Joseph Matheny's Blog, page 16

The Red Pages Podcast: Episode 154: Chatting with Joseph Matheny

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https://archive.org/download/rpp-20-09-29/RPP20-09-29.mp3

Justin sits down to talk with ARG pioneer Joseph Matheny about politics, conspiracy theories, games and the future of America.

Haps Discussed: Independent art production, marginal voices in marginal spaces, propaganda, misinformation, QAnon, social media, owning your data, Rockefeller Republicans

Books Discussed: Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski

Games Discussed: Ong’s Hat, Majestic, Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Myst

Links

Paralax Views Podcast episode Adrian Hon: What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon Conspirituality Podcast

This is not a game.

By Tom Dove

Link to the entire article: https://medium.com/@illexical/this-is-not-a-game-44142be5ff2c

Ong’s Hat.

A funny little name. A name on a map of a town that can’t be found.

Emerging on the nascent public internet at some indeterminate point in the late nineties, Ong’s Hat was the prototype for what would become a genre of participatory literature called the alternate reality game, or ARG. An ARG is part adventure story, part puzzle, part esoteric mystery, part scavenger hunt, part online community, all quite weird. They are mostly played on public forums, to capture the widest audience, but their content often spans multiple platforms, and typically multiple media. There have been many thousands of ARGs now, tiny and massive, but one of them was first, and it was wilder than the rest.

Ong’s Hat was by turns surreal, goofy, cosmic, and sinister, drawing heavily on classic counterculture and conspiracy theory lore. In the very early days of the worldwide web, it was doing something in a dispersed form that Mark Z. Danielewski would shortly be hailed as a postmodern genius for doing in the novel House of Leaves: playing adeptly with our ideas about how and why we find things to be true. What makes us believe a thing is real? The course of the game, its story, exists only in inaccurate second-hand reports and archived materials stripped of context now. By accident or by design, all the original online content has long since subsided into the digital sands, but the ghost of Ong’s Hat haunts us still.

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None of this is Real: Episode 79- Internet Mysteries: Ong’s Hat and Cicada 3301

This week we’re talking about one of the very first internet mysteries, and a complicated puzzle still waiting to be solved.

Show Link: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/none-of-this-is-real

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Small Town Secrets: Celebration, FL/ Ong’s Hat, NJ

Ong’s Hat WAS a place set deep in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.  The 17th-century town was more of an outpost with just a few buildings.  It was known as a rowdy place.  The town got its name from a man named Jacob Ong who after a fight with a woman threw his beloved hat up in the air.  It become stuck in a tree and he never retrieved it.  But Ong’s Hat may have served a different purpose in more modern times, it may have been a place where fringe scientists and cultist gathered to travel into other dimensions.

Link to Show Page: https://shows.acast.com/small-town-secrets/episodes/celebration-fl-ongs-hat-nj

https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/5c5da99a215eac406099a9c4/e/5f40d3738be9370aed0d4cc3/media.mp3

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Ong’s Hat back in the Weekly World News

Nod to David Metcalfe for alerting me to this.

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LINK: https://www.facebook.com/weeklyworldnews/photos/a.164051496982/10158840304436983/

Episode 169: An Egg In These Trying Times

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New Jersey is quite a strange place in America. Especially in the Pine Flats area where a nuclear spill nearby a place known as Ong’s Hat. This is probably the most egg heavy episode you will ever get. Prepare for intense science theory and a surprise ending with this episode.

Episode 169: An Egg In These Trying Times

LINK: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cults-cryptids-and-conspiracies/e/76951755?autoplay=true

Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Authoring Reality with Joseph Matheny

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https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/download/ubmcq5/Episode_51_-_Joseph_Matheny9vcj1.mp3

 

LINK TO SHOW: http://sittingnow.co.uk/episode-51-authoring-reality-with-joseph-matheny/
This week Ken sits down with our old buddy Joseph Matheny.

Joe is an innovator in the ARG space and is well known for his Ong’s Hat mythology, he also used to rub shoulders with some pretty impressive people, including Robert Anton Wilson and Christopher Hyatt.

This week we discuss: Conspiracy theory, ARG, that flu thing going around, and much more.

Main theme by Simon Smerdon (Mothboy)

Music bed by chriszabriskie.com

Joseph Matheny’s bio:

Some of the things I have achieved as an inventor, creator, product manager, CEO, CTO, writer, and artist include: Playing a role in establishing and evangelizing standards and practices such as PDF, DVD,  Podcasting, ARG and digital video. I am an inventor. I have designed apps for iPhone, iPad and other mobile platforms. I am a published author of screenplays, white papers, technology, sci-fi, marketing and gaming books.

My pioneering work in Transmedia is chronicled in the University level textbook: Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat – University Press of Mississippi (May 17, 2011) Also see here. My transmedia work, Ong’s Hat, is known throughout the gaming industry and academia as the first, proto-ARG. (Alternate Reality Game)I have also been the executive producer and originator of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival Podcast the first film festival to podcast from the event and the executive producer/director of the Los Angles Film Festival podcast. I  was also the podcast editor at .

I was one of the two founders/curators of the Greylodge Podcasting Company, an Independent film review site covered on MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, Boing-Boing, Dangerous Minds and Torrentfreak as well as a founder of Piltolite/Hukilau.

I have staged and orchestrated very successful, large-scale, mass media Alternate Reality Game/Transmedia style projects since the mid-80s, utilizing print, phone, fax, email, Internet, advertising, video, film, audio, CD ROM, DVD, and on-demand media. My work has been featured on CBS Marketwatch, CNN, CNET TV, Kiplinger’s, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NHK, MTV, PBS, LA Times, Clear Channel Radio, BBC, MSNBC,  Boing-Boing, and many other weekly newspapers, trade magazines, local and regional radio, television and newspapers.

My work was profiled in Games(TM) magazine, as well as Slate and Gizmodo. If you want to know “what it is“, these are probably the best profiles to date.

The Incunabula Papers CDROM was recently included by invitation in the BNF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) digital art collection.

 

Ghosts-n-Heauxs: Hellhole a Go-Go

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Episode Info

Welcome back y’all! In this episode the gals cover the very haunted Houska Castle and New Jersey’s incredibly spooky Ong’s Hat.

Also, special announcement from us & Balefire Apothecary AND shout out to listener and friend of the show, TonyBony, for creating our amazing new intro

Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ghostsnheauxs/e/76528395?autoplay=true

This Is Not a Game

Conspiracy theorizing as alternate-reality game
From Pizzagate Neon (2017) by Warren Neidich. Neon glass sculpture, installation view. Photography by Karolina Sobel. Courtesy Priska Pasquer, Cologne.

“Many quotes from a long and enjoyable conversation I had with the author made it into this article. I hope you find it as enlightening and thought-provoking as I did.”  -JM

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT: https://reallifemag.com/this-is-not-a-game/

The alternate reality game began in the late 1980s, when multidisciplinary artist Joseph Matheny pioneered the format with Ong’s Hat, a transmedia narrative about an interdimensional cult run by Princeton scientists at an ashram in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Drawing on real people and places, Matheny crafted a series of documents as supposed evidence for the cult’s existence. He seeded them to the public through snail mail, posts on early internet bulletin boards (some of which can still be seen at alt.conspiracy and alt.illuminati), and Xerox copies planted inside independent weeklies and esoteric literature at libraries, book stores, and coffee shops. Over the course of a decade, the story’s media range grew to include CD-ROMs, books, video, and radio, including some interviews on the popular paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM, which exposed Ong’s Hat to a wider audience of conspiracy enthusiasts.

Ong’s Hat was a unique hybrid of speculative history and speculative autobiography that participants could co-author by joining the investigation online. It was meant to be defamiliarizing and immersive; Matheny envisioned Ong’s Hat as a playground for experiencing synchronicities and then comparing them with other players’ — an exercise in intersubjectivity. But immersive storytelling and the intersubjectivity it constitutes can have a dark side, wherein communities can form around shared delusions that take on a momentum of their own. To Matheny’s surprise, some participants confused his fictional narrative with an actual conspiracy. When he broke character to remind them it was just a game, these true believers accused Matheny of being part of a disinformation campaign or running a mind-control experiment. He lost final say over the universe he invented.

Engaging in conspiracy culture is like playing a secret game based on insider knowledge, and it is this feeling that propels Q’s current popularity

When I spoke to Matheny, he partly attributed this reaction to the Coast to Coast segments attracting conspiracy-minded participants, to those who used Ong’s Hat to fulfill their X-Files-inspired “I want to believe” aspirations, and to proto-trolls looking for a pot to stir. Eventually these elements escalated their participation in Ong’s Hat to harassment, threats, and attempted home invasions, and Matheny was forced to discontinue the project in 2001. The term ARG, he says, began to be used on conspiracy and trolling forums around this time as a euphemism for gamified harassment campaigns. Matheny told me that he has since seen hardcore Ong’s Hat believers resurface in other conspiracy movements, including Weinergate, Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon, and the coronavirus cluster of 5G, vaccine, and quarantine paranoia. To Matheny, the 20th century U.S. tradition of conspiracy theories was “great folklore, great Americana,” to be taken figuratively. But he perceived this rightward and more serious turn in conspiracy circles at the turn of the century, with a crescendo in 2014, the year that some of his formerly left-leaning friends came out as neo-reactionary monarchists.

Matheny now refers to Pizzagate and QAnon as “dark ARGs,” signaling their family resemblance. “There was a bonding that happened, and probably a cooptation of troll culture into conspiracy circles,” he says. “This converged with fundamentalist people who were also doomsday preppers, and they had all adopted trolling behaviors, speaking in bad faith, giving circular arguments. All these weird subcultures have come together. How it happened was gradual. There wasn’t a puppeteer, but there are definitely people who took advantage of it. Breitbart, Bannon, Spencer.” This convergence of fundamentalism and trolling in conspiracy culture proved to be a toxic brew, facilitating zealous delusion and selective insincerity simultaneously. “The irony helps these people sidestep criticism,” Matheny says. “‘I’m just kidding, I’m just trolling.’ So I shouldn’t take anything you say seriously? Then they react with anger. And now there are movements being crafted to take advantage of this.” Irony serves as a gateway to belief as well as a source of plausible deniability, the same dynamic that can lead anti-PC trolls to become actual neo-Nazis. As George Orwell put it, “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT: https://reallifemag.com/this-is-not-a-game/

The Strange Story of Ong’s Hat

An audio story told by Mark Moran with sound collage by Clay Pigeon. One of a series of Waking Weird episodes which can be heard broadcast live every Monday at 8:39 am (EST) at WFMU FM and WFMU.org. Hear the program archives at www.wfmu.org/playlists/WA.

The New Jersey Pine Barrens have a plethora of deserted villages, most of them simply abandoned decades, even centuries ago. One of the most infamous of these is Ongs Hat, which some believe to be a mysterious portal to another dimension. Continue reading → weirdnj.com/stories/ongs-hat/

Weird NJ · The Strange Story of Ong’s Hat