[What’s the Frequency Kenneth?] An Ocean of Conspiracies

[Emily Care]

I've gotten to play What's the Frequency, Kenneth? three times now. The game text is here:

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

Steve Dempsey WTFK? for the RPG Solitaire Challenge. It's a solitaire rpg that brings to mind Foucault's Pendulum, and that uses the internet as a creative springboard as well as resolution mechanics. I'm writing here as a follow-up to the contest, to help Steve keep going with his development and to share the game with others. This is a game that would have made Mae Brussell, the Queen of US conspiracy stories,  furious, but I'm not convinced that she wasn't essentially playing some version of it.

The entries from my latest game.

Name: Bently Smith
Cover: technical worker
HM's GCHQ[/url] plans to expand facilities near the "Donut" were abruptly shelved due to the leaking of plans. Workers were relocated to new, secret location in the Gloucester area. Parking issues were blamed.
Cover: 10
Resources: 10

This was my first mission. Apparently I cocked it up. Posing as a technical worker in the Government Communication arm of British Intelligence, I was able to acquire a copy of the blueprints and building plans for the new facility. I made the handoff to my contact clean, but a security protocol I missed let the worker whose laptop I'd gotten the plans from know that there'd been unauthorized access. The plan was scrapped, and blamed on problems finding parking for contractors on the suburban city streets.

To see how the next mission goes for me, I take the three underline terms from my first mission and search each of them on Google. I look at how many hits each has. Each of them is associated with things that went well, or things that went poorly for me.

HM's GCHQ (good): 110,000 hits
abruptly shelved (bad): 2,980,000 hits
parking (good): 385,000,000 hits

So my masters are upset that lost them the opportunity to infiltrate the intelligence building, but they approve of the effort I put in to getting them in the first place. I'm given another chance.

I keep my cover. But the next action takes place in the US, so my Resources go down to 9.

Lindsay Lohan, Illuminati cover girl, poses for disturbing photo, with knife and fake blood. Signal is sent to agents around the world.

This one is much harder, on a meta level, to incorporate into the conspiracy narrative. The only element of wrong-doing or inflated significance is in the title, and I'm clearly not in the know. Just a little more googling changes that:

Linday Lohan Claims Iluminati is After Her

Ah, I see.

Next round of resolution:

Fake blood (good): 10,900,000
Illuminati cover girl (bad): 489,000
disturbing photo (good): 41,500,000

The signal is received, and the conspiracy is at high alert. My secret masters are pleased.

That's enough blow by blow play. I'll summarize the rest of the game, and talk about some issues that came up in my next post.

[Emily Care]

In the rest of my session, Bently was involved in ferreting out embarrassing facts about US involvement in the Bay of Pigs, highlighting the failure of the US to overthrow communism in nearby Cuba, contributed to releasing information about radiation levels in Fukushima that had been hushed up by the Japanese gov't, but once again tied it back to US lies during WWII about the dangers released by our atomic bombs.

With 7 Cover remaining, and 9 Resources (the dates were separated by months, so I recharged from Resources lost) there is much more this agent will likely accomplish. Though most of his missions had a negative outcome. I'd like to learn more about who is paying him (a conservative, international group, looking to make the US look bad), and what the costs are for what he's doing.

Things that I really miss in this game are more of the small details about who the agent is and what they deal with. I've found myself journaling in between the entries. If I don't write down what my impressions are of the mission and the agent's life, I forget them easily. The flow can get lost. Also, the website listed for the game seems to refresh slowly. Though more at some times than others--the first time I played this, there were a small number of entries, put up over widely spaced time. This time there were tons of entries from just the past two days.  I researched other possible sites:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/index.php
http://www.clubconspiracy.com/forum/
http://conspiracy.top-site-list.com/
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/

http://www.reuters.com/search?blob=conspiracies
http://www.cnn.com/search/?query=conspiracy&primaryType=mixed&sortBy=date&intl=false

Though even listing them here makes me worried about what kind of a trail I'm creating, or what attention from spammers (or worse) I'd bring here by linking. My own paranoia.

Michael Barkun, an eminent researcher on conspiracy theories, said that conspiracy theories explain what normal knowledge does not, simplifies (ie makes black & white) and distinguishes believers from the masses. He also talks about three different types:

• Event conspiracy – single event or set of events
• Systemic conspiracy – sweeping goals, often 1 group
• Superconspiracy – nested, hierarchies

These might be useful to incorporate into the game. The events could spiral upwards into a superconspiracy, or slowly reveal what type of connections are at work. I'd love to see more structures of these kinds. Charts and diagrams could easily be used to help the solo player flesh out what they create.

I look forward to hearing your further thoughts, Steve. And feedback and reflections of others on  the game.

Best,
Emily

[GB Steve]

Emily thanks very much for posting your AP and thoughts about the game. You also posted elsewhere about an issue with the character stats in that cover and resources don't change very much leading to a potentially very long game, without ever really threatening an end game.

I think I'm certainly on the right track regarding the feel of the game. I did also talk to someone about automating the IT parts of the game, perhaps even with the recording but this didn't pan out. However it is something I still think is worth considering (even though my php/javascript skills are probably not up to the job anymore).

I do get your point about the character and their background. At the moment the game focuses entirely on the conspiracy side of things and it would probably be a good thing to involve the rest of their life, to show more of the impact of the conspiracy on their daily life. This could probably be achieved through some similar mechanism to the conspiracy, interspersing chapters of background into the conspiracy turns, perhaps not each turn though but trigerred semi-randomly by events in the shadow life.

[Emily Care]

I'd love to see what you or others would make of automating parts of the game. It did win the Living in the Future award after all, so that makes good sense.

A weak spot that all solo games seem to have is getting a full experience of the fictional events. It is much easier, at least for me, when working on creating a story alone, to pass over the details of what happens in play since I'm not describing them to anyone else, or listening to what someone else describes. Those moments in play when I take the story I'm given and then interpret it into how my agent took action, or messed up, are where it happens, and I found myself forgetting what had happened when I look back, or being fuzzy in the moment.

In one of the games I played, I made notes and journaled. Now, I know that doesn't float everyone's boat, but it is a natural fit for solo play. This game would work well in a blog format. You know, I mentioned twitter in past discussion, but Google plus would be even better. You can easily include links, the length and format are more flexible, and it's virally shareable in an even broader way (I find) than twitter.

A problem of course would be the possible mixups between the story and real information! You might well have a Foucault's Pendulum/Crying of Lot 49 effect.