Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in both its legacy and citizen varieties. 

By the time Ashleigh Banfield named a suspect in the case on her podcast, by the time Megyn Kelly had structured coverage around episode titles such as “Nest Camera Questions, Savannah Stalker Possibilities and Bitcoin Rumblings,” by the time dozens of true-crime influencers had weighed in, the kidnapping of an 84-year-old woman from her home in Tucson, Arizona had become a piece of participatory entertainment. But we expect this now, in the age of QAnon and the Epstein files and near-constant social media use. It’s par for the course.

The conventional account of this kind of thing, though, almost always places the audience at the center. With participatory culture, or fan culture, the onus falls on the fan, the consumer. Internet sleuths and TikTok detectives and Reddit theorists materialize out of nowhere, spontaneously organizing around high-profile crimes and turning tragedy into collaborative storytelling. Game designer Reed Berkowitz’s analysis of QAnon as an alternate-reality game, published in 2020, introduced the concept of “guided apophenia,” which is basically the deliberate encouragement of pattern-recognition in unrelated data. Most commentators have applied his insight to crowds. The crowd finds connections, the crowd decodes – critically, the crowd plays. I’m not going to argue that this doesn’t happen – that it isn’t true – because it visibly is and it often gets out of hand. But it obscures the more interesting and uncomfortable question: what if the game has a game master? And what if she knows exactly what she’s doing? 

In a 2022 New Atlantis essay, State Department policy advisor Jon Askonas came close to this when he pointed out that the structural origins of most online systems lie in the world of role-playing games, and that what we haven’t yet figured out how to make sense of is the fun that so many Americans seem to be having with the national fracture. He’s right about the fun, which sociologists such as Sherry Turkle had long documented (and which I’d been writing about for several years by the time his piece came out). 

But Askonas, like Berkowitz, and indeed, myself, were mostly describing a condition, an environment in which gamified behavior emerges organically from the architecture of platforms and the........

© The Spectator