Joseph Matheny's Blog, page 17

Bots and Beer 2×07: A Short History of Alternate Reality Games

[image error] Header photo of Ong’s Hat Road by Michael Szul.

Even today, the origins of Ong’s Hat—although laid out on paper and in academic textbooks—is still vague. Was it based on a previous work? Who were all the players involved and what did they hope to gain from this experiment? The “game” as it is, is at an end, but the legend continues to live on like any good mythology. In many ways, like Slenderman, Ong’s Hat is a creation of the Internet that continues to have a “reality” online even if the real world has since understood it’s fiction. It’s become a golem of words, places, and ideas that continues to trap the curious, and for those that exist and explore the virtual world, it’s as real as any historical event for it is an actual piece of Internet history, showing us how the communication of ideas can virally propel the behavior of individuals across distances far greater than any folklore could imagine.

What Ong’s Hat shows us is how technology can change and propel narratives regardless of facts. Even as Ong’s Hat was shown to be a “story” in the traditional sense, many refused to believe that it wasn’t based on true occurrences. When I reflect on our current landscape filled with false memes and post-fact Facebook posts, and I look to a future of artificial intelligence-generated deep fakes, understanding how and why narratives behavior in this way is paramount to understanding how the future of media, disinformation, and politics is going to play out.

Read the entire article at: https://botsandbeer.com/issues/2×07-a-short-history-of-alternate-reality-games.html

Randocast: Joseph Matheny and David Metcalfe

Transmedia pioneer Joseph Matheny and Consciousness writer David Metcalfe join us to talk about Ongs hat, lucid dreaming, and more

Link to Randocast

If you’re not familiar with Randonauting I highly recommend you try it out.

Subreddit

Randonauts.com

Alternate Reality Games | Ong’s Hat | Know Your Meme

Precursor: Ong’s Hat

In the 1980s transmedia artist Joseph Matheny[2] launched the Ong’s Hat game, inspired by play-by-mail multiplayer games run by Flying Buffalo.[3] Though Ong’s Hat may not have set out to be an ARG, the methods by which the author interacted with participants and used different platforms to build and spread its legend has been reflected in later games.[4] Also known as The Incunabula Papers, the game incorporated the practice of “legend tripping”[6] in which a group of people visit sites known in folklore for horrific or supernatural events. Matheny built a mythos around a supposed ghost town in New Jersey throughout the 1980s through works disguised as research shared on bulletin boards and physical zines.[8] One of the earliest archived theories about the alleged legend appeared in the October 1993 issue of Boing Boing and was posted online as early as February 11th, 1994.[7]

Between 1994 and 2000, posts about Ong’s Hat were planted on a number of different Usenet groups to spark discussion, including sci.math[9], alt.illuminati[10], alt.conspiracy[11] and alt.society.paradigms[12], among others. In 2001, Matheny stopped the project[13] and went on to publish two books about it, as well as archiving all the materials on the Incunabula website.[5]

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/alternate-reality-games

The Surprising Online Life of Legends – Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat

A very interesting article/review of Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Now, from the you-can-learn-something-new-every-day files, comes Michael Kinsella’s Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat.

Read it here: http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/the-surprising-online-life-of-legends/29221

From the article:

“The response of Joseph Matheny to Legend-Tripping Online suggests the success of Kinsella’s read on the Incunabula Papers. On his Web site, Matheny wrote that Kinsella “did an excellent job and only missed the mark with two or three of his conclusions,” which Matheny said he would clear up by writing a complimentary account.

In the context of the Incunabula Papers and Ong’s Hat, something about that statement echoes beguilingly. Is Matheny offering to perpetuate the project, despite closing it down?

Or perhaps he never did shutter it. In 2001, his announcement of the termination of the project said that he and a colleague “decided today to publicly announce in the near future that the Ong’s Hat Project has now concluded.” Not only do the tenses in his statement appear slippery, but he also tantalizingly mused that he did think the Incunabula Papers “would still make a good book from a cultural anthropology perspective.”

Is Kinsella’s Legend-Tripping Online not only that book but also, unwittingly, another phase in the whole, crazy Incunabula Papers caper?

Kinsella allows: “When you’re dealing with this…this thing, there are trickster qualities and pranks and hoaxes, and fact and fiction are so blurred that it’s really hard to make sense out of it.”

Also see this review from the Journal of Folklore Research

Conspiracy Theory and Chill: The Story Of Ong’s Hat

Welcome back to CT&C, on this episode we are going to look into a very fascinating conspiracy theory that originates from a tiny village with the odd name of Ong’s Hat in New Jersey where some say that a duo of rogue scientists who were living off-grid in a small commune created a portal to another dimension that still exists there hidden today

A conspiracy thread: Brave New World Order

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Because I’m posting this on Halloween, I thought I‘d try to stick to the theme of trickery. However, I’m not going to be talking about deceptive demons or satanic rituals. It gets old. I think the subject I have in mind is much better than that. So let’s just jump right into it. – Nick Hinton

LINK: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189985756271521792.html

And one last question for you: What’s your favorite conspiracy theory?

In a recent interview about his film, Cold Case Hammarskjold director Mads Brugger is asked the question: What’s your favorite conspiracy theory? His reply?

My all-time favorite conspiracy theory? That is really what you would call a boutique conspiracy theory. It’s a theory about — it’s called Ong’s Hat — about a community not far from New York in a forest area named Ong’s Hat and these [people] began experimenting with and developing time travel technology. You should Google it. It’s a fun conspiracy theory. Not to be taken seriously, of course, it’s a fun example of what you would call a left-wing conspiracy theory. I like the title — “Ong’s Hat” — it’s a fun title.

Thanks, Mads. We think you’re pretty neat too.

Episode 160 – A Seedless Sandwich (Ong’s Hat)

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Welcome back to It Gets Weird! In this episode, Nile and Kyle discuss a mystery that’s been kicking around since the late 1980s: the secret of Ong’s Hat, New Jersey. What even IS Ong’s Hat? A charcuterie? Ye Olde Hat Shoppe? Ah, wait, says here in our notes it’s a town. Turns out some shamans and mystics and chaos scientists got together to conduct some pretty zany experiments, things like transporting a bunch of people to an alternate dimension. Join us on this bizarre inter-dimensional tale!

http://traffic.libsyn.com/itgetsweird/Episode_160_-_A_Seedless_Sandwich.mp3

LINK: http://itgetsweird.libsyn.com/episode-160-a-seedless-sandwich-ongs-hat

The Goldilocks Curve – Umberto Tosi

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From an article about the inception of digital publishing. Link to full article here: https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-goldilocks-curve-umberto-tosi.html

“The creative energy of Mightywords’ self-publishers exceeded the technological innovation of the enterprise. Some of it raised eyebrows among those looking for profit curves, not necessarily cultural ones, and had envisioned MightyWords as more of a business-to-business enterprise than a retail portal — B2B being Wall Streets flavor-of-the-month at the time. (Remember, this was just prior to the current era of social media whose business model thrived on clicks and user-supplied content.

I’d give author game-creator Joseph Matheny first prize for sweepingly imaginative use of the medium to play with an entirely new literary form beyond what we concieved — or, at first, knew what to make of. To this day, Matheny declines to state whether he intended his novel-length work (Ong’s Hat: The Beginning, first offered for sale in as a book form through Mightywords), as fiction or nonfiction. Its narrative structure allows it to be enjoyed as a speculative fiction. Through hyperlinks that invite readers to various online sites in which they can interact with content, it also invites readers on an immerrsive, interactive adventure. Internet scholars and critics tag it as the first of many Alternate Reality Games (ARG), a transmedia form that has evolved in complexity and popularity over the past twenty years since Ong’s Hat was first released. (This interactivity was a stretch given the limitations of supporting digital platforms at the time – but nevertheless clearly and breathtakingly feasible in terms of its promise.)

The author spun his tale around a nontoxic, benign (Remember those?) conspiracy theory that had been floating around chat-rooms for years. The conspiracy stories purported that the real ghost town of Ong’s Hat, New Jersey, had been the site of secret experiments by rogue scientists from the underground “Institute of Chaos” who opened an interdimensional portal – using a machine dubbed “The Egg” – through which of the town’s former resident’s had disappeared. This led to a loosely structured, Internet game in which participants traded information about sighting of Ong’s Hat evidence and former residents.

Matheny’s work expanded on this plot twist. It follows characters who had used the portal to escape the town after a deadly, toxic spill from a nearby chemical factory. Instead of using roads, the characters travel inter-dimensionally. Readers are invited to use hyperlinks to track the characters’ appearances in verious other locals, as well as report their own sightings, adding to the narrative. The work remains available through Matheny’s website and other venues, including Amazon.

Regrettably, unlike the myths of Ong’s Hat, Mightywords proved ephemeral. One minute it was poised for an ISP that would made even staffers like myself who had been given founders’ stock incredibly rich overnight. The next minute it fell burning like Icarus from the Silicon Valley sun. The high tech bubble burst in 2001, taking lots of startups with it. Our backers pulled away and pressured MacAskill to close down and sell the tecchnology – sans its creative content, which was owned after all by the authors. Barnes & Noble, which had also invested in the venture, stepped forward and took away what was left of both Fatbrain and Mightywords. Ironically, this could have given B&N a competitive advantage over the then still fledgling Amazon. But B&N remained wedded to its brick-and-mortar, trad-publishing business model and let Jeff Bezos eat its lunch, as we all know now.”

Later

“One can be too far ahead of the curve. Timing is everything when it comes to technological innovation. Your new idea has to appeal to Goldilocks and be neither too hot and nor too cold. It might be different for creative ideas like Matheny’s opus. Often the greatest ideas show up in the early days of a form — like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which remains unchallenged as the first major Western European novel and still among its greatest. Maybe if I had read Matheny’s instructions carefully enough, I could have found that interdimensional egg machine back to the some alternative future where things would have worked out differently.

There is a parallel between the mythical interdimensional disappearence of Ong’s Hat, New Jersey, and of the now vanished Mightywords, of which hardly a wisp remains onlinr. The enterprise – which had taken up two floors of a large, Silicon Valley office park building, disappeared as quickly as it had appeared all shiny and bright with its millions in venture capital loose change. I nearly forgot the plac myself as I continued on my quotidian path meanwhile, using my vaunted founder’s stock certificates as birdcage liners. Nonetheless, I’m happy to be able to say that I was there at the birth of indie digital publishing in any case. It’s also worth noting, that as far as we have come since Mightywords’ early, online book delivery system, we’ve yet to equal the creative scope of how digital storytelling could evolve online. The current platforms, however efficient, don’t allow for much Ong’s-Hat-style interdimensionality, or for inserting a modest hyperlink, or a video clip, or sound, or such that is available to me right now in writing this modest blog, even. Perhaps moving forward will involve checking back for stuff we’ve left along the curve we’re always trying to get ahead of.”

ARG Pioneer Joseph Matheny on the Counterculture’s Hijacking from Corporatization to QAnon

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https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/download/mkhhja/ParallaxViews_MathenyQ.mp3

On this edition of Parallax Views, a special, previously unpublished conversationwith Joseph Matheny, a pivotal fixture of the bohemian tech counterculture during the early days of the internet, who may offer a key to understanding the wild social media phenomenon of QAnon and the general hijacking of counterculture by right-wing and corporate forces. This should be of particular interest in light of the recent FBI memo pointing towards QAnon conspiracy theories presenting a potential domestic terror threat.

Joseph Matheny is perhaps best known as a transmedia artist who pioneered the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) with the inter-based collaborative fiction Ong’s Hat. An ARG is a type of game that uses the real world as platform and have been used in marketing campaign for Halo 2, the Lost TV series, and Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero album. The genre has flourished because of the internet and is particularly interesting in that it does not require the player realize that they are playing.

The parallels between ARGs and the QAnon phenomenon are striking. In fact, due to the focus of conspiracy theories and arcane secret histories found in Ong’s Hat, some have whispered that Matheny is having a bit of a laugh as the possible mastermind behind QAnon. Matheny adamantly denies this and I believe him when he says he’s not involved in QAnon. However, both of us agree that QAnon, whether knowingly or otherwise, uses the mechanics of an ARG in a way that is quite eerie.

In addition to discussing alternate reality games and things like Pizzagate and QAnon as “Dark ARGs” in the age of MAGA, Joseph Matheny and I more generally delve into how counterculture appears to have been hijacked, perhaps even weaponized, by corporate and right-wing elements.

It’s a fascinating episode that you’re not going to want to miss!

LINK: https://parallaxviews.podbean.com/e/ep92/