/32/ - Psychopolitics

>>1232
War of the Worlds comes in at 5:30 but the whole thing is good.

Any thoughts on smart mobs? Come on /32/ this is an untapped rabbit hole of a thread. ARGs are very powerful for manipulating reality of groups of people.

>>1238
Please detail the connection you see between ARGs and smart mobs. I am a bit familiar with both, but not enough to make this connection, though I am very interested.

The most I know about smart mobs is theoretical, except for one thing: some protestors at globalism summits invented "anti-kettling" to get around police methods of corralling and arresting protestors. They used smartphone apps that gave directions to avoid the police kettles. Really cool. But afaik nothing more has been done with the idea.

Brace yourselves, I'm going to veer significantly off topic here.

Going by what I read and what I understand, ARGs are "games" in which the player navigates and interacts with the "real" world and with people playing characters. The goal of the game is really to just enjoy the experience and get a sense of accomplishment. We should keep in mind that, unlike virtual reality, alternate reality is real, it is actually happening.
One of the points that sets ARGs apart from other kinds of games is the fact that the players does not assume a character, the player is him or herself, and therefore reacts as they would react in that situation, because the situation is happening.
What confuses me about the ARG is that a game is no different than any other series of actions undertaken on an every-day basis. E.g.: when you are at work you follow a series of rules and complete a series of tasks to accomplish something, and in return instead of enjoyment you get paid. When you are at the office you are still yourself, but you put on a character in a certain way, you assume the persona of the "work you", and your coworkers do the same. Your boss takes on the role of puppetmaster and assumes a character of authority and responsibility, directing the players.
E.g.2: When you want to have fun by playing volleyball, you abide by a series of rules and assumes a character of a volleyball player, while the other players do the same. In this case what you are getting is just satisfaction from the game.

What differentiates ARGs from other everyday situations is the fact that you realize that the situation is following a series of parameters determined by other human beings, while in everyday life we attribute our circumstances to "the system" or just don't think about it. In that sense, ARGs are a form of -I've come to dread the term- "redpill" to everyday life. Our lives are a great deal of overlapping constructed realities in which we insert ourselves voluntarily, we just don't think of them in that way. The critical part is finding out who the puppetmaster is in each situation, and if it is yourself, changing the rules of this alternate reality as you wish.

Smart mobs aren't so much "smart" as they are "organized". They serve as a decentralized network of information sharing, and as in any network anyone with more information (or better information) than the rest holds a position of power. This power can be used to covertly direct this mob into a certain action either by pretending to hold the popular position or by understanding how the information propagates inside this particular network. Ally this with the concept of the ARG and you realize how a small group of individuals with knowledge and means to manipulate the propagation of information inside a network can create an alternate reality with the impression of being "spontaneous" and "natural", effectively making it the only reality; all of the clueless players would then act according to the rules and their roles to further the plot of the game, with their efforts to conform reinforcing the fantasy of one another.

But then again, I've only read very little about this.

>>1248
Not at all off topic. A good analysis of what ARGS "are".

Can we consider psyops (psychological operations) to be a sort of ARG experience? at least from the point of view of the string-pullers?

Does neurolinguistic programming smack of ARG-like concepts to anyone else?

What about these ideas?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_%28virtual_worlds%29#The_Magic_Circle_applied_to_digital_media

After some consideration I believe ARGs are a modern stage form of occult magic.

>>1251
>Can we consider psyops (psychological operations) to be a sort of ARG experience?

No, because by definition an ARG is made up of people that know they are playing a game. But psyop is "reality-creating" for the people who don't know they are being manipulated.

Baudrillard once used an example of a group of people play-acting robbing a bank for game purpose. An unconnected third party sees this and assumes it's a real bank robbery, and calls the police. The police show up and end up shooting the "robbers." Now that they are dead, the only people that are alive are completely under the impression that there was an actual bank robbery. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate how much of things we consider facts are socially constructed and therefore the distinction between reality and fiction has mostly to do with what people agree upon rather than some objective truth that ultimately can't be acquired.

>What about these ideas?

They merely share a name. Functionally they do not work similarly at all. "Magic Circle" just refers to the virtual space in which "game rules" become the dominant logic or law. It's easier to conceive of in the computer age because we can create literal virtual words that represent the magic circle concept, as opposed to the magic circle created by say, a baseball game, where rather than "living" and dead" a ball can be in play and a player can be "out", which constrains player actions.

In magic and theurgy, the magic circle is something you are outside of, rather than in, and the thing you summon is in the magic circle, bounded by it. This is contrasted to the game magic circle, in which players are bound inside.

>After some consideration I believe ARGs are a modern stage form of occult magic.

Even if I think your magic circle analogy is wrong, you're on to something here. One time I heard someone call "international trade" the world's longest-running ARG, and have heard other people call religion, property and government ARGs because they supplant the laws of nature with "game rules".

Aleister Crowley defined magic as the theory and practice of conforming reality to one's will. ARGs certainly meet that description if you accept that the majority of "reality" for humans is socially constructed. If you get a bunch of people together to play a game, you are creating reality.

Also, I think imageboards are ripe for ARGs and ripe for demonstrating how the line between fiction and reality can be blurred and how people can be manipulated by games.

Look at /pol/. A large portion of people who post there don't believe anything they write. A large portion do believe awful stuff they write there. Over time it has absorbed people that can't tell the difference between trolling and serious, and have come to believe some of the more extreme stuff discussed there. The fact that it exists and a bunch of poeple post there has created a big enough psychological sink that it has emboldened people with fringe views to be more open about them, which has in turn caused those fringe views to grow in popularity.

Fiction created reality.

>>1258
>No, because by definition an ARG is made up of people that know they are playing a game. But psyop is "reality-creating" for the people who don't know they are being manipulated.
Do you really need to know that you're being manipulated in order to be subject to manipulation? By that same token, does the player need to know that they are in a game to be playing it?
These are kind of kabbalah-ish thoughts...

That is an interesting scenario presented by Baudrillard. It makes me wonder, if the robbers hadn't encountered the police, and went home with the loot, their pretend bank robbery was basically a real one? But they can tell themselves it wasn't, and that it was just a game... It's all a matter of point of view. Brings to mind principles of NLP.

It's not my magic circle analogy, it was actually applied to ludology by games scholars Salen and Zimmerman. The entirety of this wiki article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_%28virtual_worlds%29
is interesting especially when taken into account that the two authors who applied it to game studies are involved with gamification and bringing games into education. Obviously those two are aware that games/ARGs create reality for the players...

>>1259
Certainly agree with you here, and it also calls to mind "weaponized irony" - another sort of ARGish paradigm where the rules of communication are altered based on in-group established tone and linguistics.

In a way, memes seem like a reality-altering paradigm sort of like "weaponized irony" and distantly related to ARGs. They change how we communicate and cognitively process.

>>1271
>Do you really need to know that you're being manipulated in order to be subject to manipulation?

No, but to be playing a game, you have to know you're in a game. The game part requires knowledge, not the reality-altering part.

>It's not my magic circle analogy, it was actually applied to ludology by games scholars Salen and Zimmerman.

You're right and I was wrong. I was thinking of magic circles from strictly one pagan tradition.

>>1287
>to be playing a game, you have to know you're in a game

I remain unconvinced anon ;)

>>1289
Not that anon, but I agree with him there. Take as an example the movie "Truman Show": Truman was living his life and experiencing reality, while everyone else, who was doing the exact same things as him with the only difference of knowing of the situation, was working on a reality show.
Imagine you are playing a video game: for the character that you control, the game is reality. If he was to step out into the "real world" where you are, he would learn that his life was just a game.
Let me put it this way: in order to play a game you need to know you are in a game, otherwise you are not playing it, you are living it.

>>1271
>Do you really need to know that you're being manipulated in order to be subject to manipulation?
To manipulate is to skilfully manage, influence or handle something or someone. Manipulation implies that you are in control of the thing you are manipulating.
If you want to make a person act in a certain way, you can explain the situation truthfully to them and hope that they choose to act in that particular way. Since the person is making the choice, the person is in control. On the other hand, if you feed them information in such a way that you know with certainty that they will react in the way you want them to react, you are in control. By this reasoning, one mustn't know one is being manipulated in order to be manipulated.
Of course, this is not necessarily true. Blackmail is a form of manipulation in which the person knows they are being manipulated. "Manipulation" also doesn't need to have a necessarily negative connotation. If you want a reasonable person to act in a certain way, you can expose the situation truthfully to that person and appeal to his or her reason with arguments, making him/her act in the way that you want (as long as that is the apparently reasonable course of action).
Basically, manipulation of human beings demands that you achieve the results that you want with careful management of the information flow. Whether that information is truthful or not, and whether or not your results are in tune with the interests of the person being manipulated is besides the point.
I would like to hear an antithesis to my definition.

>>1289
>>1290
https://youtu.be/Ia4iKP6T97g?t=15m25s
Related?

>>1292
Definitely.

>>1293
The whole thread might have interesting material:
http://8ch.net/pol/res/1646390.html

>>1292
If I understand correctly, what the people on the first video are talking about is the intentional blurring of the edges of the magic circle in games through built-in mechanisms. The choice of games would be a natural one as it is the form of entertainment with the most significant immersion. The second section (the one you linked) shows people who are very enthusiastic about this prospect of merger of the real and virtual worlds. And how could you blame them? If this future does come into being, it is the game developers who will amass a huge influence over society in general, and these guys are game developers.

>20:45 "Apply the power of game design towards positive results", that's a fairly straight-forward, ethical statement to make. The question is "who defines what is a positive result?"
The speaker who answers believes that games shouldn't be just about having fun, but about something else. He then criticizes the companies who focus on the monetary aspect of making games. This man represents

They propose to counter the Marxist notion of alienation of work through a ludification of life in general, but wouldn't that lead to an alienation of reality itself? A loss of understanding of the distinction between organic and designed "life"? By taking the power away from the capitalist, the game developer is not giving it to the worker, they are seizing it for themselves so they can mold their ideal society. In their eyes, the capitalist alienates in search of profit, but they do the same thing for their own personal goals and call it "liberation" when in reality it is merely a new form of alienation, a subversion of the individual freedom to develop their own morality. They hope to "liberate" individuals from the burden of making up their own minds and submissively accept the ideas fed to them by the game developers.

>30:25 Formulate games that aren't attached to notions of economy or politics
But they are attached to notions of morality, as all of them keep saying

>31:30 Fuck the Magic Circle
The Magic Circle is what keeps us sane. We built magic circles because compartmentalization is necessary for the psychological management of everyday life.

The video about using games to end domestic abuse is a perfect example of what these people believe they are doing: using technology and psychology to target children and influence behavior to achieve a positive goal. Well, I don't think anyone would say that domestic abuse is a good thing, so this makes everything else they are doing look great. The problem, and what this whole thing is about (which has everything to do with GG) is: how do you make sure that this behavior-modifying technology isn't used to the advantage of amoral people? Or worse, people with different morals than yours? I can't help but associate this whole situation with the paranoia that surfaced in the late nineties about the influence of violent video-games on children. At the time they were worried about how the games changed behavior and they wanted to stop it. Now people are looking into how they can exacerbate the behavior-modifying aspects of gaming for use a covert propaganda devices.

I know this is just a personalized commentary that doesn't add much to the discussion, but I though I should to say it

>>1295
>how do you make sure that this behavior-modifying technology isn't used to the advantage of amoral people?

it's just as likely to fail

propaganda can't be sustained forever - especially when it runs counter to one's real thoughts

changing the 'system' requires changing reality through direct reality-changing behavior

>>1306
Propaganda is what you use to induce reality-changing behavior.

Propaganda acts as a filter so that the individual sees reality in a different way than it really is, and acts upon this perception. This induced behavior can lead to the construction of a reality that is an actualization of the projected reality that results of the propaganda, making it so that the propaganda is no longer necessary.

That was a bit confusing, wasn't it? Let me try to give an example:
Individual lives in country A, which is moderately safe, and that has an aggressive interventionist policy when it comes to other countries in a area B. This policy leads people from B to have a hostile view of country A, which is expressed in attacks towards A's embassy and the creation of anti-A terrorist groups. Propaganda makes the individual from A believe that the government should intervene more over B in order to stop the hostilities, and that they hate A because they are just plain bad people. With this belief, individual from A supports the interventionist policy, which aggravates the threat, which reinforces the feelings of fear and aggression and the extremism of certain B groups. propaganda changes behavior and behavior changes reality.

>propaganda can't be sustained forever - especially when it runs counter to one's real thoughts
What are "real thoughts"? How do you know which thoughts are real and which were placed there by outside influences?
Unless you have always lived in a state of complete sensory deprivation, your thoughts have been influenced by the external environment, and if groups controls the environment they influence your thoughts.

>>1312
My time on /pol/ has made me think the same. The internet has really shifted our perceptions of reality, hasn't it?

>>1313
This "scrambling" keeps /pol from forming the cohesion it needs to start organizing in the real world. Look at gamergate, the mainstream media has been forced to provide cover for their moronic shills in the games industry. /pol and 8chan forced that. I guess gamergate broke the "magic circle". How has the internet shifted our perceptions of reality?

>>1314
>This "scrambling" keeps /pol from forming the cohesion it needs to start organizing in the real world
Do you think the authoritarian nazi thing is part of this? It sure looks like a block to effective mobilization of any kind a la gamergate.

>Look at gamergate, the mainstream media has been forced to provide cover for their moronic shills in the games industry. /pol and 8chan forced that. I guess gamergate broke the "magic circle".
Ha, nice.

>How has the internet shifted our perceptions of reality?
Well for instance we read each other's posts generally assuming that we are all being straightforward and truthful. Then there are astroturfers and ironic shitposters in the mix which we may or may not detect. Then, just having the knowledge that those aforementioned type of posters exist affects how we read all posts. With the amount of time spent communicating on the internet and imageboards it displaces tangible, face to face interactions.

tangible, face to face interactions = reality?
internet communications = reality?

Mass communications in general have changed our perceptions. We read and see secondhand accounts of things and base our knowledge off of that. Before mass communications our knowledge was limited to what we heard from people we came into contact with or from written word or print media in its limited early forms. I think it was Baudrillard who said that simulation becomes more real/important than reality in the time to follow post modernism. I guess the internet is a big step towards that.

>>1314
Is the Ben Garrison meme an ARG?

>>1312
What do you mean? Could you could you provide an example of this occurring?

>>1326
The conversation on 8chan /pol for the first month or so after the first 4chan exodus was coherent. Actual conversation was taking place. Then the second exodus occurred and the shitposting and shilling became noticeable. Now in the last month or two the number of bait threads have exploded. "Am I degenerate if I like X" or the number of MGTOW threads or massive number of Nazi loving threads.

>>1312
The inability of 8chan's /pol/ to organize or produce good content isn't the fault of external actors. Rather, it's due to the lack of skills and dedication of the average member, and the ephemerality and lack of accountability inherent to imageboards and the Internet itself.

>>1312
>>1330
Their blend of self-reinforcing paranoia is especially damaging (and somewhat entertaining).

I have seen the same thing happen to both /pol/s:
Someone started a thread clamoring for mobilization and cooperation, and was soon called a shill or an alphabet agent running a honeypot/datamining operation. The op in turn claimed that the person accusing him of shilling was a shill/ alphabet agent trying to prevent the group from achieving anything. Some third party criticized the methods/stance proposed by the op, calling him a leftists, a democrat, a jew or all three. Other anons joined and pointed out that there was another thread with a much more important topic that the jews were trying to slide by making stupid threads such as this. The thread soon descended into nothing but mutual accusations of shilling and anons posting pictures of happy merchants to one another.

>>1322
No. An ARG is a collection of factors and circumstances. A single meme can't be an ARG.