Series: December 2007 Archives

There was a moment when I could have killed the comment: the moment I confirmed it again for the fact checker. We knew we'd start talking about it more explicitly in 2008, but was a minor detail in an unreviewed article the right place to let such a critical detail about our baby first appear, after only hinting at it before? How would I write this very post, to frame the same information in our own voice? I could even imagine the hypothetical Unfiction thread to go with the hypothetical article. Then I confirmed for Wired's fact checker that yes, we do intend both graphic novels and a television show as part of the revenue generating plans for Eldritch Errors. Participants in Eldritch deserve at least a little more detail to go with that unexpected revelation, as we've kept a few critical concepts under wrap for a year now. 

The Quiet Zone is one of the strangest chunks of real estate in North America, and an "alternate history" of how it came to be lies at the heart of the tale we're asking participants to dive into with Eldritch Errors. If Book One was in part inspired by real Sentries, then Book Two was inspired at least in part by the Guardian of the Quiet, Wesley Sizemore, an eye witness to the 1988 telescope collapse in Green Bank. This recent PBS & Wired Science segment on the Quiet Zone (noticed by Varin) explores the Zone further.

I've been writing for the last month about H.P. Lovecraft, meandering from talking about his work to his scientific leanings to his letter writing. It has made me look like such a tremendous geek (or at least that's what my commercial clients tell me.) Part of that was certainly to help illuminate what I mean when I say that Eldritch Errors is inspired more by the author than his works, but I also want to set up a more radical proposition. Lovecraft was working with ideas from the 21st century, but he was forced to explore them with 19th and 20th century technologies (such as letter writing instead of email.)

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.

Explaining what Eldritch Errors is presents challenges, both for those of us crafting the experience and for the participants involved in it. It is similar to a number of things: you can talk about how it is both like and unlike an alternate reality game, or how it is both like and unlike live action roleplaying games. Each of those labels works on some level for setting your expectations on the kinds of experiences you might have participating in Eldritch Errors, but they might also suggest things that aren't as true.

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.