Alternate Reality Gaming ( )
a bunch of level zeros told me to speed run this portal…
[Can the Gamification of Permaculture Design, Appropriate Technology, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge Increase Biodiversity, Reduce Pollution, End Homelessness, and Create Resilient Networks of Disaster Ready Mutual-Aid CooperativeDAO Guilds?]
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Bored with doom-scrolling anon? Wanna take a risk?
Keep reading.
I did an academic presentation & video about Alternate reality gaming (or ARGs) back in 2014. I never published it. I made the argument for the use of gamification and media storytelling to organize workforce development for bioregional disaster resilience. I figured that story-driven play-to-earn augmented reality games would be the medium of the future, so I committed myself to gaining the skills needed to create one and to be one of the best players for when they emerge at the edges of our culture again. That time has come, and as I predicted, it would correspond with the rise of AI and a specific cultural phenomenon on the very near horizon. Thus, I reorganized my life as a game and started to seek the real-world skills I would need to level-up my life and lead a team into the future. I learned everything I could about wilderness survival, permaculture, leadership, entrepreneurship, engineering, ai, film making, and even had a brief stint being an executive at a tech manufacturing company. I’ve experimented with thousands of tools to prepare for this time period. If you’re reading this right now in early February 2024, it’s time to level up: Here’s why:
We’ve all heard about augmented reality gaming, the metaverse, and various other promises of 21st century technology. As people laugh at spatial computing headset users I can’t help but wonder about my old unpublished paper. The real bounty of “XR” and “AI” is that those infinite procedurally generated worlds need a narrative to hold it together into a cohesive and accessible story for a broader audience. Of course the powers that be in the tech world are eagerly working in secret to design such experiences that they can unleash on the masses. Games are ultimately an interactive storytelling mechanism, and alternate reality games promise to invite players to experience just that: alternate realities.
All the world is made up of stories, and together we weave the present-story. Alternate Realities will prove to be a powerful way to change the hearts and minds of people over time as more people become exposed to new worlds in and out of the comfort of their own home. Alternate realities will also give us a chance to experiment with bringing wealth back to the real-world so we can begin to start solving some of the problems our civilization is facing today. And no I’m not talking about rearranging pixels for profit or being a laptop bureaucrat.
Your little black mirror is designed to get you to interact with it more and more... draining your willpower or even tempting you to join the “creator economy” where you’ll whore yourself out for pennies. Which is the same as most any job really. Sure you might enjoy working whether it be carpentry or childcare or making videos or making art. Yet most people are trapped in a poverty loop while prices rise with no hope of escape. Some have turned to crypto as a possible store of value and/or an alternative currency, others produce art and sell them as NFTs, and a few tinker with decentralized autonomous organizations seeking new ways of organizing and deploying capital. In general, very few people have much agency when relating to the world at large while us plebs and peasants grind, suffer, and do our best to innovate with what we have.
In other words, the problem is the economy and the money. The system appears rigged for the rich and the bureaucratic elite. It’s difficult to find good jobs and amass wealth of any sort while navigating the labyrinth of modern living. We often feel hopeless, angry, and alone, which sometimes lead to bad decisions.
I know because I’ve definitely made some bad decisions in my life. I failed spectacularly at my goal of starting an alternate reality gaming company by February of 2024, a goal I’ve had since 2011. I’ve never been able to hold onto more than a couple G’s before it all melts away. It’s expensive to be poor and now everyone is poor. The truth is… I wasn’t ready then. I may not be ready now. I could have created a safety net so I could increase my risk in smaller intervals, gradually growing so I could start my company with a larger chunk of money. But I didn’t. With venture capital a nigh impossible task for my silly ideas, I’ve been forced into a corner. I’m stuck.
In the darkness and despair of how my own life has fallen apart through several bouts of losing my job and housing in the last few years while February 2024 looms ever closer, I’ve found myself dreaming of an alternate reality game where meaningful work was not so miserable, much easier to find, and with better pay. Seems impossible right?
If you’ve looked into alternate reality gaming before… you might have encountered the term TINAG or “This is Not a Game,” used to describe the aesthetics of suspended belief. It’s basically an honor code to pretend the game is real and do a little bit of light role-playing with other players for the sake of fun. Usually there’s a ton of puzzles requiring creative problem-solving throughout the ARG for players to encounter and interact with in order to reveal mysteries, But here’s the thing… I encountered an alternate reality game in development that’s light years beyond anything I’ve ever seen before. A few years ago I threw myself at it full-force.
This game is easily the most difficult ARG I’ve ever encountered. There’s a leveling system (which isn’t normal for ARGs), it’s worldwide with many virtual environments intertwined, and there’s already thousands of players. You can make money in this game, but it’s far more complex than proof-of-work algorithms to solve, and I just burned out all my reserves trying to figure it out. I’m done. I blew up my account and I’m back to zero. It took everything I had to get to level ***, but I didn’t break the ceiling working alone, and I’ve run out of money to prop up my learning.
Invoking the old days of gaming when we teamed up as guilds to defeat dungeon bosses that were insurmountable alone, this ARG is phenomenally challenging. Despite my failures, what does seem clear is to start a player’s guild. To my knowledge, this doesn’t exist yet in-game… and I can’t go on alone anyways. The game requires real skills in the real world in combination with an extremely high intelligence and vigilance that will be consistently tested. There’s no violence, though dueling (read: feisty debates) is allowed in certain circumstances, but it’s mostly player versus environment with an AI twist. The puzzles are incredibly complex and strangely all-to-human. In this gamified meritocracy we’re going to need a variety of player characters to fill our ranks, specialize in arcane skills, and venture forth into this strange new world. I’d rather work with others than stop playing because I’ve already tasted the spoils of victory. I have weird artifacts from playing that have no market… yet. Besides, the game seems poised to become a very big deal in the next decade or so, especially since it seems to promise an economic-labor system that might just work.
Right now, the player base is facing a big problem. Nobody has broken the skill cap to open up the next area of exploration. My working hypothesis is that aren’t enough people who are on one hand old-school hardcore gamers willing to cooperate to overcome extreme challenges, and on the other hand actually have skills and intelligence in real-life to accomplish the quests.
I’ll argue that this is the best time in the history of the our species to take entrepreneurial risks. All this technology around us is on the brink of transformation, and that we’re on the cusp of an unexpected golden age for our global civilization and our network economy. And No it’s not because of so-called “artificial intelligence...” or God, climate, politics, war, or even an asteroid. It’s because we’re all going to start experiencing an entirely new game of how we organize humans. The technocrats are wrong about AGI automated planned economies. The truth is far more dynamic. The open metaverse is inevitable, and unevenly distributed in 2024. Our challenge is to combine the wands and use the power we’ve amassed to choose a brighter future. What that looks like is up to us now: the plebs, the peasants, and the people of the planet just trying to have a good time here while we can!
The game I’m playing right now might fail, but I’m almost certain that whatever rises to prominence in the next few years will be in the medium of an alternate reality game. That’s why I’m starting a new player’s guild. Our primary focus will be to bring wealth to our members in real-life through guild activities beyond the portal in this unnamed alternate reality game. We’re also going to be rightfully focused on improving our member’s skills, knowledge, and equipment in order to venture into the unknown and come back whole. We’ll maintain a treasury for players that fall on hard times to help them get back on their feet again should they encounter hardship. We will work together to amass enough resources to open a guild headquarters and member’s only lounge in real-life, where players can meet together to discuss game developments and mutual knowledge sharing. We’ll work together to find the geocaches hidden throughout the world, solve the riddles, and turn a profit in the process. If for some reason this game fails, we’ll adapt to a new game.
Of course, I can’t do this alone. We’ll have officers, organized by trades and skills and provide training with a compendium of our knowledge to new members that pass the initiation phase. This is not going to be free, and there’s no guarantee of any sort of reward from the other side. We’ll have to be industrious enough to secure several income streams in order to provide for our guild’s activities. There are many non-monetary benefits from playing, but profit is possible. We’re starting from scratch though, so we’ll need funding to get started and maintain ourselves until we can figure out how to transmute the resources from the other side into wealth here in this world. We’re in it for the loot, but also for the fun.
In the real world one of our best tools we the people have had to wield influence is the ability to remotely crowdfund entrepreneurial activities that we think are worthy of the risk. This phenomenon has taken many forms from crypto to online fundraisers to NFTs and so forth. The reality of the mechanics are pretty simple: an elaborate online and public promise sold in exchange for a beneficial outcome that may or may not manifest for the buyer.
As a founder of the guild, I’d like to see it endure beyond me, and grow to be a large cooperative enterprise. However, I’ve failed way too many times to make an empty promise of a product based loosely on the trendiest tech at the moment even if we are using that technology in-guild. Instead, our first fundraiser will aim to auction off a few obscure art pieces and a few commemorative NFT sets. Our second fundraiser will be for memberships for five new level zero recruits when I’m ready to take on and train a team.
The amount of money raised will affect the velocity and color of my choices for how I spend my energy. For small amounts, I’ll commit to producing a type of fictitious zine or graphic novel that depicts my experiences thus far playing the game for the general public, while I grind out creative ways to grow the guild. For larger amounts, I can commit to the loftier and more ambitious projects.
The money we raise from these initial offerings will be put towards guild expenses for paying me, the guild’s first officer, to travel to, meet with, and solicit to other high-level players to join the guild in order to grow our wealth. Furthermore, I’ll work to establish a temporary guild headquarters, create inventory geocaches for guild members throughout the world, and work with industrious locals to start producing various specialized goods and equipment for guild members to use when exploring beyond the portal, and a few public offerings too.
The value I hope to lead our guild in providing for its members is a nourishing culture of learning through experience. In that vein, members of the general public that purchase a commemorative NFT or other art piece, will receive a copy of a graphic novel authored by me, containing a special one-shot experimental geocache alternate reality game. The game will be thematically appropriate but ultimately a fictional branch of the game we’re already playing, as we don’t want to tread directly on what is currently hidden.
There is no website.
There is no real “ask.”
There is only You, Me,
And the game.
You can decide if you want to go further down the rabbit hole.
To start, follow me on X @GuerrillaThink and send me a DM.
I won’t recruit just anyone to this epic quest. You need to have your heart in the right place. This isn’t about getting rich quick. It’s about building a better world. I mean c’mon our cities are ugly, our culture is devolving, and we’re constantly fighting against each other. Don’t you want to explore the world and craft a legacy? Or will the blue-light of the black-mirror consume your hours and eat you alive? I won’t lie, having a deep pocket to take experimental risks will be highly valuable, but this game doesn’t run on fiat “money,” … or even crypto. It’s a meritocracy. When the first MMORPGs opened up there was a special magic present within our guilds as we experienced new content for the first time together. We spent hours together grinding and tinkering, experimenting and laughing, all for the loot and the lulz…
that magic… is back.
Our first quest is to collaborate on some art together. I’ll show you bits of what I’ve already discovered based on your interest: the game is played both in real life and in the metaverse so the aesthetics wildly vary, the loot is bizarre, and the characters are strange. For now, create your own character-card based on your real skills. Being ONLY a coder is not going to cut it - unless you’re a Super Class A Hacker. You will need many real-world and digital skills in order to venture beyond the portal.
Look right now it’s just me and a few other players that are wholly absorbed. Let’s start with a simple conversation. We’ll grow from there. It just takes one follower to grow a movement and just one meme to be a Stand Alone Complex.
Queue: the laughing man.
Happy February 2024.
~! G.t. Press.
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