Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump seemed
Speaker 1: to be offering some support for a conspiracy theory movement
Speaker 1: called QAnon. When asked about it, Trump said that its
Speaker 1: followers quote love our country. Meanwhile, over seventy supporters of
Speaker 1: quanon have run for Congress in the cycle. One of
Speaker 1: the candidates, Marjorie Green, has won the Republican nomination and
Speaker 1: is almost certain to be elected to the House of Representatives.
Speaker 1: Here to discuss the emergence of quanon and its distinctive
Speaker 1: character with US is Adrian Han. Adrian is the founder
Speaker 1: of a London based game company called six to Start.
Speaker 1: He's been a journalist as well as a game designer,
Speaker 1: and he says that part of the way we should
Speaker 1: understand QAnon's success is to realize that in the way
Speaker 1: that it functions, it works a little bit like a game. Adrian,
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to you about a topic on
Speaker 1: which you've become i would say, a leading public intellectual,
Speaker 1: and that is a deeper understanding of what is going
Speaker 1: on in the universe of QAnon, particularly why this immersive
Speaker 1: experience of conspiracy resonates in a contemporary moment in particular,
Speaker 1: And I wonder if you would start by just saying
Speaker 1: a little bit about your interesting, creative and I think
Speaker 1: quite personally informed theory of what's going on. So I
Speaker 1: think the thing that struck me about QAnon is the
Speaker 1: way in which people describe how they discovered and how
Speaker 1: they really came to believe in it. Q obviously encapsulates
Speaker 1: so many different theories and ideas, you know, five G
Speaker 1: conspiracies or charge trafficking. But the thing that a lot
Speaker 1: of people say when they begin to believe in q
Speaker 1: and on is they say they did their research. A
Speaker 1: catchphrase that when here is a lot, I did the research,
Speaker 1: or I did my research right, and now'll tell other
Speaker 1: people you should do your research if they are skeptical
Speaker 1: about q andon. You know, I just kept seeing that
Speaker 1: again and again and again, and I think we all
Speaker 1: know what that looks like. It looks like someone typing
Speaker 1: into Google or Facebook q and on right and quanon
Speaker 1: plus charge trafficking or that sort of thing, and they
Speaker 1: get a list of results, you know, news stories perhaps
Speaker 1: or blog posts, but usually the highest racking stuff will
Speaker 1: be or has been, conspiracy theories and pretty unreliable material,
Speaker 1: and that's what passed us for research, and it reminded
Speaker 1: me of a particular type of games that I make
Speaker 1: and that has been popular in the past, called alternate
Speaker 1: reality games. And those games are unique because they are
Speaker 1: trying to make a really immersive experience for players. So
Speaker 1: unlike again like Fortnite or Candy Gross that you play
Speaker 1: on a console or a TV or a moa, alternate
Speaker 1: reality games try to tell their stories across as many
Speaker 1: media and platforms as possible, so you might get phone
Speaker 1: calls in these games, or you might meet real world actors,
Speaker 1: or you might go to websites and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: So they're trying to mimic reality or create an alternate reality.
Speaker 1: And the way in which a lot of alternate reality
Speaker 1: games start is by seeing a strange phrase or picture
Speaker 1: or signed somewhere in the real world, like in a
Speaker 1: newspaper or a movie trailer, and then you google it
Speaker 1: and the creators of that game will have seeded some
Speaker 1: web pages or some YouTube videos or similar with interesting
Speaker 1: results that lead you down this rabbit hole. And we
Speaker 1: would literally call it rabbit hole when we design these
Speaker 1: games in order to kind of drow you into this
Speaker 1: really interesting fictional world. And it really struck me to
Speaker 1: see the similarities, at least in how people ended quanon
Speaker 1: with alternate reality games, which actually quite old. Now many
Speaker 1: fascinating things here. Let's start with the phrase I did
Speaker 1: my research or do your research, and you mentioned it
Speaker 1: from most people that just involves googling. I wonder if
Speaker 1: it doesn't go it a little bit more deeply, because
Speaker 1: what you're describing in the context of the alternate reality games,
Speaker 1: when they're well built, as I'm sure yours are, is
Speaker 1: that a person who's playing the game doesn't just google,
Speaker 1: which is the beginning step, but then goes deeper and
Speaker 1: begins to search out the clues, and then the game
Speaker 1: becomes more immersive. I'm imagining as he or she goes
Speaker 1: down rabbit holes, finds more clues, and essentially builds up
Speaker 1: a universe of meaning that you've seeded for or for her. Presumably,
Speaker 1: when the QAnon people say I did my research, they
Speaker 1: don't judst me in the initial search. They mean digging
Speaker 1: down and having the experience, in scare quotes of discovering
Speaker 1: layers of meaning I mean, I think if a player
Speaker 1: is playing an alternate reality game and it goes months
Speaker 1: and months and can't find another clue, that probably won't
Speaker 1: hold the player's attention. I'm just guessing Similarly, in QAnon,
Speaker 1: the person has to be able to say, aha, I
Speaker 1: found yet another validator, I found yet another validator. Right.
Speaker 1: It needs to be sufficiently messy, but not too messy
Speaker 1: so that it just seems like it's completely constructed. And
Speaker 1: I think that people want it to reflect the complexity
Speaker 1: of reality. So you will see contradictory ideas in QAnon,
Speaker 1: and you'll see contradictory posters. And that's why often when
Speaker 1: people point out contradictions in q and on, that doesn't
Speaker 1: magically mean that people stop believing, because people kind of
Speaker 1: enjoy trying to tease out the different sort of possibilities
Speaker 1: and contradictions within the conspiracy theory. And so I think
Speaker 1: that when it comes to the experience that people have
Speaker 1: when they're research in QAnon and when they're playing alternate
Speaker 1: reality games, it's like you're a detective. It's actually quite
Speaker 1: pleasurable to go down these different fabbit holes and to
Speaker 1: see one idea here and to follow what seems like
Speaker 1: a clue and to what do YouTube video from six
Speaker 1: months ago saying well, if you look in the background
Speaker 1: of this photo here and you can see someone making
Speaker 1: this hand signal, and you might think, oh, I've seen
Speaker 1: that before in another photo, and you start to create
Speaker 1: your own connections as well as following connections that people
Speaker 1: have made for you. The obvious difference between QAnon and
Speaker 1: the Alter Reality game is that in QAnon, no one
Speaker 1: has constructed, No person, no team of designers has actually
Speaker 1: constructed the game. So when the Easter eggs are discovered,
Speaker 1: they're not discovered. They're invented or made by the active
Speaker 1: interpretation of the person who is quote unquote doing his
Speaker 1: or her research, and by the community that says, aha,
Speaker 1: you found this, and this is indeed an Easter egg.
Speaker 1: That interests me in the psychological question of design for you,
Speaker 1: when you are designing a game like this, how much
Speaker 1: validation do you give the player, the user when he
Speaker 1: or she has found one of your Easter eggs, to
Speaker 1: know you actually found an Easter egg here? And then
Speaker 1: the question from there would be how is it working
Speaker 1: for people from whom no one has done the design.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good question. So with alternate
Speaker 1: reality games, you don't want to be giving so much
Speaker 1: feedback that they feel that they're playing a video game.
Speaker 1: That's not what people play these games for. Where you
Speaker 1: get but you don't want achievement bad just appearing immediately.
Speaker 1: At the same time, if you don't give that kind
Speaker 1: of feedback eventually, then often what happens is they just
Speaker 1: get completely down the long path because they following something
Speaker 1: that seems believable and maybe is somewhat internally consistent, but
Speaker 1: is not the path that you want them to go down.
Speaker 1: So we would have we'll be having to monitor the
Speaker 1: player forums and player chat rooms all the time, which
Speaker 1: was full time twenty four seven job really to make
Speaker 1: sure they didn't get too far off track, and we
Speaker 1: would use whatever means we had available to sort of
Speaker 1: steer them correctly. And that's because they're playing these games collectively.
Speaker 1: They're playing the games collectively. That's hugely important. I think
Speaker 1: it may be lost on a lot of listeners like me,
Speaker 1: but if people are playing collectively, they're creating meaning collectively,
Speaker 1: and that might really matter for understanding how QAnon is working.
Speaker 1: That's right. Most alternate reality games take place in real
Speaker 1: time with everyone proceeding at the same rate. So it's
Speaker 1: not like a game or even a multiplayer game where
Speaker 1: you can proceed at different rates. The whole world of
Speaker 1: the alternate reality game is unfolding at the same rates
Speaker 1: for every single player. That means that if someone solves
Speaker 1: a puzzle, it is effectively solved for everyone. So you know,
Speaker 1: that means that it is a different kind of experience,
Speaker 1: and people can solve puzzles extremely quickly basically, so we
Speaker 1: have to make games and stories and puzzles that are
Speaker 1: sufficiently compact one person or ten people console them on
Speaker 1: their own. You need a community of thousands or hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands to solve them. And on the one hand,
Speaker 1: that sounds just ridiculous who would want to play such
Speaker 1: a complex game. But there is something really compelling about
Speaker 1: being part of a solving community that allows you to
Speaker 1: feel like you're working towards a bigger purpose. And even
Speaker 1: if you can't solve a particular puzzle, you can maybe
Speaker 1: contribute a small part of that. And one of the
Speaker 1: really interesting things about alternate reality games is often the
Speaker 1: players come up with better theories and ideas of how
Speaker 1: the story should proceed than we have done ourselves, and
Speaker 1: some writers might just try and ignore that and try
Speaker 1: and keep going down the same path, the same story
Speaker 1: path that you've planned out six months ago. But if
Speaker 1: you see the players getting really excited about particular development
Speaker 1: or particular prediction, what we try to do is incorporated
Speaker 1: back into the story in real time, which means that
Speaker 1: we might have to rewrite entire websites or emails, or
Speaker 1: we've record phone calls, and that is something that people
Speaker 1: find really pleasurable because it makes it feel like they
Speaker 1: are part of a living world. And I think that's
Speaker 1: something that is kind of interesting with QAnon because it's
Speaker 1: always hamping to incorporate new information about news, about politics.
Speaker 1: It's not a conspiracy theory about how Edian's built the
Speaker 1: pyramids where the facts aren't really changing. It's a real
Speaker 1: time conspiracy theory, and that requires a different kind of
Speaker 1: construction of understanding the world. Dan, I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about directions of influence and interchange. You've been I
Speaker 1: think very careful. Everything that I've read of yours has
Speaker 1: shown great care in not saying one is causing the other. Here,
Speaker 1: QAnon is caused by alter reality games or the games
Speaker 1: have contributed to QAnon. You've just pointed to similarities, and
Speaker 1: I want to push on that a little bit. One
Speaker 1: past interpretation I could imagine is that QAnon is popular
Speaker 1: in many of the ways that conspiracy theorists have always
Speaker 1: been popular, because it is a mode of interpreting the
Speaker 1: world around us, and in the end, that's what religion
Speaker 1: has always done in a way, it's what science does,
Speaker 1: that's what some kinds of philosophy do, makes an effort
Speaker 1: to create a coherent narrative out of the phenomena that
Speaker 1: we encounter every day, which taken on their own, don't
Speaker 1: intuitively seem to cohere with each other. And on that view,
Speaker 1: the reason for the similarity between your games and QAnon
Speaker 1: is that your games are also really good proxies for
Speaker 1: what it's like to interpret the world around us, So
Speaker 1: they're appealing for sort of the same reasons that quanan
Speaker 1: is appealing, but without any sense of mutual encounter or influence.
Speaker 1: The other stronger hypothesis would be that actually, there's something
Speaker 1: about our moment in time and something about the way
Speaker 1: that the use of the digital world interacts with conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory that brings a closer similarity. Then would otherwise have existed.
Speaker 1: Between these two realms, which are those views do you
Speaker 1: tend towards. I think it's definitely true that the technology
Speaker 1: that we used and the types of social interactions that
Speaker 1: we took advantage of for alternate reality games are the
Speaker 1: same that people are using in q and on the
Speaker 1: community filtering aspect of YouTube and a reddit and of
Speaker 1: four chant is so important to the spread of things
Speaker 1: like QAnon, where if you didn't have the ability for
Speaker 1: people to up vote and to promote specific attractive ideas,
Speaker 1: it would just be a complete madouse. Honestly, it would
Speaker 1: just be thousands of thousands of people talking to each
Speaker 1: other and no way to filter that. But because we
Speaker 1: have these systems which are still pretty crude, I mean,
Speaker 1: up voting is pretty crude for people to identify attractive ideas.
Speaker 1: It allows a kind of evolutionary process to occur on
Speaker 1: a far faster time scale than what have happened if
Speaker 1: you're just doing everything with paper, and I think that's
Speaker 1: something that is really underestimated. We'll be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about what you might call
Speaker 1: the regulatory impulse. You could imagine a person who is
Speaker 1: a good old fashioned, mainstream small l liberal, which I
Speaker 1: sometimes am, who says, you know, these kinds of conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: We have to allow them to sundregate our society because
Speaker 1: we believe in freedom of expression. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: we don't have to promote their spread to the point
Speaker 1: where they have a substantial, dangerous and even eventually violent
Speaker 1: effect in the world. So the regulatory impulse says, thank you,
Speaker 1: Adrian for your wonderful diagnosis. You've helped us see why
Speaker 1: this works. Let's shut it down. Let's try to block
Speaker 1: it's viral. Let's try to block groups where people are
Speaker 1: discussing it. If the problem is that everyone is saying
Speaker 1: it together, let's make it harder for them to do.
Speaker 1: So where do you come down on the what I
Speaker 1: would call the regulatory impulse, And I'm trying to be
Speaker 1: neutral in describing that impulse. So Facebook and Twitter have
Speaker 1: been making efforts to try and reduce how quickly qun
Speaker 1: on can be amplified. So if you search for q
Speaker 1: and on YouTube, it will come up a disclaimer. If
Speaker 1: you search q and on accounts on Twitter, then you
Speaker 1: can't find them. I think that's clearly going to help.
Speaker 1: At the margin, I don't really think it does anything
Speaker 1: for people who are already into Q on on and
Speaker 1: to be honest, I think that we've already started seeing
Speaker 1: these sorts of ideas spread in private message groups and
Speaker 1: WhatsApp that are harder to control. I think that we
Speaker 1: all need to have a discussion about what role we
Speaker 1: want A small number of companies due to regulate speech.
Speaker 1: Basically Facebook, Twitter, Google, and I should say just full
Speaker 1: disclosure for listeners and for you that I have advised
Speaker 1: Facebook on some of their speech related issues. So I
Speaker 1: have a stake in this too, and I agree that
Speaker 1: there ought to be a conversation. But I guess what
Speaker 1: I'm asking you is, what would you like to contribute
Speaker 1: to that conversation. I think there needs to be more
Speaker 1: public regulation now exactly what that is. I think that
Speaker 1: there should be a discussion in democracies about what kind
Speaker 1: of speech we think is acceptable and how we should
Speaker 1: promote it or not. You know, I think there are
Speaker 1: things you can do at that technological level. At the
Speaker 1: same time, this is a symptom. It's not the cause.
Speaker 1: It didn't happen because of Facebook. You know, people believe
Speaker 1: in things like q and on because they have completely
Speaker 1: lost trust in government and authorities. And so while I
Speaker 1: think that there is probably some level of public regulation
Speaker 1: that should be introduced, I suspect that the only way
Speaker 1: you really get around this is by trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how you can restore trust, not necessarily in governments,
Speaker 1: because I think the governments have demonstrated a lot of
Speaker 1: comments recently have demonstrated that they aren't really to be
Speaker 1: trusted in certain areas. But I think you need to
Speaker 1: have trust in some institutions and some people, and the
Speaker 1: way that they can establish trust is through great a
Speaker 1: degree of transparency and great a degree of involving the
Speaker 1: community in how they gather data and how they interpret data.
Speaker 1: And when I say that to be really specific, you know,
Speaker 1: I think there's some really good examples of this. One
Speaker 1: is the COVID Tracking Project in the US, which is
Speaker 1: trying to create one of the more comprehensive databases of
Speaker 1: COVID cases and cover statistics in America. And they are
Speaker 1: going to publicly available information. But importantly, you can go
Speaker 1: and look at the entire chain of where they gather
Speaker 1: the information, which websites, how they archived, at how they
Speaker 1: process it. It's all open source. You can go into
Speaker 1: the chat rooms and talk to the people. So if
Speaker 1: you think that, oh no, this particular piece of information
Speaker 1: collected from Florida is wrong, I think it's inflated. You
Speaker 1: can see the footnotes about why it's there. Now are
Speaker 1: people going to drill down that far? Most people aren't.
Speaker 1: But I think that if you're able to quickly answer
Speaker 1: questions about, oh, well, these covered figures completely fake, if
Speaker 1: you can say no, they're not fake. Oh no, we
Speaker 1: did make a mistake last week, but here's our response
Speaker 1: to that. Rather than just stonewalling or saying, well, you're
Speaker 1: my political opponent and I don't believe you, then you
Speaker 1: can establish that trust. And I think that where this
Speaker 1: wraps around alternate reality games is the process of collecting
Speaker 1: that data and interpreting that data. It's not as fun
Speaker 1: as playing an a arg but it resembles it because
Speaker 1: it is a collective effort that cannot be done by
Speaker 1: one person. It can't just be done by software. It
Speaker 1: requires humans working together, and if you get the right people,
Speaker 1: it can feel like a very fulfilling process. And that's
Speaker 1: why I think that getting everyone involved in that project
Speaker 1: is so important. Could you say more about whether there
Speaker 1: are other productive things that alternate reality games can contribute here.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you, I'll sor put my cards in
Speaker 1: the table. What the philosophical question behind it is. To me,
Speaker 1: it seems like what's appealing about those games is that
Speaker 1: you're interpreting the universe and you know that there was
Speaker 1: a designer. So you may not get the answer, but
Speaker 1: you can try to get the answer. And there is
Speaker 1: an answer out there, which is how the world looks
Speaker 1: to religious believers. And I would include in that some
Speaker 1: very dogmatic religious believers in science, but it's not how
Speaker 1: the world functions a lot of the time, on a
Speaker 1: lot of the questions we care most about, there isn't
Speaker 1: a design out there? Is there a way that playing
Speaker 1: those games makes us believe or reinforces our belief that
Speaker 1: there must be a design? And if so, is that
Speaker 1: a good thing? I mean, if we believe that there
Speaker 1: is a design, maybe we would be more inclined to
Speaker 1: trust the authorities. Or is it the other way around
Speaker 1: that the more we play games, the more we acclimate
Speaker 1: ourselves to what is sometimes called, fancily the hermonutic of suspicion,
Speaker 1: this idea that the way I see the world is
Speaker 1: that I'm always suspicious of whatever data is presented to me.
Speaker 1: Can playing algies need to more sort of conspiratorial thinking
Speaker 1: or the other way By the way, I don't want
Speaker 1: to pre judge it. They could, I wouldn't they able
Speaker 1: to disprove that. I think that algies aren't really that
Speaker 1: popular anymore, so I don't think there's that much of
Speaker 1: a cause on link though it was quite difficult to
Speaker 1: make money from them. Now I would put it a
Speaker 1: different way. I think that when you play these games,
Speaker 1: you can feel like you can solve anything, and that's
Speaker 1: partly because the puzzles have been designed to be solved.
Speaker 1: But I do think that they can train you. They're
Speaker 1: like training wheels in the best case, for understanding how
Speaker 1: to use certain types of tools, how to organize groups online,
Speaker 1: how to share information and template information that actually can
Speaker 1: be used for good. And I do think that they
Speaker 1: are kind of kind of like hopeful games because they
Speaker 1: do you only solve them by working together, and I
Speaker 1: think that's kind of a really lovely thing. I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you just about the broader question of the
Speaker 1: role of gaming in our society, particularly in this COVID era.
Speaker 1: You know, until COVID began. I, like a lot of
Speaker 1: parents of young kids, tried to limit the amount of
Speaker 1: time my kids who were playing games. I thought it
Speaker 1: was fine in some bound, but I didn't want it
Speaker 1: to swallow up their lives. Suddenly they were at home,
Speaker 1: they weren't able to see their friends because of social distancing.
Speaker 1: The games were one way in which they could interact
Speaker 1: with other human beings, and suddenly they seemed far superior
Speaker 1: to any activity that was not interactive. And I don't
Speaker 1: think I'm unique in having gone through this trajectory. Do
Speaker 1: you have a sense of how the gaming community more broadly,
Speaker 1: the industry in the community more broadly, are being affected
Speaker 1: by or thinking about this strange historical moment that we're in.
Speaker 1: I mean, games are booming. It's one of the few
Speaker 1: areas that's doing well in the economy, along with just
Speaker 1: TV and streaming. There is a massive amount of people
Speaker 1: playing games now. We can see that in the stats
Speaker 1: of simultaneous players of big games. Consoles at the switch
Speaker 1: are just selling out. Exercise games, interestingly in Japan are
Speaker 1: selling out extremely quickly. You know, people are saying that
Speaker 1: games are very good way of socializing. That is not
Speaker 1: just having endless zoom calls basically. You know. The other
Speaker 1: interesting thing about games, I would say is that unlike
Speaker 1: TV shows, which can be consumed in a lockdown but
Speaker 1: can't really be created and lockdown as effectively, games can
Speaker 1: be created and consumed very well in a lockdown. A
Speaker 1: lot of games companies are pretty well suited to working
Speaker 1: remotely because it's all just on our computers. You don't
Speaker 1: have actors or all things of that. And so the
Speaker 1: great of production has not really slowed down for games.
Speaker 1: And so while everyone's watching TV, there are a a lot
Speaker 1: of new TV shows coming out, but there are a
Speaker 1: lot of games coming out, and that's really a now
Speaker 1: the industry to thrive in this strange moment. Do you, yourself,
Speaker 1: in your own life, or when you're advising people whom
Speaker 1: you know, have some ideas about proper ratio of human
Speaker 1: time that should be spent on And I'm including interactive
Speaker 1: games here, I mean obviously in a lockdown, when one
Speaker 1: doesn't have the option of in person socializing, it may
Speaker 1: be better to socialize through a game than not to
Speaker 1: socialize at all. In fact, I tend to think that
Speaker 1: that's the case. But when an af we return to
Speaker 1: some capacity for social interaction. Do you have a general
Speaker 1: view on whether it's a bad thing. As a proportion
Speaker 1: of all their social interactions, the percentage that are happening
Speaker 1: mediated via games are high versus slow. You know, I
Speaker 1: think this is a really hard question to get right,
Speaker 1: because it really depends on what time window you're looking at.
Speaker 1: I think there's a temptation to go and say, well,
Speaker 1: you should spend two hours a day or one hour
Speaker 1: a day, or have a many hours of screen time
Speaker 1: a day or week or a month. I had one
Speaker 1: summer where I feel like I just played Civilization Too
Speaker 1: for about a three months straight and I didn't really
Speaker 1: do anything else. And then I had times where I
Speaker 1: don't play any games at all and I just spend
Speaker 1: all my time going out. I think it is okay
Speaker 1: to go through these phases and recognize them as phases
Speaker 1: rather than things that last for years. There are ways
Speaker 1: to combine playing online games with social interaction. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can go to conventions in some ways. Maybe the
Speaker 1: answer is to kind of push through. If you've got
Speaker 1: someone who is incredibly into World of Warcraft or the
Speaker 1: League of Legends or Fortnight, you know, you can indulge
Speaker 1: that to some extent, and you can say, hey, how
Speaker 1: about we go and meet some Fortnite players in the
Speaker 1: real world, and that is a social direction and people
Speaker 1: can make really good friends there. And so I think
Speaker 1: it's rather than saying, well, the game is wrong, it's
Speaker 1: more the way in which you experience the game is
Speaker 1: wrong or not wrong, but perhaps excessive. But the people
Speaker 1: are still people, and you can meet the people through
Speaker 1: the game, but you can also meet the people in
Speaker 1: real life, and I think that's something that is we
Speaker 1: should all be reminded of. Do you think when our
Speaker 1: various social distancings that are over, that increased game playing
Speaker 1: will continue as a trend or will it decline slightly
Speaker 1: or do you think it would return to its pre
Speaker 1: COVID levels. I think it will decline slightly. But we're
Speaker 1: at an interesting point in gaming right now, with the
Speaker 1: release of a whole bunch of new consoles and technologies
Speaker 1: which are probably going to be quite attractive to people,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot more investment going on to games.
Speaker 1: They're just going to get better and more interesting. And
Speaker 1: I know that everyone always sorts about the futual reality
Speaker 1: is coming next year, but it is coming, and it's
Speaker 1: get very good, and I think that there's already been
Speaker 1: a huge run of sales on the reality headsets. It
Speaker 1: wasn't quite there for this pandemic, but God help us
Speaker 1: if we have another pandemic of five years. But if
Speaker 1: we do have another pandemic of five years, VR is
Speaker 1: probably going to be the place where a lot of
Speaker 1: people are spending their time. And while maybe it'd be
Speaker 1: better to meet people in the real world, VR is
Speaker 1: probably second best, even before games. Adrian, I want to
Speaker 1: thank you for your time and for your really really
Speaker 1: unusual and insightful angle on this hard question. It's a
Speaker 1: great pleasure to hear your fascinating views. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: Adrian Han's very thoughtful perspective is a reminder that although
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories are resolved as human consciousness, they evolve and
Speaker 1: develop in the light of cultural understandings and changing technology.
Speaker 1: Site into the way that alternate reality games and QAnon
Speaker 1: have something in common is valuable to me because it
Speaker 1: opens up our thinking about both topics. It opens up
Speaker 1: our thinking about what a conspiracy theory is and how
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorists are trying to understand, interpret and make sense
Speaker 1: of the world. And it also opens our perspective into
Speaker 1: how certain kinds of games, like alternate reality games, can
Speaker 1: generate meaningful community and an experience of investigation, thought and analysis.
Speaker 1: Beyond that, Adrian really got me thinking about the social
Speaker 1: experience of gaming more generally. Of course, he doesn't think
Speaker 1: that we should spend all of our time online, but
Speaker 1: he does take and advance the view that social engagement
Speaker 1: through games can be a meaningful form of interaction, especially
Speaker 1: when we're cut off from other forms of social interaction
Speaker 1: by COVID. Understanding a complex phenomenon like QAnon is not
Speaker 1: a simple thing. To really understand it, we would need
Speaker 1: to understand psychology, sociology, history, technology, and a wide range
Speaker 1: of other specialties, probably even neuroscience and religion. But trying
Speaker 1: to get one view of one part of the elephant
Speaker 1: is a valuable way to try to make sense of
Speaker 1: this phenomenon, one that, for better or for worse, probably
Speaker 1: for worse, is going to have a meaningful effect on
Speaker 1: our political lives. Until the next time I speak to you,
Speaker 1: be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is
Speaker 1: brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia
Speaker 1: Jane Cott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez and our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Sophie mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Gara. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Clodwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. You can find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Noah R. Feld I also have a new book out
Speaker 1: called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. I'd be delighted if
Speaker 1: you checked it out. I read a column from Bloomberg Opinion,
Speaker 1: which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman.
Speaker 1: To discover Bloomberg's original state of podcasts, go to Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com slash podcasts and if you like what you
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Speaker 1: This is deep background