a great song list on Spotify is a way to peacock a little bit. Early social games spoke to an underlying drive to express oneself without making it a thing, or risking mockery or critique. You could show off your organized soybean fields and irrigation system, your niece in Arizona threw you a little acknowledgement…mission accomplished. If only that was where it stopped…
At CASEWORX, we think a lot about how media is mutating. I’ve been tracking the QAnon phenomenon since 2018, so when I saw the U.S. Capitol being stormed, I immediately began looking for the Q flags. For the uninitiated, QAnon is a sprawling, conspiratorial movement begun in October 2017 on the infamous 4chan meme site. The very TL/DR version is that Donald Trump is leading a battle against various globalists, Democrats, and liberals for the soul of the world. Folks like Hillary Clinton and George Soros run underground pedophile rings where they drink the blood of children and try to keep patriots like Trump from exposing their evil deeds. QAnon is too unwieldy to explain in full — if you must see a full breakdown, this is a good place to start — but the pandemic, the election, and the social justice protests of 2020 were like lighter fluid on smoking embers. It is now a real-time conspiracy engine, absorbing Trump’s election loss, his recent neutering on social media, the Capitol siege, and new pandemic information while spitting out extensions of the ever-growing story almost simultaneously.
We study “story” as a tool to do things, and QAnon has managed to meld entirely disparate groups like Evangelicals, suburban moms, gamers, veterans, wellness influencers, and others into a lurching organism. And it has accomplished this with a narrative that constantly folds back on itself, sheds parts of its backstory at will, carries obvious contradictions, and is entirely logic-proof. That’s written not in critique but in awe, because even complex or fantastical stories tend to rely on internal coherence, of respect for the “rules of the world.” QAnon has succeeded in spite of not caring about these rules one whit.
But I think the conventional wisdom on QAnon is wrong. An august publication like The Atlantic agrees with what I see to be the consensus view, that QAnon is decidedly religious or cult-like, like a digital Scientology or a Heaven’s Gate for Nazis. “To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.” And for sure, the parallels are obvious. The movement bubbles on about good vs. evil, battles for the soul, there are prophetic scriptures (“Q drops”), objects of purity and innocence (trafficked children), a fanatical devotion to the anonymous “Q,” and threats of Revelations-style justice against the cosmopolitan elite and deep staters. There is a very Old Testament feel to the language, sprinkled with hashtags for efficient viral transmission, and it can feel very much like one of the many paranoid off-shoots of Christianity.
But I think categorizing QAnon in religious terms is a mistake, and this mistake is important because the movement is dangerous, as we’ve seen. More than anything, QAnon is mimicking the behaviors of an artform that’s just a few decades old, and that artform gives you some indication of where it will go and how to counter it.
QAnon is a Augmented Reality Game.¹
APOPHENIA & POSTMODERNISM
I’m not the first to argue this, and others have gone into great detail on why the movement behaves like an ARG, down to the game mechanics that make it so addicting to people. But there are two “innovations” in QAnon that make it more dangerous than others. The first is what you could call “weaponized apophenia.” As game designer Reed Berkowitz eloquently lays out, apophenia — or the human tendency to perceive connections between random things and ideas — is a major irritant to game makers. An innocently placed arrow on a mystery tour can have people literally ready to rip up the floorboards in pursuit of a non-existent clue. The human brain craves to make sense through connection — it is an evolutionary holdover — and once that happens, it’s incredibly hard to decouple the joined items. QAnon willfully, joyfully, cynically encourages this. It is the game’s engine.
“Look at the words that Trump capitalized in this tweet…” one “Q drop” might point out. “See how Pelosi is standing under the number 3?” another will say. The QAnon information drip is always cryptic, constantly colliding things together as if they are of great import. Whereas a regular game maker works to scrub out design that would foster false connections, it is the entire point of QAnon. It is a breadcrumb trail away from reality, not toward a deeper, hidden truth.
The second, more important innovation is less about the game, and more about its players: the conspiratorial far right in America has fallen in love with postmodernism. A philosophy that sprung from the left in the 20th century, undergirding current concepts like Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, has found traction in growing corners of conservatism. Postmodernism attacks the Enlightenment-era, universalist ideas which conservatives hold dear: objective reality, morality, social progress, meritocracy. In a postmodernist framework, power, perspective, and identity are the prime lenses, and arguments for objective realities and ethics are attempts to maintain leverage over subjugated classes like women and minorities. Now, I have no interest here in debating postmodernism, and I do not believe that QAnon followers are carrying their favorite Derrida and Foucault tomes around with them. But what is beyond debate is that conservatives have historically HATED this movement, and many still do today. While this antagonism has remained across conservative elite layers of society, however, something below has definitely shifted…
Start with a murderous attack in broad daylight against symbols of American exceptionalism. Mix with a bumbling, disastrous war against the wrong country. Add two (and a half) economic collapses, the deceleration of religion, major strides for LGBT folks, amplified voices and representation for minorities and women across all media, and the blending of gender roles and responsibilities. Stir until it’s clear that it’s just not as advantageous to be a white, Christian male American as it once was (or to benefit next to someone who was). Garnish with a once-in-a-century pandemic that isolates people so that the internet is the one reliable way to the outside world. That dish is served to millions of people, anxious and resentful about their place in the world, and many of them are ready to abandon the “principled” worldviews of their fathers and grandfathers.
This is your game, and these are your players. The average QAnon enthusiast is on a spectrum, sitting between Patrick Wyman’s “Bro Culture” and Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies. Overwhelmingly male, skewed white. Consuming more and more online content through mobile devices, and supported by a thriving merch ecosystem (there’s a reason some are called “paytriots”). They simply have no allegiance to old left/right debates around taxes or foreign policy or other last-millennium conflicts. They’re either not traditionally religious, anti-religion, or fascinated with older faiths like paganism or Norse mythology.² They’ve receded from the local communal institutions of yesteryear — the Elk Lodge and the guy’s fishing trip off The Keys — to focus on tactical readiness, physical fitness, self-referential online communities, gaming, or lone samurai codes. They’ve lost faith in meritocracy, because the Deep State is always pulling the strings. They’re not having successful, stable romantic relationships, and finding mates (even before COVID) is highly troublesome. They do not believe they will do better than their fathers. So in this world, what is the point of trying? Why not just make memes, shock the conscience, focus on the gainz, antagonize for the sake of it? What does it matter?
It’s this creeping nihilism, victimhood, and cynicism in traditional America that undercuts the idea that this is some new religion or cult. Impacts aside, religions emerge to help people make sense of the world. The cynical beauty of QAnon is that the game designers are not interested in helping people grapple with anything! In fact, the more it veers away from reality and common sense, the more our biology will work overtime to make up the chasm.³ And that’s because the upside is so alluring: the average player — feeling disenfranchised and victimized by forces larger than himself — can be part of a small group of truth-keepers on the inside. No facts or evidence can ever pierce this intoxicating feeling of self-agency. The actual game pieces, from Robert Mueller to Mike Pence to even Donald Trump, can and will be thrown overboard when they no longer serve the goal of pursuing this high. And best of all: you can never lose. The “storm” is always on the horizon, always coming to provide the last laugh. It’s a world where you never have to admit defeat. And it makes people write articles like this one, trying to figure it all out. That, my friends, is a game if I’ve ever heard one.
Which is all well and good, but people are dead now. And QAnon was a major accelerant in the conflict. Having (hopefully) made the case that it’s best to think about the movement as a game, next month we’ll talk about what to do, and how some of the steps we would have to take may be in direct conflict with some of our core principles as a society. Fun!
¹ As I hope will become clear throughout the piece, though QAnon behaves like a game, that does not diminish the danger. There are numerous heartbreaking stories of losing people to this movement, and we’re seeing how easily experiential gameplay can lead to actual violence (as opposed to, say, rampaging in Grand Theft Auto). Moreover, even though there were many LARPers and chaos tourists at the January 6 attack, it’s becoming clear in the aftermath that there was a motivated, very dangerous group of far-right insurgents among the fray. That has to be treated in its own light.
² Another important distinction between QAnon and religious movements is its near fetishization of “facts” and “evidence.” “Do your own research,” is a common matra. The language is quasi-militaristic, authoritative, rigid, consumed with incontrovertible proof (which is very ironic, given how bananas Q-drops can be). But unlike major religions, which have struggled for centuries about the gulf between faith and facts, QAnon adherents almost have a disdain for faith, and take pride in the reality-based world they purport to live in.
³ This phenomenon of doubling down in the face of being wrong is a natural emotional defense mechanism, and is a heightened feature in folks who might politely be called “overly persuadable.” My favorite example of this is how Nigerian “419” scammers intentionally spell emails poorly, so that only the most gullible will respond, thereby upping the scammers’ chances of success!
Justin Wolske runs CASEWORX, and is a Co-Founder of GRID110. He likes to play Call of Duty, but is very, very bad at it.
