The Books, The Alternate Reality Game, The Cultural Phenomena
Thin Liminal Lines
“Reality is often less interesting than fiction.”
“I would not have said this 20 years ago, but I’m going to say this now: make sure there is a very clear line between reality and fiction in your work. Make sure that you don’t present something as a real thing. Like, you have to believe to a certain extent that what you’re about to read or watch is real, at least for the time that you’re experiencing it. But what you have to realize is—and I don’t know where this happened—in the last 20 years, especially with the Internet, a lot of people have lost the definition between reality and fiction.”
This is what Joseph Matheny, the salt and pepper beard-having mastermind behind Ong’s Hat, told me last year at some point during our 2-hour call. These words have been coming up to me ever since, not only because the blending of reality and fiction is a running motif in ARGs and pseudo-ARGs, but because I’d be hearing the same point being made, albeit in a different combination of words, with everyone I spoke with for this piece.[3]
For readers who’re not familiar with the name, Ong’s Hat is the Ur Alternative Reality Game. The real deal; the Spacewar! of ARGs. In the mid-to-late 80s, when the Internet as we know it was still in its bulletin board systems-clad diapers and ‘polygons’ weren’t even a thing (at least not outside garages where self-taught devs tinkered with their Macintoshes), Matheny, a software engineer-cum-LARPer, got the idea to do a fictional story based around a mysterious place called Ong’s Hat, located in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
According to a mysterious brochure that started popping up in the late 80s called “Ong’s Hat: Gateway to the Dimensions,” – which, I imagine, is not unlike something scientologists were handing out back in the day – bespectacled scientists were joined by a group of mystic scholars, who discovered an alternative reality via a device called “the egg”.
“You have been searching for us without knowing it,” the pamphlet began, some ten-plus years before the same words would be uttered by Trinity, Neo’s personal, latex-clad White Rabbit. It claimed to know “you, your interests, deeds and desires, works and days” and where you hang your tighty whities.
It reads like Isaac Asimov high on couch syrup, if he were tasked with writing a Star Trek-inspired LARP. There are mentions of extremist Shiite revolutionary philosophy, lucid dreaming, exotic pharmacology, and some Sanskrit thrown in for good measure. At one point, it drops this: “Unlike Baudelaire who pleaded, “Anywhere! – so long as out of this world!” we knew where we were going. Ong’s Hat has indeed vanished from New Jersey, except for the hidden laboratory deep in the backwoods where the gate ‘exists.’”
While setting up a wide net of somewhat-connected puzzle pieces took a while before Ong’s Hat conspiracy-turned-ARG escaped the confines of dorm rooms and dim-lit cafes, Matheny was ready to mindfuck with self-proclaimed “eggheads” on a level unheard of since Orson Welles’ legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
According to a guy named David, who witnessed Ong’s Hat in its peak (as told to Gizmondo): “You kind of knew it was some kind of game, but there was this level of question that was left open. It would bleed into your life.”
Similar to contemporary ARGs, Matheny and his collaborators’ brainchild pulled in every existing medium at the time. Booklets (some sent all the way from Hong Kong, allegedly) to what would become the Internet. Hired actors who would phone you in the middle of the night after reaching a certain point in the puzzle. An AI-like bot created to direct the game, which, in a stranger than fiction manner, materialized as a G-Man-like persona that started taunting Matheny.
But more than the sum of its parts, it was this make-belief slowly bleeding into your life, immersion getting out of hand, then, which attracted me to Ong’s Hat. That there was a handful of like-minded individuals, crazy and idiosyncratic enough to pave the way for ARGs like The Blair Witch Project and Petscop, before the creepypastas and GameTheory’s MatPat—doing this for the thrill of it, all gas no brakes, to see how far the barely visible line separating reality and fiction can be stretched and bent before it snaps like a rubber band.
“I was actually trying to achieve the crossover between reality and fiction,” reasoned Matheny with academic-cum-mad scientist curiosity at the time. He told me how Greeks used to do it back in the day with theatre, entire audiences believing they were witnessing gods on that stage.[4]
It’s hard to say whether Matheny’s make-belief was too smart and convincing for its own good, or simply that the game’s participants happened to enjoy sporting hats made out of tinfoil a bit too much. It was an era of no disclaimers; a time before you could find any answers on Reddit, a time before Pizzagate, and nobody—even Matheny himself, making it all up as he moved along with Ong’s Hat—knew any better.
For him, it was a mere matter of “want[ing]to see what would happen”. To see how deep this paranormal rabbit hole could go and how far his followers were willing to roll along. But with no actual endgame in sight—no hands or message threads to guide you along — it was a matter of time before someone lost grasp of that thin liminal line between reality and fiction.
