Adrian Hon, a game designer, writes about games, technology and politics, including alternate reality games, larps, and escape rooms.
HN commenters cite his post on alternate reality games and QAnon when discussing how ARG-style storytelling shaped political movements.
Fuck that noise -- if you'd have even bothered to google their name, you'd have found that Givewell are total scumbags:
http://metatalk.metafilter.com/15547/GiveWell-or-Give-em-Hell
Summaries: http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/Givewell
They got caught out because they were blatantly astroturfing for themselves and slagging 'competing' charities all over the web. Then it turns out that even by their own generous accounting, more than half of their funds goes directly to their own overhead. On top of that, their 'research' is at best based on getting charities to rigorously assess themselves.
Their rubberstamp board publicly (in the NYT) pretended to fire one of the founders, but less than a year later he was quietly back at his old position.
MetaFilter also works this way. Self-policing is a big part of the community [1][2].
There is a even a whole section of the site devoted to discussing internal stuff (called appropriately MetaTalk [3]).
Sometimes I miss something like this on HN - a separate space for meta stuff.
BTW MetaFilter is the only other online community I'm aware of that has quality on the level of HN (despite being even larger - over 56,000 registered people).
[1] http://mssv.net/wiki.cgi?SelfPolicing
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaFilter#Moderation
[3] http://metatalk.metafilter.com
Treading carefully because a sibling comment has already been banned, but I'm reminded of the QAnon-as-ARG view:
https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qanon/
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5
It contains many of the familiar "satanic panic" elements such as wild allegations of child abuse.
> TYLIP is...a book that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story. It teaches you how to read, how to do maths, it teaches you morals, ethics, even self-defence.
http://mssv.net/2006/05/01/the-young-ladys-illustrated-primer/
https://mssv.net
Writing about games and technology, with the occasional sci-fi short story and politics thrown in.
https://adrianhon.substack.com
I play a newish game every week and talk about its mechanics, game design, and what makes it interesting.
ARGs which are a hack of storytelling, rendering the format either mute or too diffuse to cohere, became the backbone format of Russian news, Brexit, QAnon, and MAGA.
Addl citation
https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qanon/