.:aaron.helton:.
musings.of {'husband', 'father', 'technologist', 'international civil servant', 'humanist', 'skeptic', 'gamer', 'dreamer'}

The time is now. The place is right here. Your playing board is the entire world. You are a player by choice, a puppetmaster by rough consensus. Invent fabulous but plausible fictional news items, or create their supporting artifacts and plant them as a sort of archaeological evidence. Track other players’ contributions and vote for the most plausible. The deeper you can integrate the fantasy into reality, the better.

What is it?

Alternate Now is a kind of alternate reality game where the players shape a clever fiction over the real world, integrating it as deeply as possible with reality. The fiction is intended to take the form of serious, plausible news articles resting on a foundation of fabricated evidence. Fake company websites, press releases, photographs, audio and video recordings, government memorandums, public documents, database records, other news items, and anything else that can be plausibly falsified: these are all great ways to contribute.

A multilayer game

Players earn reputation points in multiple ways. The most obvious layer is the crafting of newsworthy items for others to support and build upon. Below this (and worth more points) is the crafting of corroborating evidence for existing newsworthy items. The final and most insidious layer is the crafting of evidence in absence of an actual newsworthy items, but which serve to implicate the missing story. Bonus points are awarded at each level to all whose contributions are so believable that real, paid news organizations report it as fact.

Are there rules?

The rules are pretty simple. If at any time you need to fall back on the argument that this is, after all, a game, then it’s important to have registered your falsified and planted evidence in a central database. This also simplifies the awarding of reputation points. In fact, you might say a central database with accompanying logic to handle these things is required. Beyond that, it should be pretty much anything goes, but do be careful about the implications of your stories: nobody wants to start a war or have the FBI breathing down their necks. Be inventive, but plausible. Don’t rely on pseudoscience, but feel free to speculate. If you have expertise in creating certain types of documentation, don’t be afraid to specialize. Anyone should be able to find a way to play.

Are there winners?

Are there winners in life? Objectively, only sometimes. Mostly the question isn’t that interesting. At certain points everyone can be categorized as a winner or loser, depending on the circumstances. Reputation in this game is all there is, just like in real life. You get out of it what you put into it, and have some fun in the mean time.

What’s still needed

I don’t have a central database to keep track of players, their contributions, and their resulting reputations. I also don’t have any standard for presentation of evidence. I assume that a number of artifacts and the news articles they support will be removed from the internet at some point after it is discovered that they are not factual, so there needs to be some way of preserving evidence that the artifacts and attending news items existed, were located in plausible public places, and actually generated the kind of buzz that we’re looking for. And finally, we need more coherent rules on how to assign reputation.

And so, to wrap it up: Who will answer the call?