One day, I'll tell you the story about how the Poet snagged the Puppetmaster, the Sculptor and the Cultist up into a mad scientist project, all while Sploit got sucked into some kind of psychological testing project. Lesson: even a deep team bench can be devestated by the realities of people chasing a living (the flip side being, of course, it is so much easier if someone is paying you a wage and telling you it is your job.)

Your outpouring of friendly support is amazing, and has barely felt like stalking at all! I'm humbled by it and don't take any of you for granted. I've missed you too. The pre-production wheels are already in motion of making sure we earned that support, although the proof will be in the pudding.

When I saw the full moon in the sky during the pre-dawn drive to work, I knew it was time to shutter up Schmeldritch. Otherwise, people might wonder if Book Three has started or not, and you might as well say it has: once the interludes are over, we tend to get pretty quiet here in favor of EldritchErrors.com to help new players jump in. It is always so hard to avoid indulging in one brief William Castle moment before shuttering this place up, though. It will be the first Schmeldritch post new participants stumble into for a while. This time, I might even indulge and give myself two brief moments to set that stage.

It goes without saying that the Eldritch crew thinks I'm insane, they've grown used to the mad scientist cackle coming from my office from time to time. My expectations for "Red Moon Rising" are obviously higher than they were even for "Scream in the Mountains," and after that many of us were going "holy crap!" May I recommend that experienced participants change their tin foil hats daily during Book Three and leave it at that?

For new participants, welcome to the party, you're still fashionably early. Don't worry that Eldritch Errors has been going since last April, Book Three was developed with you in mind. It was also developed with Book One participants in mind, as well, so you'll have lots to discover together. You might even argue that new participants only missed the confusing, complicated setup to the real action.

Until we see each other again, I leave you with a quote from Lovecraft: "I hate the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous."

Lovecraft was an alternate reality game designer, a writer who believed his stories must be "devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax," stories that he unfolded like forensic investigations. He was also an Open Source advocate and loved implied share alike licensing (although I suspect the license I linked too is more restrictive than what he believed in.) He delighted when others lifted references from his work and equally delighted incorporating their references back into his work. He had an intimate relationship with his readers, because he was frequently the one mailing them the manuscript to read. It shouldn't be surprising that tabletop gaming and non-tabletop gaming have so embraced his work (now public domain) and played such a key role in preserving and extending it.

Some will argue that in my desire to look for artistic antecedents I'm stretching the definitions of some of these concepts too far for them to remain meaningful. Those critics might give me a push on "Open Source," as Lovecraft legacy is a massively impressive example of the long-term effects of a "share alike" mentality. They might even grudgingly give me the "alternate reality" argument as well ... Stephen King was certainly in an alternate reality that day in Providence. The argument will come down, I suspect, to the definition of "game design," and the criticisms of that perspective will be remarkably close to the critiques of my own work as well. People who like the more explicit end of gameplay sometimes find my work "more like a story" than like a game, while those who enjoy my work are more likely to also accept a less explicit definition of game.

Ponder What a Game Is

Narrativists have these same kind of rules. We can talk about three act structures, conflict resolution, the hero myth cycle and hundreds of other rules for writing good narratives. The difference between a narrativist and a game designer is often (but not always) whether or not you make those rules exposed to the audience. In a game, the rules and the players are very apparant, and the narrative frequently seems like a complete surprise to the audience even though it is self evident in an analysis of the rules (and our general concept of "fairness of rules".)

Others will have more stringent definitions of what constitutes a game. I find this particular construct useful primarily for those places where narrative and game must tango in unison. With those eyes, I look back at Lovecraft -- especially his letters -- and see an artist inventing new rules, pondering the new kinds of experiences that ruleset ("weird fiction") can create, and teaching those rules to other artists and fans. The size of this audience, while Lovecraft was alive, was exceptionally small. The proportion of people who learned the rules from Lovecraft to those who read his work was unusually high, especially from the viewpoint of "mass produced 20th century art". Because we have so many of his letters preserved and published, I can even the learn the rules directly from Lovecraft's informal coorespondence with his own fans and peers more than 70 years later.

Chickenthulhu!

A part of me likes to imagine he would have been mailing out bas-relief sculptures of unspeakable gods, accompanied by notes from the artist describing their horrible nightmares that lead to this work, all as rabbit holes for his new ARG called "The Call of Cthulhu." He probably would have argued vehemently in Unfiction META that he wasn't making ARGs at all, but was making "weird reality fiction" (WRF?!?) or some such, as Lovecraft loved him some good META.

Not many artists have played with this concept yet outside of the RPG universe (such as Delta Green); there's a surprisingly good very-short story about a Miskatonic Electronics modem that turns everything someone posts to flamewar material (Lawrence Watt-Evans' punnily-titled "Pickman's Modem"), but it was published in 1992 before the real age of the Internet had dawned. Eldritch Errors is an attempt to explore the question further, to experiment with the rules of "weird fiction" (as H.P. Lovecraft practiced and explained them) with the new tools of 21st century platformless storytelling, where the world and everything in it can be both part of the story and the delivery vehicle of the story.

Describing what Eldritch Errors is should frankly be the job of the other site; I'm cheating if I have to do it here. However, there is no client whose ultimate needs must drive this production, so the intentions of what we hope to craft stem from the experiments that we want to explore, not from a marketing need. Eldritch Errors didn't appear from a vacuum; it is the continuation of past experiments that also shed a light on the kinds of experiences participants have already had ... and what you might expect from Eldritch Errors in the future.

Production for the feature film Nothing So Strange began in late 1999; it finally started reaching an audience at festivals in January 2001 and we ended up self-releasing in 2003. Like many of the independent films I love, it isn't a perfect film, but it received warm critical praise instead of financial success. We used the phrase "documentary from an alternate reality" to describe the film, in great part to separate it from the excellent (but more comedic) work of Christopher Guest that gets labeled as mockumentary. People still call it a mockumentary anyway.

Long before the websites for Nothing So Strange served any promotional purpose, they were an intimate part of making the film during 2000. They were a repository of props and essays by performers. They were a meticulous assembly of conspiracy references by the producers. They were an immersive exchange between people who stumbled upon our bizarre experiment and those participating in it. Most of the performers in the film didn't even know what they were getting into, and our antagonist and victim are both public figures who didn't even get asked if they would like to participate.

So, for example, the cast might receive an email, telling them to show up at a certain place and time and hold a meeting where they draft a constitution and mission statement. When they arrived, Brian Flemming the director would already be setup and filming. During that experience, there is no cut or scene or script - the action is improvised, sometimes in ways that end up defining the most interesting moments of the film. The first rule was verite: it must be real. The cast was able to do this in part by keeping track of what was happening at the Citizens for Truth websites. Most of the participants weren't even professional actors, only a few experienced cast members were scattered through the mix. Flemming liked to pride himself on the fact you couldn't pick the professionals out from the non-professionals by their performances. He was on to something.

It was a natural extension to then take those people and drop them into real situations that are far more public, while also having some actors (like David James and Laurie Pike) act as much as producers as actors in the classic film production sense. There was a lot of inspiration drawn from Medium Cool by Haskell Wexler (including shooting at the Democratic National Convention among protestors 32 years after Wexler shot at another DNC in a different city.) The mixing of the fictive and the real, and their reactions to each other, was at the heart of both films. Sometimes the real even called me and asked me to make my fiction less realistic!

Even if we had never encountered alternate reality gaming, what we're doing with Eldritch Errors would have still been the next phase of that same experiment in Nothing So Strange. Now many of you are among that cast, and the experiences that people have in Eldritch as protagonists greatly resembles the way Flemming engineered the experiences of the cast in an unconventional film production dedicated to verite. Welcome to the new experiment.

Are You Experienced?

In 2002, Sean C. Stacey coined a little phrase, alternate reality game, to describe a grassroots game called Lockjaw, created by the players-turned-developers from a game (The Beast) for Spielberg's movie A.I. in the summer of 2001. Brooke Thompson should really tell you more about that period of time, since she was one of the developers of Lockjaw. I didn't really pay more than passing attention to that particular development (and the wonderful world of Unfiction and ARGN) until 2004 when a project we were running for Sharp Electronics started getting called an ARG by some of the participants.  I remember those early conversations with Michael Monello, one of the producers of The Blair Witch Project and another of the developers of Legend of the Sacred Urns. The ARG community had come to many of the same conclusions that we had about what was fun, but had invented a new lexicon to try describe it that was confusing to outsiders.

It wasn't until the same core team (part of which would go on to become Campfire NYC) worked together again for Audi that some of ideas expressed by the ARG community were part of the design concepts, and The Art of the Heist could thus be called "our first alternate reality game" in 2005 (at the least, it was the first that was intended to meet those expectations.) GMD Studios did one more classical ARG in 2006 with, in fact, the aforementioned Brooke Thompson. There are some things about the ARG metaphor that are fascinating after drinking deeply from that well (earning all of three sentences in Wikipedia history of ARGing.)

The most interesting of those ARGish perspectives is the gamic design principles of agency, and the subtle difference that creates in design when it replaces the broader category of interactivity. It isn't enough to let the audience wade into the story, they must be left with the feeling it wouldn't haven't happened if they hadn't waded into it. That intersection between game and narrative has always been one of my biggest fascinations, as I was technically a game developer before I was a web artist or online brand builder. We were big in Europe in the 1990s, natch!

I'll leave it to others to debate whether Eldritch Errors is or isn't an alternate reality game; it probably is at least a chaotic fiction (a slightly broader umbrella term that includes ARGs also coined by Stacey.) Either phrase does a good enough job of setting up the expectations of participants, even if neither definition fully explains what we're experimenting with. If I had to pick a label, though, I'd call Eldritch Errors an "immersive narrative experience" and draw part of that definition from Nathan Shedroff's work in experience design, especially some of his work in 1995 while at vivid studios, because we're all at least slightly influenced by what we play:

"The most important concept to grasp is that all experiences are important and that we can learn from them whether they are traditional, physical, offline experiences or whether they are digital, online, or other technological experiences. In fact, we know a great deal about experiences and their creation through these other established disciplines that can-and must-be used to develop new solutions. Most technological experiences-including digital and, especially, online experiences-have paled in comparison to real-world experiences and have been relatively unsuccessful as a result. What these solutions require is for their developers to understand what makes a good experience first, and then to translate these principles, as well as possible, into the desired media without the technology dictating the form of the experience."

Experience design is broad, so putting "narrative" before it lets you know it isn't a work of truth like our community experiences for PBS Online, while tacking "immersive" at the beginning helps make it clear that this isn't just a mediated experience (media is a part of it, but not the totality of it.) It still doesn't quite convey that there is still a game in there too, but then it also doesn't convey we want to scare you and make you learn something about computer security as well. You have to unbundle those concepts by realizing what makes up an experience ... or by becoming experienced.

"Nobody expects anything of a letter, or judges any man's style by one. Even when I write one by hand I pay no attention to rhetorick, but just sail along at a mile-a-minute pace ... If you were to analyse the language of this letter you would find it shot all to hell with solecisms and bad rhythms."

I can't let that stop me: there seems to be so much power in his letters, an easy elegence of style that smells suspiciously 21st century. In an essay that Lovecraft wrote defending his work "Dagon," for example, he penned a line that I think is among the most revealing glimpses into his soul as an artist: "There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression." Here's the story of one of those "seven persons" and a few of the tidbits from those letters that have shaped my view of Lovecraft.

"Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form -- and the local human passions and conditions and standards -- are depicted as native to other worlds and universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all." (Selected Letters, 1925-1929)

"The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality -- when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt -- as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?" (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)

"The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen ... If any unexpected advance in physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related by the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel." (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)

"No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax." (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)

Lovecraft was a creature of his letter writing, and deliciously so for all of us. What he gained from that experience was something he could even articulate. I wonder how many of us receive some similar benefit from our Internet existences:

"As to letters, my case is peculiar. I write such things exactly as easily and rapidly as I would utter the same topics in conversation; indeed, epistolary expression is with me largely replacing conversation, as my condition of nervous prostration becomes more and more acute. I cannot bear to talk much now, and am becoming as silent as the Spectator himself! My loquacity extends itself on paper." (Selected Letters, 1911-1924) 

"As a person of very retired life, I met very few different sorts of people in youth -- and was therefore exceedingly narrow and provincial. Later on, when literary activities brought me into touch with widely diverse types by mail -- Texans like Robert E. Howard, men in Australia, New Zealand, &c., Westerners, Southerners, Canadians, people in old England, and assorted kinds of folk nearer at hand -- I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge. Only correspondence could have effected this broadening; for it would have been impossible to have visited all the regions and met all the various types involved, while books can never talk back or discuss." (Selected Letters, 1911-1924)

Through his letters, it becomes easy for me to imagine what Lovecraft might have been like if he had lived today. The Internet might very well have combined a few of the things he was passionate about -- including correspondence, amateur journalism and literary community -- and turned him into a great model for what the rest of us could do with those same tools. I imagine he'd be a frequent and fiery participant in all kinds of online communities as well as one heck of a blogger. I imagine he'd be a defender of the Open Source movement and be Creative Commons licensing his work as "Share Alike". I also imagine that his interest in stories with the "care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax" would have also led him to be fascinated with alternate reality gaming and immersive narrative. Basically, the kind of guy I probably would have learned a lot from.

So I'm going to need your help. In the perfect world, we're writing all of each Evidence page except for the "speculation," where we're faithfully curating your various takes on the topics. This would be the place to help us do that, by posting your comments here with references on the best of that speculation. If you're feeling really froggy, start a Sentry Wiki page and submit that as your link!

We've got 28 different topics in 4 categories to take that first swipe at an Encyclopedia of Eldritch Errors, and our plan is to launch a handful of them each week. We might as well let you dump your speculation on the whole pile of them, though, so that you can imagine how they fit together as a set.

• PEOPLE: Devon Conrad, Bryce Droher, Spukhafte Fernwirkung, Arthur Lydney, Howard Philips, Dr. Elizabeth Riley, B.A. Saint-Feline, Peter Severn, Dr. U / eXu
• EVENTS: Telescope Collapse (11/88), Taylor Run Incident (10/99), Prophetic Packages (04/07), Alphabet City (05/07), Atlanta Ritual (08/07), Feast Before the Scream (10/07)
• ARTIFACTS: The Finger of Hope, Lucky 5, the Nightmare, the Scream, Trussed Swan HD
• GROUPS: Chorazos Cult, The Council, Dreamers, The Esoteric, Knights of Mars-Nodens, Miskatonic University, Providence, Sentries

Then, it's useful to illustrate what I think of as the difference between "what you know" and "what you have theorized" -- let's use B.A. Saint-Feline:

• YOU KNOW: Since April 2007, she has documented many of her nightmare prophecies through an elaborate series of Craigslist personals.
• YOU THEORIZE: She might suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity because she reports headaches around some kinds of technology.

Don't expect any of us storyteller-types to be chiming in on your speculation, but we might occassionally jump in and ask if you can pick one link that would let someone jump into the discussion on that particular theory.