S1E3: Hidden Meanings (Haunted Videogames, ARGs, & Folk Groups)

Feb 13

[Dial-up modem connection sounds]
[Vintage AOL "You've got Mail" voice transitions into the voice of a digital monster]:
Welcome. You've got… Digital Folklore.
[Melancholic music plays as Brooke Jennett reads a story originally posted by 00WARTHERAPY00 as a comment to a YouTube video by PBS Digital. The video was titled, “Can Video Games be a Spiritual Experience?”]
00WARTHERAPY00 (YouTube Commenter):
When I was four, my dad bought a trusty Xbox, the first ruggedy blocky one from 2001. We had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all kinds of games together, until he died when I was just six. I couldn't touch that console for 10 years, but once I did, I noticed something. We used to play a racing game, RalliSport's Challenge, actually pretty awesome for the time it came out, and once I started meddling around, I found a ghost, literally. You know how when a timed race happens, the fastest lap gets recorded as a ghost driver? Yep. You guessed it. His ghost still rolls around that track today. And so I played and played and played until I was almost able to beat the ghost, until one day I got ahead of it. I surpassed it and I stopped right in front of the finish line just to ensure I wouldn't delete it.
Perry Carpenter:
Hi, I'm Perry Carpenter.
Mason Amadeus:
And I'm Mason Amadeus.
Perry Carpenter:
Today we're talking about haunted video games, alternate reality games and mystery solving communities.
Mason Amadeus:
Content warnings for this episode are minor, but there are brief mentions of drowning and suicide.
Perry Carpenter:
This is Digital Folklore.
[Digital Folklore theme music plays and transitions to music from an overhead speaker at a mysterious pawn shop]
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, dude. They have Donkey Kong 64 and the expansion pack still in the box!
Perry Carpenter:
I hate places like this.
Mason Amadeus:
I don't remember the exact story, but there was a bug they couldn't fix in the game without adding more ram to the console, so they had to spend a bunch of extra money and bundle this with the game.
Perry Carpenter:
Are you going to buy that? I'm super ready to go.
Mason Amadeus:
Why? Perry, we barely even got into the back aisles. There is so much stuff, and also I'm probably not going to buy it because I don't have a CRT TV and it's not the same.
Perry Carpenter:
No, I'm just-
Mason Amadeus:
Maybe they have one here.
Perry Carpenter:
No, I'm not really big on pawn shops at all.
Mason Amadeus:
Why?
Perry Carpenter:
I don't know. It's partly the smell... I feel saturated by it. There's this smell of dust and oil... and desperation. It's like claustrophobic and desolate at the same time.
Mason Amadeus:
What?
Perry Carpenter:
Pawn shops seem to represent themselves as like this big treasure trove filled with mysteries over here and bargains over there... And you get inside and you shake around these bins and you realize that everything that's here has been left here by somebody's desperation. I mean, somebody's sold this stuff for half of its value just to pay their water bill for that month or toss away a painful memory or-
Mason Amadeus:
Oh dude, dude, look, original Pokemon Red, like original, original. Look.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay.
Mason Amadeus:
Well I thought you'd appreciate it.
Perry Carpenter:
What about me made you think that?
Mason Amadeus:
Because the whole Lavender Town Syndrome was because of these games.
Perry Carpenter:
Was that the one where people claimed that there was this super high frequency tone that somehow made people kill themselves, right? Is that it?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, the story goes that the music for Lavender Town had that effect on only younger kids who played it because it was so high pitched that you couldn't hear it past a certain age.
Perry Carpenter:
Right, and I think it was just the original Japanese edition that had that, right?
Mason Amadeus:
You know what actually, yeah I think you're right, and this one's in English.
[Pawn shop owner enters. His unexpected interjection startles Perry & Mason]
Todd:
I hate to break it to you fellas, but that whole Lavender Town story thing with the music, yeah, that never happened.
Mason Amadeus:
Jeez, you scared the heck out of me, man. Yeah, it's a Creepypasta.
Todd:
Great game though. I'll let you take it complimentary if you want to buy a Game Boy.
Perry Carpenter:
Wait, I'm sorry. Who are you?
Todd:
I'm Todd. Nice to meet you.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, this is Todd's shop.
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, you guys know each other?
Todd:
I was in a band with Mason's dad in the '80s.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. I wasn't alive, but yeah, I mean I've seen photos.
Perry Carpenter:
Cool.
Todd:
Hey, I don't want to make this awkward or anything, but if you got an appetite for spooky video game lore, I got something you might be interested in. It's-
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, I don't know, Todd. I think we were going to head out. Perry doesn't like your shop very much.
Perry Carpenter:
No, no, it's not that. I mean the shop is fine. I'm fine, actually, I really am a little bit curious. Todd, what were you about to say?
Todd:
Easier to show you than to describe it. Follow me, round the back, my special stash. You see, I'm a collector of sorts, rare objects. You never know what you might find if you keep your eyes open.
[Glitch transition sound to ad break]
[Glitch transition – Scene opens with Perry hearing sounds of a distant conversation happening deeper in the shop]
Dr. Brittany Warman:
And it was all made up, but when Valente talks about it, she doesn't claim ownership over it. She's like, "It went out of my hands. It became something of the internet."
Perry Carpenter:
Hey Mason. Todd, hold on a second. I got to go check this out.
Mason Amadeus:
Perry, we're like right in the middle of-
Perry Carpenter:
Excuse me. Sorry to bother you. Sounded like you were talking about some kind of internet folklore.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Yeah, I was just had my mind blown by a video on that came out recently that is about the internet sensation that wasn't actually a game, but reported to be a game called Killswitch.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
A story about a game, yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
What was it called?
Dr. Brittany Warman:
It's called Killswitch.
Perry Carpenter:
Killswitch.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Yeah, and it-
Dr. Sara Cleto:
So it's a Creepypasta.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Yeah, it's essentially a Creepypasta. It was about a video game that had all these scary things associated with it, and-
Dr. Sara Cleto:
You're right, this video game apparently would erase itself. If you played it to the end, it would be gone and there was no way you could play it again. There's no way you could show it to anyone else and talk about it.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
It really took on a life of its own on the internet. People tried to... they went on searches to find the last remaining copies of this game, and what blew my mind about it is that it turns out it was actually written by one of my favorite authors, Catherynne Valente.
Perry Carpenter:
So even if there was a definitive author, it becomes folklore after the fact because of how the community reacted and created around it, is that right?
Dr. Sara Cleto:
Yes, even though Cat Valente wrote the original story about Killswitch, it went viral and turned into many other stories that became its own internet legend. It might help to think about the concept of folk groups for this, and a folk group can be as little as two people or as many as 100 or something or even more, who all share something in particular. Like a family is a folk group and their shared thing is that they're all related. Or a community of gamers who are all super passionate about one particular game are also a folk group because they hang out and they talk about that thing. So if you think of any of these communities as folk groups and their outputs as a kind of folklore, I think that framing might help.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, that does. Thank you.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
Really, I mean, folklore is so enormous that we could sit here and talk together for 50 hours straight and absolutely not cover all of it.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, we-
Mason Amadeus:
Hey. Hey, we were like... we were right in the middle of Todd taking us to the secret stash. What are you doing?
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, right.
Mason Amadeus:
Todd's closes in half an hour.
Perry Carpenter:
Sorry, I think I got to go. Mason's getting anxious. He does that every now and then. Here's our card. Do you have anything?
Dr. Sara Cleto:
For sure.
Dr. Brittany Warman:
Yes.
Perry Carpenter:
Great. Thank you.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
Awesome.
Perry Carpenter:
Hey, thanks for waiting on me guys.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, who was that?
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, that was Sara and Brittany from the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, so you know them?
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, you might think so, but no, I just met them. They gave me their card right here. It has a cool tree on it.
Mason Amadeus:
Sure, yeah. We were also kind of doing something though.
Todd:
Come on.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, follow Todd.
Todd:
In here for inquisitive minds only.
[Sound of a heavy door sliding open to reveal Todd’s secret chamber]
Perry Carpenter:
Whoa.
Mason Amadeus:
Okay.
Perry Carpenter:
Geez.
Mason Amadeus:
How far back?... what is the square footage of this place?
Todd:
Much like the Tardis, nerd reference, it's bigger on the inside.
Perry Carpenter:
Wait, Todd, is that a Polybius arcade cabinet?
[Sound of Todd slapping the arcade cabinet with pride]
Todd:
Certainly is. This bad boy's got a body count. I had to cut the cord off it for safety, but it's genuine.
Mason Amadeus:
Holy smokes, you have Taboo.
Todd:
Yep. Taboo: the Sixth Sense. Got that one when it came out, actually.
Perry Carpenter:
What is Taboo?
Mason Amadeus:
It's like a tarot card simulator that came out for the SNES in like 1980 something.
Todd:
1989, and it has accurately predicted the deaths of multiple players.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay, but that's like obviously some kind of law of averages. You get enough people to play the game, it's gonna get a few things right.
[Sound of Todd straining to grab his prized item]
Todd:
Yeah, probably, but this is my crown jewel.
Mason Amadeus:
A beat up cartridge..?
Perry Carpenter:
…for the N64?
Todd:
Yes, but also no. This little thing is a lot more than it seems. I got this from a friend and let's just say it's no ordinary game.
[Mysterious music plays]
He picked it up at a yard sale from some creepy old man, right? The old guy walks out of his garage and hands it to him... this beat up cartridge, no label, just Majora sharpied on the front of it, and gives it to my buddy for free. He says it belonged to a kid who didn't live there anymore or something. So my friend goes home, right? Thinking maybe this is some pirated copy or beta version of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Pops it in, it boots up just fine. Turns out it is Majora's Mask and he finds this save file on it. Right? It's named Ben, and shrugs it off thinking it's probably whoever the kid was the old guy mentioned.
So he makes his own save, calls it Link, and he starts playing. Everything's hunky dory at first, but then it gets weird pretty quick. He's seeing textures and graphics showing up where they shouldn't be. Bits of cut scenes popping up out of nowhere and sometimes the characters in the game call him Ben. And here's the thing, all the dialogue is text so whenever you name your save, it's what the characters call you in the game, except he was playing on Link and getting called Ben. Some my buddy's thinking this is probably just some glitchy bootleg copy and goes and erases the Ben file to try to fix it, but that doesn't work. Now the characters in the game don't call him anything, nothing, just a blank space where the name should be. He still thinks it could just be a pirated, janky copy from God knows where.
And so he's not creeped out yet and the rest of the game seems fine and he keeps going. And then stuff gets unsettling. He gets to a point and the game starts playing all out of order, and all of a sudden his character appears in the biggest town in the game, Clock Town, but all the people are gone. Nobody there except he's hearing these faint voices everywhere he goes and the game's totally broken, all sorts of graphics and stuff out of place, even the music is playing backwards. He told me that at this point, it started affecting him emotionally too. He started feeling this deep powerful sense of dread. So he tries to reload the game or get out of that area, but it won't let him back. It keeps popping him back into the ghost town.
Finally, he gets out, but things aren't normal. Now there's these weird creepy statues in the game stalking him, and that's not supposed to happen at all. Every time he turns around, the thing shows up behind him, and they ain't supposed to move, let alone do that. And not long after that, it becomes clear this game is trying to tell him something. It's trying to communicate. Out of nowhere, he gets teleported to the final boss area and this floating skull kid keeps killing his character in impossible ways, like setting him on fire and he can't do anything about it, nothing works. He just has to watch. He reloads and tries again over and over and it's the same thing, he's stuck. But then eventually, he gets stuck on this black screen with text on it that says, "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" Pretty spooky.
After that, the game kicks him out to the title screen and get this, his save file is gone, deleted. But now there's a new one called Your Turn. So he's curious. He can't stop himself. He loads up that new creepy save and all it is his character's dead body on the ground, that same skull dude floating over him with creepy, looping, distorted laughter playing over and over again. My buddy tries to restart the console and get out of there, but then....
[Todd’s story is interrupted by the sound of some kind of animal complaining… apparently Mason was poking around]
Todd:
Hey, stop it!
Mason Amadeus:
Okay, sorry. Sorry.
Todd:
Don't give that thing any food. What's wrong with you? Don't touch.
Mason Amadeus:
I won't, sorry.
Perry Carpenter:
Jeez man.
Todd:
Thank you.
Mason Amadeus:
You go on. It's fine.
[Tense / mysterious music returns]
Todd:
So, he restarts the console and now guess what's back? The Ben save file he deleted, right there. All the other ones are gone. That's too much for him. So he shuts the whole thing down and goes to bed.
Perry Carpenter:
…sounds familiar.
Todd:
So the next day, yeah, he tries to avoid playing this thing. It really messed him up, freaked his bean, like Majora's Mask is supposed to be kind of creepy game, but not like this. Later that night though, he just couldn't resist, too curious. I can't blame him, really. So he loads it up and the Ben save is still there, but wild thing is, it looks like the safe file is farther along in the game than it was the night before, like it'd been played. Creepy, right? But he goes in anyways and now this is where things get real dark real quick. He loads up the Ben save and right off the bat, everything is very wrong. His character is all distorted, it's like its back is broken and cocked to the side. The character's face is all blank and dead looking every few seconds, it keeps twitching and spasming. None of this stuff is in the normal game, by the way. It's not right. More of these creepy statues keeps stalking him wherever he goes, appearing behind him and stuff.
Then he starts getting teleported all over the place to more and more broken parts of the game in impossible and creepy ways that don't make sense. The text, "You've met with your horrible fate, haven't you?" keeps popping up on the screen at the strangest times. He's getting zoomed around this creepy broken game and starts turning into different characters from the story and stuff. Long story short, all this lead to him getting sent towards a water level, the Great Bay, and for this level, the character can breathe underwater. So he goes in and sure enough, one of those creepy stocking statues is sitting there right at the bottom of the Bay. He swims over to it, at this point figuring he ought to see this story through. Suddenly his character starts choking to death and dies. He drowns. Even though the character's supposed to be able to breathe underwater, he's drowned. And then instead of just reloading the game, kicks him all the way out to the main screen again. And the save files have changed once more. Now there's two saved games. The first one is labeled Ben and the next one is Drowned.
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, Ben Drowned, yeah.
Todd:
Right. Yeah, that's what he thought. That's the mystery. This kid Ben must have drowned, which means the game belonged-
Perry Carpenter:
No, I mean, it's a Creepypasta. It's Ben Drowned, the Creepypasta. I knew it sounded familiar when you were telling it. It's actually really popular.
Todd:
No, no.
Perry Carpenter:
Surprised you hadn't heard of it.
Todd:
This was my buddy, right? He told me about it.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. I hate to break it to you, Todd, but I think your buddy found the story on the internet or somebody told it to him and then he told it to you and passed it off as real.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, I remember reading this too. And there's also YouTube videos, really well edited YouTube videos, actually. It's a great story.
Todd:
I'm not even then telling it though. It goes beyond the game. A few days after this, he starts having-
Mason Amadeus:
Starts having conversations with a weird chatbot online, like an AI chatbot.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, it's named Cleverbot, and this Cleverbot starts claiming that it is been, and then it starts taking over his computer too. And then he starts getting headaches and nightmares.
Mason Amadeus:
There's a ton of stuff to it, writing, videos. I think there was even like a Ben Drowned ARG of some kind.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, there were these hidden ciphers, like in the YouTube account that posted the videos and those pointed to a website, and the website had a whole second story art called Moon Children. And that was packed with all sorts of hidden URLs and secret conversations.
Mason Amadeus:
Yes. Yes, you're right. It was about a doomsday cult stuck in a time loop. It was actually super cool. The website would reset every three days and it was really interactive.
Todd:
Yeah. All right. Cool. You two really know how to kill a story, huh?
Perry Carpenter:
Todd, it's not your fault. I'm sure your friend was just into Creepypastas and ARGs and found an old copy of Majora's Mask and he wanted to have a little laugh with you.
Todd:
Yeah, whatever. I don't even know what an ARG is.
Mason Amadeus:
Well, it's kind of like a game, but it's not like a game, game. It's on the internet, but it's also broader than that. ARG is alternate reality game.
Todd:
Like the NetiVerse headset thing you strap to your face and wave your arms around and buy fake T-shirts with Bitcoin or something like that, right? Yeah, sure.
Perry Carpenter:
No. No. That's virtual reality. These are alternate reality games. They take place in the real world or spread across the whole internet.
Mason Amadeus:
It's more like a puzzle where all of the pieces are hidden in different weird places.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, you look for these hidden clues and website code or Twitter bios or Reddit threads, really just all over the place, and sometimes even in the real world.
Mason Amadeus:
And usually it's revolving around some kind of a mystery or conspiracy that you have to solve.
[Sound of heavy curtain being pushed aside]
Niles Sankey:
Hey, I don't mean to be weird about this, but were you just talking about creepy ARGs?
Todd:
Okay, cool. Yeah, cool. Yeah, right. Okay, great stuff. Hey, this has been fun. You two should look around. I got to go play the actual reality game of running this dive, all right?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. Sure, Todd. Thank you.
Todd:
Yep. Yep. Okay. And look, with your eyes, not with your hands.
Perry Carpenter:
I'm sorry, who are you?
Niles Sankey:
Yeah, I'm Niles Sankey. I worked on the game Asemblance.
Asemblance trailer voiceover:
I know what you're thinking, "Impossible. I should be dead." You're right, I should be, but here I am.
We initially built the chamber to simulate memories. We used it to free our minds, but as we went deeper, we found more, our fears, our hopes, the past, and our future. And then everything changed. We finally found the answers, but it wasn't what we expected. The memories took on lives of their own and the terrible things it showed us.
Now I want you to see.
Niles Sankey:
Part of the themes of Asemblance were sort of getting lost and dwelling on the past, and getting lost in your memories and being confused by your own memories and over-analyzing your memories at a very sort of high level. And so I was like, "Well, I want to present this to where people can feel like they're whining themselves deeper and deeper into this." It was maybe in the last month of development that I was like, "Well, I'm going to just throw in a bunch of these ARG sort of elements or I'm going to tease it where people are going to see clues and then hopefully they'll catch on," because people are pretty smart. And then I'll just... I'll string some clues along with these sources that are not the game. I tapped on external sites like Reddit, for example, and other websites.
And I'm just going to build this as though... this is crazy, I don't even know if people can solve this, but maybe it'll be years and they won't solve it because it's pretty esoteric, these puzzles, and I threw them together really quick. It was never usability tested. Yeah, I don't think I thought that far into it. I think it was just, "Well, let's see if this might be a total disaster and maybe not. Who knows? Let see, and this is fun." It's why we make games. Let me take a little chance here. And early on, it's funny, when Asemblance first came out, I never actually said there's an end game, it just... the game wraps up really quick. It's a very short experience. You can usually beat it in 45 to an hour. And the initial group of players, I remember watching a video review on the first day it came out, and this streamer finished the game and he was so pissed off, "That's it? That's it? This game sucks."
And I was like, "I guess that didn't work." And then I was like, "Well, maybe I should have told people, hinted that there's more." But we just rolled with it like, "Okay, well maybe it's not going to work out." And then people started to be like, "Wait a minute, after you beat the game, if you continue the game, there's something new here, there's something different." And then if you follow that, it keeps going. Wait, there's way more to this game. And it sort of blew my mind. A handful of streamers found this content and then they follow these rabbit holes and some of them kind of almost put their health in danger. There was a streamer by the name of I'm the Blue Ranger, I think Blue Ranger right now, but I'm still friends with him to this day and I met him through this experience. But we were watching him play, and one of the rules is I don't interact with the community when this happens, it's purely just observation.
And he was just on this thing nonstop and he and a handful of other streamers or gamers were slowly getting closer and closer, and it was just this great... it was actually the most entertaining entertainment I've had as a game developer or even just watching games and just watching the drama. And I wanted to like, "Oh, you're so close, just look over there," but we can't interact with him. And then to see him finally... you can find the video somewhere, it's on YouTube, it's still on his channel, of him discovering this final puzzle and he's just freaking out. And I remember exactly where I was. I was at a restaurant in Seattle, we were at Happy Hour and I was on my phone just watching it as I think, "He's going to do it. I think he's going to do it." And then he did it and I was like, "Oh my God, this is so cool. I'm getting to experience watching him sort of find this final puzzle."
Mason Amadeus:
With a game that has ARG components and all of this mystery, you're kind of creating this universe for someone to make and tell their own stories in and make their discoveries. How does the approach to that kind of thing come together?
Niles Sankey:
When I approach the more ARG aspect of Asemblance is, it was an intent to build a social experience, but that wasn't like, "We're playing the game in co-op or we're playing multi-player." Co-op and multi-player games are very cool, but there's a lot of those and I think there's something very unique and different about well, it's social, but it's not social where you're playing the game together. You're sort of connecting with other individuals on this mystery, this quest that has all this hopefully rich fiction that people absorb themselves into. But the truth of the matter is I didn't really know if the game would really work. It was kind of just a artistic experiment and it wasn't a massive success of a game, but it did have this core following and it was just a great experience as a developer.
Perry Carpenter:
Had you had any experience with ARGs? Had you grown up participating in anything like that before, whether that was hybrid online/offline, or not?
Niles Sankey:
No. In fact, I kind of even hesitate to use the term ARG with Asemblance because I'm not that familiar with ARGs in general. I kind of know what they are and I think they're cool. I think the idea of them are cool. I think even Halo 2, this was before I joined... had the I Love Bees ARG, and I wasn't really part of that. To be totally honest, I'm not really even much of a gamer. I sometimes struggle to force myself to play games. I really should be playing more games, after all, it's what I do for a living, but I'm not a huge gamer. I'm not a ARG person. But I love the idea of building these experiences.
Perry Carpenter:
It sounds like as you had that thread in Asemblance and you were able to watch people do it as a game designer, that could be a little bit of addictive to see people participate at that level because you have people that are looking at something that could be unsolvable and they're throwing themselves at it and giving potentially hundreds of hours and lots of mental calories to do that.
Niles Sankey:
Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
Is that something that you're hoping to replicate as you do games in the future, to have this other component that gathers communities around it?
Niles Sankey:
A hundred percent, yes. I mean, I'm sort of in the process of building another game right now. It's not developed enough to officially say anything about it, but certainly I think any game I release in the future would to have this... I consider it sort of a sort of staple to the art I build. And it's like you said, it's so rewarding and it does create these very unique social situations. It encourages these lasting sort of relationships and a lot of the people still will connect online. I'll see occasional Tweets, et cetera that like, "Oh you were... yeah, that's right. You were there when we first solved the puzzle. Remember when this happened?" Almost sort of humbling feeling that you can have this sort of very, as I see it, a positive effect on people's lives to bring them together.
Mason Amadeus:
For you, what are some of the things that go into design or telling a story that make you passionate? What are those elements that just really get you excited or the things you always want to bring to your stories?
Niles Sankey:
Yeah, it's tough, cause I'm not a very disciplined storyteller. I think to be totally honest, a lot of Asemblance or a lot of the games I built, I think I sort of picked this up from watching David Lynch movies where they have exceptional sound design and they're great visually, but they also present these situations or these stories that have open interpretation and they are sort of emotionally driven and they emotionally inspire people to speculate. The way I kind of see pure what art should be, which is what the art of it comes from your interpretation, how does it make you feel? What do you believe that means? What is the artist trying to say? How does it connect you with the artist or with other people around you that are also experiencing this?
And that's something I really love about... and it's not just David Lynch, but he specifically says publicly he will not explain what his movies mean. And I think that's the right call. It means that the movie will always be a piece of art that's open to interpretation and that connects people together and it connects people to the universe. And so my approach is definitely... I wish I was a more disciplined storyteller, but Asemblance is very... I would say it's definitely open to interpretation. I mean, I have my opinion. There's actually a... there is a story that exists, but the story itself isn't as important as allowing people to have an emotional interpretation.
Mason Amadeus:
I'm curious if you have thoughts on the concept of how people can take games and find and tell their own stories inside of them, whether that looks like a community figuring out ARG clues or people in open world games discovering and telling their own stories. Since it's an interactive piece of fiction, you kind of get your own story from it, even though it's a designed story.
Niles Sankey:
I used to tell people a story, I haven't told it in a while and I don't think I'll tell it now, but there was a story where I was playing Fallout New Vegas and it was not a pleasant experience because I just somehow broke the game really early on. But I loved telling the story to friends because it was kind of a hilarious... I don't want to call it a fail because how can a game be a failure if you're telling people this great story that happened in it, even though I ended up turning it off and never playing it again. But I was like, "Man, that was one of the best silly stories that I've had."
I think there was another one where back when we were developing Destiny, we were trying to look at other games that are similar and one of them was MMOs and I am not an MMO person, like I said, I'm not really a gamer at all, but I was like, "Well, I really should play World of Warcraft." And so we ended up playing. I was like, "Okay, let's set a night and then we're all going to play and then I'll see if I can learn something from it, I guess." So we were playing and one of the people we were playing with was sort of a... at work he... I was friends with him, I liked him a lot, but he was sort of like a technical guy that we would tell him like, "Hey, can you fix this thing for me?" Whatever like, "Please fix this. This is broken," whatever. But in the World of Warcraft, he was in charge, he was our leader, and I was like, "Damn, this is cool." Tim, who's I'm always bugging him, "Can you fix this for me? Fix this for me."
Now he's like, "Tim, what do I do? What do I do? I don't know what to do." I think I picked the mage or something, we were shooting fireballs and we were in the training area and we were all... I was following Tim and we were all like, "This is pretty cool." But then I looked over and I saw another player from a different group and I thought I saw him fighting an animal and I'm like, "I'm going to help him." I started doing my mage power and he was fighting a bat or something and attacked the bat and I killed it and I was like, "Yes, I helped that guy. This is so cool." And then the guy swiveled and looked at me and then I saw the words, "What the...?!?!" And I was like, "Did I do something wrong?"
And I was like, "Tim, I was trying to help that guy. He was fighting an animal." He's like, "Yeah, you just killed a pet he was trying to train." And I was like, "What? I thought he was trying to fight someone... or fight an animal. I didn't know that was his pet. Dude, what do I do? I'm so sorry. I feel so bad." And he's like, "Don't worry about it. I already apologized for you. He's cool. Let's move on." It's like this is so... this is such an awesome experience. I was like, "Tim, you're our leader. You're our savior." Anyway, I was like, "Man, I'll never forget that moment." That was such a cool, silly experience. I'll never forget that guy.
Perry Carpenter:
That's great.
Mason Amadeus:
That's a great example because the people coding WOW did not write that encounter. They did not create that moment for you.
Niles Sankey:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Mason Amadeus:
You had it and-
Niles Sankey:
Completely unique. Yeah, yeah.
Mason Amadeus:
I think, and talking about breaking-
Todd:
Hey.
[Everyone gasps as Todd startles them]
Mason Amadeus:
Jeez.
Todd:
If you guys are just going to play pretend NPR in there instead of buying something, I'm going to need you to hurry it up. Closing in ten.
Mason Amadeus:
Okay. Yeah, thanks, Todd. Anyway, Niles, thanks for talking with us, man.
Niles Sankey:
Yeah, sure. Just remember, don't disregard any detail. That detail could be the secret to unlocking the puzzle.
[Sounds of Todd ringing up items]
Todd:
All right. So The Ring DVD, you know I got the special edition of that, but whatever. Your loss. Two pounds of mixed Pogs and one bag of loose remotes. That's $16.28.
Matthew Bliss:
Okay. Oh, hey, Niles.
Mason Amadeus:
What?
Perry Carpenter:
What?
Niles Sankey:
Oh, hey Matthew. What's up?
Perry Carpenter:
You two know each other?
Niles Sankey:
Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
What are the odds of us all being here at the same time?
Todd:
Ah, great. Hey, you guys know you can go make friends outside after Matt here finishes paying for his stuff.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, but what are the odds?
Todd:
You don't have to do this in front of me.
Perry Carpenter:
So you know Niles?
Matthew Bliss:
Yeah, we did that game Asemblance stuff.
Todd:
Hello? Earth to nerds.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. Sorry, just one second.
Todd:
I'm trying to run a business.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. Yeah, I know, I know. But just one second. Did you help Niles make Asemblance?
Matthew Bliss:
No, no. I was just one of the main Discord users that was involved in unwrapping some of the mysteries.
Perry Carpenter:
Very cool. How many hours did Niles steal from you?
Matthew Bliss:
He stole an inordinate amount of my master's degree, I'm ashamed to say.
Mason Amadeus:
Niles talked a little bit about what the game was, but sort of in broad strokes as a developer's perspective, what was the game to you as a player?
Matthew Bliss:
The story of it taking up a large component of my Master's is because, and I remember this very specifically, I was doing some assignment work in the library of the university I was doing the Master's in, it was a Master's of teaching, and I got an email. Because I'd played the first game, there was some out of game components that required you to email an email address and it would automate a response, and that response would give you some information to then solve stuff in the game. And one of those emails sent something to me. I just got a very indirect email, had some information, but it had come to me without me asking for it.
So what did I do? I dropped the assignment and I started pinging all of the email addresses from the previous game. I didn't get anything. I probably spent like half an hour trying to ping those addresses multiple times to see if things would come out because you try to game it, right? There's no way there could be a human behind that. So you try and just send nothing at all or you send random words just to see if it needed an answer, but it wasn't checking the answer. But over the course of a few days after that, we got more messages, and those were links to audio files from SoundCloud. It was a bunch of random noises, but you take the spectrographic imaging of those sounds and it creates one quarter of a picture, because there were four sounds, and you put those pictures together and you've got a picture of a face. And then the Arecibo message that was sent out as a way to unpack human language by some bloke who was also pictured in that spectrographic image.
Once that's unpacked, you get a cipher from that Arecibo message that allows you to decrypt what is essentially dot based binary at the very bottom of that image because it's referenced by the Arecibo message. And you unpack that binary and it gives you a number, and then you... and this was the bit that made me feel like I was done. ARGs were my life after this point. It gives you a number and you put it at the end of every shortened URL that he used to send the sound files and it sends you to what was the result, which is a link to the soundtrack. When I'd sent that discovery, he then announced it on Twitter and it became available for everybody else to access before the game came out.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, so you unlocked that for everybody.
Matthew Bliss:
Yeah. Yeah. I had to check because I thought my memory might have been bad, but I've actually got the Tweet linked here that names me.
Perry Carpenter:
Was there a clue that said if you take those numbers and put them at the end of the URLs... was there something that would indicate that or did you just have to come up with that as a possible use?
Matthew Bliss:
There was no indication that that's what you should do, but we had a number and it had the same number of digits as every other number at the end of the shortened URL for every other link they'd sent.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay.
Matthew Bliss:
There was two links in the last email. Having two there means that you compare the two to the number and...
Mason Amadeus:
You're almost like hacking the game apart in a sense. You're almost looking for vulnerabilities or patterns or things that they haven't checked or what they might be looking for in every little detail of every little thing.
Matthew Bliss:
Precisely. And he is excellent at a red herring as well. One day an email went out, it was just an infrared image of what seemed like a body, maybe not, it was like red and yellow. I think I emailed him directly at some point after I'd finished the game and I said, "Was this anything?" And he's like, "No." And I was like, "God… Okay."
Perry Carpenter:
What is the emotion as you're going through that? Because you know that there is a game designer out there, but I'm wondering if you almost get caught up a little bit in the spookiness of it and feel like there is something way bigger than what Niles or Niles and a couple people put together.
Matthew Bliss:
There definitely is, and if we're talking about things like the ghost in the machine, I definitely think something like that existed in Asemblance: Oversight because I believe that Niles was hovering over a couple of buttons and as we progressed through the game, he would release updates to the game in order to gate our progress a little bit. I think that manipulating the game through updates meant that there were sometimes things that happened that were a little bit weird, and one of those weird things happened to me. I was trying to brute force the game and probably outside a time zone as well, that probably wouldn't have helped. It was so weird. I'll have to send you a link to the video, but essentially some of the aspects will lead you to specific endings to learn more information in Asemblance: Oversight.
And somehow I'd brute forced an ending that mashed up a bunch of things together, but it was really spooky because I had those mashed up endings in blurry kind of black and white intermittent oversaturated colors, but there's also a big head that has a big booming voice, and all I heard as it was shifting through those different endings is just... all the way through the video. I think I emailed Niles about that as well and he said, "No, that's a bug. We're going to patch it out in the next update." So what I got, I presume no one else has ever gotten and could very well have been a haunting of Asemblance: Oversight.
Perry Carpenter:
Nice.
Mason Amadeus:
In that moment you must have thought that you found something wild, and then sharing that with people in the community, the stories we tell about this kind of thing and that community interaction that sprung up around it, what was that like? Was it a slow trickle of people, and how did the community get along? Can you speak on that side of it, especially as the organizer?
Matthew Bliss:
Yeah, absolutely. It started slow. As I said before, Asemblance hasn't been the most popular game in the world, even though I take as many opportunities as I can to talk about it and bring it to people's attention, because it needs that attention. But there was probably... even over the three weeks, there was probably a core group that was there all the time, maybe nine to 10 people, and some of them were just people playing the game, but it was slow. There was a few people that would trickle in, and the more people that we got in, the more opportunities for answers as well.
So there was never any gatekeeping there. It was always welcoming whoever there was that wanted to join. We couldn't have had more than maybe 30 or 40 people in the Discord at that stage, but over time that has changed because there was an Asemblance labs sub-Reddit actually, and I posted the Discord link to that and I posted it on Twitter so that people can join. And so there's a form of discovery outside Discord itself for people to seek information. And as you can imagine, there's precious little information out there about the game because Niles would prefer it to be a fresh experience for anyone who joins.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. How much of the success in "solving it" is dependent on a community aspect? I mean, could one person who's super dedicated pull it off?
Matthew Bliss:
Look, always, but we're talking about multi-universal kind of thinking there. Yeah, practically, probably not. And I think Nile saw that with Asemblance 2 and through the updates and barring certain progress did stop someone who had an IQ of 999 and was just tearing through everything wouldn't be able to spoil it for everyone else. So I think that's why I think this community experience is really special that we had in that Discord because he was very hands-off with it, but he potentially was curating an experience for those people involved in those three weeks.
It really did take all of us to contribute to the answers that we needed. And that's why this ARG is really important to me because not only did it take a village to solve this thing, but the people that were involved in three weeks I think it probably was, those three weeks where we were diligently trying to solve all this stuff, that three-week period of time is a memory for the people who were involved at the time. Anyone trying to pick up the game now, it won't be the same for them, or it won't be the same as it was for us anyway.
Mason Amadeus:
What do you think is more impactful, or was more impactful or meaningful? Was it the sense of community formed with the people or was it really the game's puzzles? Is the community bigger than the game? Is the game bigger than the community for you personally? Where's that balance?
Matthew Bliss:
I think my answer has to be the combination of the two. As a community, it hasn't really had a chance to be the same as it was because Asemblance 2 came out, the Discord came together, we solved everything, but that community hasn't really come together again. But the way that this game has brought my mind into a state that searches for detail and to make inferences about that detail into a broader picture I think is the most valuable part for me. To my detriment sometimes. I will waste whole wads of time because of the components that we're in Asemblance 2 that lead me to understand how ARGs work and how people can manipulate information and bring us more stuff. From a cybersecurity perspective, it's great because you get an email and you scrutinize every single aspect of that, and all of a sudden your lake is completely empty because they cannot fish for anything.
But the other part of that is that you'll dive down rabbit holes that mean absolutely nothing. And the perfect encapsulation of this is last night I did a quick search, as I usually do because I did spend a lot of time trying to rip apart asemblancelabs.com. So Asemblance Labs as a domain has lapsed. I presume Niles doesn't want to keep it anymore, but it now has on a domain register, a review of... I don't even know what it is. Here it is, a reading of the first couple of sentences, "Asemblancelabs.com, updated 26 days ago from Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive, PO Box, blah, blah, blah. I did not know how many of you have had mom and dad's apple pie, but it's amazing. As a Christmas present for your grandchildren a few years ago, we made an image of them making the pie. I set up our kids lighting and clicked along as they worked and talked away. I loved every minute of making this. And we had our kids cherish the final image too."
Mason Amadeus:
Huh. Okay.
Matthew Bliss:
It gives you some information, it doesn't tell you enough about what's actually going on, but you search for a bit more information and the general contact is for annette'sacres.com, which then takes you to an HTML based website, which looked like it was built in 2004, and just has a bunch of random activities and images and not even a link to the Facebook page. Now I have to think about Annette's Acres for the next two years waiting for Asemblance 3, and wondering if this is going to be important or not. So that's what I mean by destroying my brain. I look for stuff and I find things, but whether it's relevant or not, I don't know.
Mason Amadeus:
I fully expected Niles to have said that he carefully planned and engineered the level of difficulty in all of this, and then to hear him say, "I wasn't really sure if this would work at all or not. We just put it in," was definitely a surprise to me. Because I would imagine crafting a game like this, crafting an ARG experience, seems like an extreme exercise in game design.
Matthew Bliss:
But I think that's why it was so good as well because it tells me that if he was very last minute with it, that he was there. He was looking at what was happening and trying to figure out which bits to should go where and whether that grew while we were playing aspects of that ARG or whether it was maybe a little bit before, I don't know. That kind of touch is important. Whereas a lot of people would think about how to automate it, how to make sure it persists across time, but Niles, I don't think was too concerned about that either, from what I can gather, because Instagram could get bought by TikTok and then disappear the following day and all of a sudden there's whole components of this game as well that disappear. All the website domain lapses and goes away. Like it's-
Mason Amadeus:
Or that's part of the ARG with the apple pie review and no one will know.
Matthew Bliss:
Don't do this to me.
Mason Amadeus:
I'm sorry, man.
Matthew Bliss:
I don't need it.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, everything is intentional.
Matthew Bliss:
Everything means something.
Todd:
Hey listen, this is getting weird. You're making this whole thing weird. Can you two please stop doing this? Thanks. And Matthew? Yeah.
Matthew Bliss:
Oh, oh.
Todd:
You going to pay for this?
Matthew Bliss:
Sorry.
Todd:
Or are you three trying to bore me to death so he can sneak off with it?
Matthew Bliss:
Sorry. Here you go.
Todd:
Thanks. Great. Cool.
Matthew Bliss:
I'll see you guys later.
Perry Carpenter:
See ya Matthew.
Mason Amadeus:
Later Matt. See ya.
Todd:
You two buying anything else? I'm locking this place down in 30 seconds whether you're in here or not.
Mason Amadeus:
No, I'm good. I'm just going to pick up that thing I called about a couple days ago.
Todd:
Right. You're already paid up. It's out front in a little nook.
Mason Amadeus:
Cool.
Perry Carpenter:
What?
Mason Amadeus:
Thank you.
Todd:
Tell your old man I said, "Hey."
Mason Amadeus:
Yep. Sure thing, Todd. I'll let him know.
[Mason and Perry step outside. Sound of a bell jingling as the pawn shop door closes and Perry & Mason step outside. It’s night… we hear crickets and noise of cars passing from a nearby road.]
Perry Carpenter:
Well, that was interesting.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. See, pawn shops can be cool. You never know what you're going to find if you keep your eyes open.
Perry Carpenter:
I mean, the odds of running into an ARG developer and then one of the major players in the community around solving it, that is actually pretty cool. And also Sara and Brittany from the Carterhaugh School, I actually think they hit the nail on the head when they talked about folk groups.
Mason Amadeus:
Right. And even though a published game or a story inherently has its own centralized cannon, people still form groups around it and they create and share their own stories and legends inside the scope of that world.
Perry Carpenter:
And that's folklore. Things like fan art and memes and music remixes and TikTok videos or even tattoos, they can all be forms of folkloric expression.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
Hey, not to be nosy, but what did you buy? This seems a bit sketchy.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh no. No, it's not sketchy at all, actually. You're going to love this. Hold on one second. I'll be right back.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay.
[We hear the sound of tires on gravel and a bicycle bell as Mason returns]
Mason Amadeus:
Boom. Amazing, right?
Perry Carpenter:
A bicycle.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, dude. Absolute bargain too.
Perry Carpenter:
Is it like special or something?
Mason Amadeus:
It is, wicked special, actually.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay.
Mason Amadeus:
It's blue.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay.
Mason Amadeus:
I like it.
Perry Carpenter:
What makes it special?
Mason Amadeus:
It's special to me.
Perry Carpenter:
I mean, no, that's cool. I'm not trying to rain on your freaking parade or anything. I was just expecting something I don't know, different.
Mason Amadeus:
It is also responsible for the deaths of more than 800 people.
Perry Carpenter:
There we go. I knew it was...
Mason Amadeus:
No, dude. I don't know. It's just a bike. It's blue. I like it. It's mine now, and that makes it special.
Perry Carpenter:
Is this supposed to be some kind of metaphor?
Mason Amadeus:
You're really in that mindset, huh? No, it's just a bike. I bought a bike at a pawn shop because I'm an adult and I can do that.
Perry Carpenter:
No. No. I know you. You're up to something. You even phoned ahead days ago, but then you wait until we're both here to pick it up?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. I'm going to spoil this puzzle for you, Perry. Straight up, forgot to come and get it until you texted me today and that's why I suggested we meet here. Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
Believable.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. Not so much ARG as ADHD, but it's worth it.
Perry Carpenter:
Well, I guess it worked out. We got some good conversations in, I think we got some fodder for some other episodes and we met some cool people.
Mason Amadeus:
Hey, sorry. Do you think this is... do you think this will fit in your trunk? I kind of didn't think about how it gets dark so early now.
Perry Carpenter:
Of course.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh uh oh. Hey, did you leave a light on?
Perry Carpenter:
Huh?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. Is there like a light in your trunk or something? It's like...
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. Wait, maybe I left it. I don't think…
[Perry fishing for keys]
let me... wait.
[Perry and Mason gasp. It sounds like something grabbed them and dragged them away at lightning speed. We hear the car honking rhythmically as the alarm sounds. Todd’s voice… laughing… menacingly]
Todd:
I told you to keep your eyes open. You never know what you might discover.
[All is quiet… the noise is subsiding and the peace of night returns]
Todd:
Looks like Perry and Mason may be unavailable. Let me take a whack at this end credits bit I found in Mason's backpack surrounded by off-brand snack wrappers and something labeled raccoon treats.
[Todd -- Clearing his throat and doing what sounds like a vocal warm-up exercise]
Okay.
[Theme music kicks-in]
Todd:
Thanks for listening to Digital Folklore. If you enjoyed this episode, the best way you can help us out is to tell a friend or a friend of a friend or a complete stranger. You can also leave a rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Thank you to Brooke Jennett, who you heard in the opening story. Brooke is part of the podcast Thirteen, which is a monthly anthology podcast featuring atmospheric, slow burn, spooky stories that will make you smile, break your heart, and have you wishing for a nightlight. You can find a link in the show notes of this episode.
And thank you to Rich Dale, AKA Mouth Almighty, for his performance as the mellifluous and sinister voice of Todd.
[in Menacing ‘monster’ voice]
Expect to hear more from Todd in future episodes.
[Returning to Todd’s announcer voice]
And of course, a huge thank you to our interview guests this episode, including Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman from the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. Sara in Brittany are award-winning folklorists and have such a deep breadth of knowledge. You'll hear more from them in an episode coming soon.
Thank you to Niles Sankey of Nilo Studios. Niles is an interactive experience designer in the gaming industry since 1999 with a lot of projects under his belt. You can play the game mentioned in this episode, Asemblance, on PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, or the Nintendo Switch right now. And thanks to Matthew Bliss, avid ARG solver and host of the Dead Drop Podcast. It's a 10 minute, twice weekly podcast featuring video game news analysis and industry insights.
As always, check the show notes for links and more details. Digital Folklore is a production of 8th Layer Media, which is really just Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus doing the best they can to learn everything about the fascinating world of folklore and bring it to you in an interesting, fun and accessible way. Digitalfolklore.fm.
Click to download a fully formatted PDF version of this episode’s transcript.

Hidden Meanings

You never know what you might discover if you just #KeepYourEyesOpen. Perry and Mason venture into their local pawn shop where they meet the mysterious proprietor, Todd, as well as a handful of very interesting people who happen to all be connected...

In this episode:

An opening story about a gamer who discovers their deceased father's ghost car and gets to race him again
A retelling of Ben Drowned, one of the most iconic creepypastas about a haunted copy of the classic N64 videogame Zelda: Majora's Mask.
An exploration of what constitutes a 'folk group' and how folklore can emerge from pop culture fandoms and other established media.
A discussion with the developer of an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) where various cryptic clues are spread across the entire internet.
An interview with one of the key members of the community who solved that ARG, discussing how that community came together.
Mason purchases a bicycle...