Cults, Games, Platforms and Politics: A Primer for 21st Century Social Movements

This Grey Briefing was developed and circulated to select audiences in July, 2019.

It predicted the rise of alternative belief communities such as QAnon, their role in politics, the use of games and game-like dynamics in social movements and the growing importance of video games in entertainment, media and culture.

Its core insights remain pressing and are still not widely understood, even if some aspects of the Briefing are slightly dated (automation as a driving concern, Andrew Yang’s presidential bid, Coronavirus, etc.).

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Cults, Games, Platforms and Politics: A Primer for 21st Century Social Movements

1. A Time of Disorder

Hassan Ibn Sabbah, Master of the Castle of Alamut and founder of the Order of Assassins, was born in Northern Iran during a period of extraordinary social and religious upheaval. Political order was decaying, propped up by the military might of the Seljuk Turks and a rotting alliance with a string of corrupt princes and Sultans stretching from Cairo to Baghdad. Fractions and counter-movements had sprouted up everywhere, but none were able to consolidate their power or offer serious opposition to the establishment. 

Hassan changed this forever. A follower of a splinter group of Islamic scholars called the Ismaili’s, he dedicated himself to overthrowing the Seljuk rulers and committed himself to the reclamation of a “pure” political and religious life. Over a period of 300 years, he and his Ismaili assassins waged one of the most successful guerrilla campaigns in the history of warfare. His agents were everywhere, executing a series of daring public assignations of key political figures that sent ripples through the empire, ultimately destabilizing political alliances and leading to the collapse of the regime. In doing so, he became the father of modern suicide attacks, a mastermind of political assassinations at scale and the architect of theologically weaponized guerrilla warfare.

His tools of revolution were called the fedayeen, an elite group of young men whose name means “those who sacrifice themselves.” The Fedayeen were known as “living knives” and were selected from broken homes, many whom had been humiliated under Seljuk rule, and were given a rigorous training regime which combined fighting, parkour, camouflage, acting, diplomacy, spying, subterfuge, languages and religion. They were kept apart from the rest of his followers in the Castle of Alamut, where Hassan’s word was law, and subjected to intense discipline. Hassan inspired such intense dedication in them, acting as both a prophet and a father figure, that they begged to sacrifice their lives to fulfill his command. 

How did Hassan create such a following? What could he have told these young men that would cause them to endure the trials of their training, living apart from their peers and the comforts of domestic life, begging for Hassan to give them a mission that would cause them to spend years in camouflage, living in the court of their enemies, only to be subject to torture, humiliation and death after killing their target in the most public and surprising way possible?

The answer was 11th century virtual reality.  The secret to Hassan’s devoted and highly effective followers, followers that would literally throw themselves off the rafters at his command (giving rise to the expression “leap of faith”), was the walled gardens behind the Castle of Alamut.

Aside from being a gifted strategist and orator, Hassan cultivated a legend that Allah had given him the power to send men to heaven to taste the fruits of Paradise, then bring them back again without having to die. His “key to heaven” was only revealed to the most devoted and proven Fedayeen, and only before being given a mission to show them what was in store for them upon completion. 

But Hassan didn’t actually have this power. What he had instead was a clever simulation, artfully rendered through theatre. Hidden in the walled gardens behind his palace, he secretly built a picture perfect replica of Heaven as described in the Holy Qur’an; crystal pavilions made of gold and gems, a garden of the most beautifully scented flowers,  streams flowing with milk, honey and wine, the most delicious foods, tamed animals and, most importantly, the love of the Houri’s, beautiful young women dedicated to the pleasure, affection and entertainment of the chosen ones.

Here is how it worked. The lucky Fedayeen, having been granted access to this simulated paradise thanks to Hassan’s generosity, were given massive doses of hashish, eaten as balls, then secretly transported into these gardens while unconscious, after being told they would awaken in Paradise. Hassan’s trained “houris”, literally the most beautiful women in the land, were raised from a young age and sequestered in the gardens, taught only the delights of poetry, music, debate and dance in a training regimen every bit as strict as the Fedayeen’s. They were slaves whose sole purpose was the administration of Hassan’s twisted theatre in a bid to convince the Fedayeen soldiers that they were, indeed, actually in heaven.

After a night of drinking wine for the first time, gorging themselves on the finest foods they had been forbidden to eat, and enjoying the sexual pleasures of beautiful, artful young women under the lingering influence of hashish, the soldiers would be drugged again, pass out, and returned to the castle in secret. They awoke anew in their barracks, flush with the pleasures of the senses, convinced of the divine power of Hassan and ready to do anything to experience the pleasures of Heaven again.

“When the fedayeen wake up again in Alamut, their first feeling will be regret that they’re no longer in paradise,” writes Vladimor Bartol in his 1940’s fictional account of Hassan and the Assassins of Alamut. 

“They’ll be able to mitigate that regret by talking about the experience with their colleagues. In the meantime, the poison of the hashash will be at work in their bodies, awakening an irrepressible desire to enjoy it again. That desire will be inseparable from their assumptions of heavenly bliss. In their mind’s eye they’ll see their beloved girls and virtually die longing for them. The erotic humors will regenerate in their systems and awaken new passion verging on madness. Eventually this condition will become unbearable. Their fantasies, their stories and visions will infect their surroundings completely. Their churning blood will blot out their reason. They’ll no longer reflect, they’ll no longer make judgments, they’ll just pine away with desire. We’ll provide them with comfort. And when the time comes, we’ll give them their assignment and promise them that paradise will be open to them if they carry it out and perish. They’ll look for death and they’ll die with a blissful smile on their lips …”

Hassan manipulated his followers into believing that they had experienced Paradise and only he could transport them back again, this time forever… but only after fulfilling a suicide mission to accomplish his goals.

Hassan created a force of devoted, trained killers which he used to unleash a wave of assassinations that toppled one of the most developed and sophisticated empires in history, creating a dynasty that lasted 300 years and stretched across the Middle East, and gave rise to the legend of the Assassins. His legacy outlived him and succumbed only after the arrival of the Christian Crusaders to the West and the Mongol Hordes to the East, which caused internal struggles and led to the dissolution of the group.

He legacy lives on, however, as a template for the asymmetrical war fighter, “a nimble, unpredictable upstart relying on a relatively small but close-woven network of self-sacrificing agents on the one hand, and a massive, lumbering empire on the other, put constantly on the defensive and very likely creating new recruits for its adversary with every poorly focused and politically motivated offensive step that it takes.”

2. Today’s Alamut

“A period of rapid transformation that destroys old coping mechanisms… and creates new demands before new coping strategies can be developed.” - The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi

Why is the story of Hassan and his fearsome assassins relevant for us today? Like the 11th Century Caliphate, the contemporary global condition is deeply enmeshed in an interlocking web of commitments, complexity, momentum and machinations. We face a looming climate crisis, persistent social inequality, emerging technological unemployment, and a deep crisis of meaning which leaves many young people feeling hopeless and adrift.

Our global governance and industrial systems are stretched to the max and have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to transform themselves fast enough, despite our growing awareness of the unfolding crises that they both suffer from and are the cause of. As the archaeologist Joseph Tainter elaborated on in “The Collapse of Complex Societies”, the interdependent nature of complex societies drives an ever increasing ratcheting up of complexity and cost, from which it is nearly impossible to return. When the cost of maintaining the system exceeds its ability to reproduce itself, it collapses. “There is no retrenchment possible; removing a keystone will bring it all down, and every stone is a keystone.”

Many young people feel this and are experiencing a sense of hopelessness and resignation about their ability to do anything about it. In one of his last works before committing suicide, the British cultural critic Mark Fisher called this “capitalist realism”. People implicitly understand the power structure that capitalism imposes upon them and the nature of our current condition, he asserted, but they have no viable means to change it. Thus they are forced to accept it. As the union organizer in Boots Riley’s near future dystopia Sorry to Bother You observed, “If you get shown a problem but you have no idea how to control it, then you just get used to the problem.” Capitalist realism acknowledges the emergency we are in while simultaneously neutralizing any possible response to its resolution.

One of the consequence is what Fisher calls “depressive hedonia”; the inability to pursue anything other than pleasure, combined with the inability to actually derive pleasure from anything. This is illustrated well in Riley’s film. The main characters pass their time complaining about the oppressive state they are in but have no options to escape or transform it. They are supremely “woke”, as represented by Cassius Green’s (“Cash is Green”) girlfriend, who sports large earrings with phrases like ““Bury The Rag / Deep In Your Face” (a reference to the “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, a Bob Dylan song about murder and racial injustice) or “Kill, Kill, Kill / Murder, Murder, Murder”, all while twirling a sign on the street advertising various local businesses. Given the choice between sublimating themselves to lifelong contracts in the forced labor camps of “Worry Free, Inc.” or scraping by in meaningless, demeaning jobs, they take the jobs, live in their family’s garages, wax philosophically, and pass their time at the local bar.

Automation, globalisation and the climate crisis represent different facets of the challenges we face. Many young people acknowledge this, realize their inability to do anything about it and experience a crisis of faith similar to the young Fadeyeen in Ibn Sabbah’s 11th century Persia. And like the Fedayeen, hundreds of millions of young people, many of them are men, are looking for someone (or something) to provide a context for their lives. Some, indeed, are turning to classical forms of religion, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, but many, instead, are turning to video games.

3. Games that Matter

“Haven’t you noticed? The games are the economy now.” - Stealing Worlds, Karl Schroeder

Video games are the new Hollywood.  In economic terms alone, video gaming exceeds traditional entertainment by several multiples. In 2016 the global film industry generated $36 billion USD in revenue. The entire global music industry generated $16 billion USD. Gaming, on the other hand, $104 billion USD, more than the entire film and music industries combined by a factor of two.

Triple A title games like Call of Duty 4 routinely take home a billion dollars or more within the first week of their release, exceeding blockbuster films like Avengers: Infinity War and Star Wars: The Force Awakens by several multiples. Grand Theft Auto V made $800 million USD in its first day of release alone.

But big titles like Call of Duty account for just under half of the total gaming revenue. Mobile games like Fortnite and Candy Crush account for the other half, despite being mostly free games to play. Fortnite, for example, is a free game with over 250 million regular monthly players (equivalent to 75% of the United State’s entire population, or one third of all of Europe). At its peak, Fortnite generated over $200 million USD in revenue a month. Pokemon Go, a game which launched in 2016 (ancient history for mobile games), added $7.5 billion to Nintendo’s stock price and still makes over $2 million a day in 2019. 

The scale of participation isn’t just financial, either. Pokemon Go users have collectively walked 23 billion kilometers playing the game, a distance from here to Pluto and back. That is equivalent to nearly 700 billion calories burned (or 450 million kilos of weight loss). One could even argue that Pokemon Go was the single most effective, unintentional public health intervention in the history of recent medicine. 

Online social games are also becoming a major source of cultural production and community formation. Global television viewership accounted for nearly 1.2 billion hours of consumption a month in 2018. An estimated 2.5 billion people play video games on a regular basis, for an average of 25 hours a month each, resulting in over 65 billion hours of games played each month… over 50 times the amount of time spent watching television. YouTube and Twitch alone have the same monthly viewership of all television combined… just for people watching videos games, not even playing them.

As the gaming population grows and games become a larger part of everyday life, it is likely that content,  mannerism and references of online culture will exert an ever growing influence on society at large. Although hours spent per day is not a direct measure of cultural influence, examples such as the Fortnite dance, dabbing, and other markers of cultural trend setting are growing. Social media supports and accelerates the cultural impact of these trends. Viral movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and others already are not directly related to gaming, but are powerful examples of how online social movements form. At a growth rate of nearly 10% a year, not counting the meteoric rise of e-sports (which have more viewers than the NHL and NBA combined), it is likely that the future of youth culture will be strongly influenced by, and enacted in, online social spaces.

How will this interact with the challenges of globalization, technological unemployment, climate collapse, and the crisis of legitimacy experienced by many people and institutions? We are already beginning to see early effects on labour force participation as a leading indicator.  “Kinky labor supply” is a phrase coined by Andrew Kortina and Namrata Patel to describes the sharp reduction in young men looking for jobs in the United States.

The number of young men working or looking for work has declined significantly over the past few decades. An Atlantic article in 2016 called these “The Missing Men”, noting that one in six men in America of prime age (25–54) are either unemployed or out of the workforce—10 million men in total.

Economists call this “labor force participation”. Although many explanations for the drop have been offered (ranging from laziness to automation and offshoring), there is mounting evidence that the drop is caused at least in part by a combination of lower jobs available, lower job quality, and video games. The possibility of a fulfilling, independent economic life is prohibitively expensive for many, high quality, long lasting, emotionally rewarding video games can be had for relatively little money, and the social value of luxury signaling is so far beyond the economic means of most that they are turning to other sources of fulfillment instead.

Put simply, young men are staying at home, sharing expenses or living with their parents, and playing cheap video games instead of looking for jobs. According the US Census Bureau, young men without college degrees replaced 75 percent of the time they used to spend working with time on the computer, mostly playing video games. Andrew Yang points out in The War on Normal People that young, unemployed men without college degrees used to spend spending 3.4 hours per week playing video games. This between 2003 and 2007 and by 2014, the average amount of time spent rose again to 8.6 hours per week. This is a massive shift in time spent and some economists estimate that this is responsible for up to 30% of the drop in labor force participation. 

Aside from economics, this makes psychological sense. Economists Aguiar and Hurst write that, “despite stagnant wages, declining employment rates, and an increased propensity to live with their parents, younger men report increased happiness during the 2000s. This contrasts sharply with older men, whose satisfaction fell along with their relative earnings. We see the life satisfaction results as indirect evidence that younger men experienced relatively little decline in the consumption and greatly valued their improved leisure options.”

In other words, staying at home playing games is more socially and emotionally fulfilling that flipping burgers at the mall. Young men know they’ll never be able to afford a home, a nice car, or a fancy vacation and are focusing on the virtual rewards of video game achievements instead.

Social games create a powerful sense emotional engagement and can act as a profound scaffold for experiences of purposeful community . “Video games are fun and communal,” comments Andrew Yang. “They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment… You experience a continuous feeling of progress and accomplishment.”

Anecdotal evidence supports this observation. Describing his experience competing in a top World of Warcraft guild, the player “wincy” wrote, “I was in a number 1 guild… It felt so amazing… I imagine I’d feel the same if I’d won the Olympics, as silly as that sounds. Ultimately it was a hollow victory but when I think back … [this] was the most intense positive emotional experience of my life. Not my kid being born, not getting married. My mind was convinced we were in a war against an insurmountable foe and we won.” 

Games researcher Nick Yee observed this sense of shared commitment in his research at Stanford, where he observed that gamers often developed a deep sense of loyalty to their online friends and gaming groups, coming back again and again out of a sense of social responsibility to help out their peers. Unlike traditional single-player campaigns, multiplayer social games like Fornite a powerful place for socialization for many the world’s young people. And by “place”, I mean literally a place.

“It’s like going to church, or the mall,” writes game developer and tech journalist Owen Williams, “except there’s an entire universe to mess around in together.” New York Times journalist Jennifer Senior describes how her son tells her that “he’s going to hang out with his friends” when he gets online to play, enacting many of the same rituals teens around the world have done in malls, parks and plazas for decades. “Jumping into a game of Fortnite is paying a social call, the equivalent of dropping in on a cocktail party.” Gaming, she observes, fills a crucial gamp in many children’s social lives, acting as a kind of third-place for them to be themselves. 

“Middle-class children today don’t have much freedom to find such places. They’re rigidly scheduled and aggressively sheltered — parents of my generation are more inclined to roll their children in bubble wrap and tuck them on a high shelf for storage than allow them to wander off to parks or shopping malls on their own. Gaming is their form of self-determination, a means to take control of their constricted, highly regimented lives.”

Finally, Wall Street Journalist Betsy Morris points out that Fortnite "is not only reshaping how boys spend their time, but how they communicate — it acts essentially like an open phone line.” A study by financial education company LendEDU of over 1,000 Fortnite players earlier this year found that most players spend at least 6-10 hours playing the game per week. By comparison, the average active user of Snapchat or Instagram spends roughly 30 minutes per day on the platform. Half of teens say playing Fortnite helps them keep up with their friends, according to a study from Common Sense Media and 44% say they have made a friend online through the game. 39% even say that have become closer to their family members by playing the game together. Contrary to stereo-types, Nick Yee found that 80% of players regularly play the game with someone they know in real life, as well, often including spouses, family members, siblings and friends. Fortnite clearly isn’t just a game, it’s a place, and it’s a place where new forms of social meaning are being forged.

4. The Political Economy of Meaning

“Ordinary reality rarely requires such full participation and attention. Ironically, by faking reality, we somehow made it feel more real.” - Alexa Clay, Aeon Magazine

If video games clearly offer a template for making meaning that contemporary employment, religion, and media does not. But what kind of template are they offering? Can they offer transformational narratives or just distracting ones? Put more directly, can massive online social games become a a vehicle for the kind of transformational social change necessary to tackle the crises of our time?

Game designer Ralph Koster asserts that games are puzzles and its fun to solve puzzles. The deliberate design of these puzzles, the structured discovery of their patterns and the mastery of their solutions is what provides the dopamine response and satisfaction derived from games. But the transformative potential of play exceeds simple problem solving. Play forms a vital part of mental development and learning, and playful activities are essential aspects of learning and creative acts. As Jane McGonigal notes in her research on Alternate Reality Gaming (an early form of Live Action Role Play, or LARP’ing), “players feel more capable, more confident, more expressive, more engaged and more connected in their real everyday lives” as a result of engaging in structured narrative play in game-like environments. This suggest that play can also be transformative, potentially even subversive. 

MIT’s Mary Flanagan calls games designed to explore social themes “activist games”. 

“Activist games can be characterized by their emphasis on social issues, education, and, occasionally, intervention. In other words, they are not purely conceptual exercises, but rather, games that engage in a social issue through, most commonly, themes, narratives, roles, settings, goals, and characters; and less commonly, through game mechanics, play paradigms, interactions, or win states to benefit an intended outcome beyond a game’s entertainment or experiential value alone.”

Nordic LARP’s are the example par-excellence of activist gaming. In their pioneering book on Nordic LARPs, Jaako Stenros and Markus Montola observe that LARPing automatically generates temporary, imagined communities that let participants simulate new forms of social relationships and external conditions.

“As these games can portray any world or society imaginable, they are a natural tool for studying questions such as what kind of a world is possible, what the world should or could be like – and what our world actually is like. LARPs are great at showing alternatives, both good and bad. It is one thing to postulate an alternative society on paper; constructing and living in one is another thing entirely. The compelling experiences of both utopian and dystopian ideas that such simulations offer are why LARP lends itself so easily to critical play.”

LARPs like the game Europa imagine a reverse refugee experience, for example, re-imagining the history of Europe where instead of Yugoslavia falling apart it was the Nordic countries who were at war. Refugees from Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark fled the religious and ethnic conflict and sought safe haven in an imaginary Balkan country called “Orsinia”. Like most LARPs, Europa was played in person, through a kind of dynamic, role playing theater experience. Players played both refugees seeking asylum and Orsinians border guards who’s job was to evaluate who was worthy of acceptance. By acting out these roles, the game exposed players to the arcane bureaucracy of the asylum system, the strangeness of being a foreigner in a foreign land, the powerlessness associated with being lumped together as an anonymous ethnic immigrant, and more. As a result powerful, transformative experiences were had by players on both sides. 

“Almost ten years after Europa I still recall vividly the moment when a Norwegian woman tried to drown herself by swimming out into the icy waters of the Oslofjord…” wrote one participant in Stenros and Montala’s book. “I have never been so close to my emotions during a LARP before. I think I started to cry more or less spontaneously about ten times during the game… Furthermore, I remember a lot of more diffuse feelings such as the happiness of biting into a piece of freshly baked bread, after starving for several days, and finally getting a chance to shower after more than a week with no washing at all. You learn to survive with very little, and to appreciate the small things.”

“The social framework of the game seems to encourage an organised and sustained form of empathy,” writes Alexa Clay in her article on transformative LARP’ing in Aeon Magazine. “You identify with your character, and then you start to understand her world, and the world of others around you. This process can take you to some remarkably deep places.”

Other LARP’s explore different, but equally powerful themes. The Wayfairer Experience allowed participants to change genders, roles, and status in a world where gender was more fluid. The game “allows you to play with ideas of masculinity and femininity in ways that aren’t necessarily traditional,” says its co-creator. The Tribunal, a Nordic LARP developed by J. Tuomas Harviainen, explored totalitarianism and how everyday people often end up supporting terrible acts of exploitation and control by turning on each other. Games like Fall of the Jaguar Gods explore the social response to climate change in the context of an imagined Mayan apocalypse festival taking place in the middle of a severe drought.  

Everything from marriage to family, war and refugee crises, social relationships, economic models, and group cooperation can be explored through LARP’s; often with lasting emotional effect. When done well, LARPs act as a form of shared ritual that prototypes alternative social arrangements. They are temporary worlds superimposed on the everyday world, where characters “slip under foreign skins…. discovering what it is like to be someone else, a refugee, a Mafioso, a space pirate – in a coherent, thought-out setting with others who share and strengthen the experience.” 

The anthropologist Victor Turner called this “psychophysical re-training”, a process by which participants remove themselves from their every day selves and temporarily re-build themselves and the world as something new.  “To make believe is to make belief” in these spaces, a technique which has formed the backbone of serious ritual for thousands of years. The effect can be tremendously powerful, altering not just the game world but people’s actual sense of themselves and what is possible in the ‘real world’.

5. LARPs as Social Movements

“The Rewilding isn’t just a game, I do know that. The frames are a front for something.” - Stealing Worlds, Karl Schroeder

Clearly games, especially immersive alternate reality games like LARPs, have the potential to transform the dynamics of competitive problem solving into something much more profound. As public familiarity with immersive social experience like Meow Wolf, Punch Drunk, Sleep No More, Star Wars theme parks and others continues to grow, I believe they will begin to naturally blend together with the world of online social gaming at scale. Real world AR games like Pokemon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite have already demonstrated the tremendous influence that location-based, alternate reality gaming can have. Yet none of these games have yet to produce a full cross-over of transformational, LARP-style social immersion with augmented reality game dynamics. What might such a technology enabled augmented reality social LARP enable?

Science fiction author Karl Schreoder has imagined how these trends might unfold and intermingle in the mid-term future in his 2019 novel Stealing Worlds. The story takes place in a North America 30 to 40 years in the future, eviscerated by technological unemployment, subject to low grade ecological collapse, adrift in meaninglessness, proliferating with cheap augmented reality glasses and even cheaper IoT devices. Ubiquitous blockchain systems tag and track everyone and everything, managed by narrow AI and Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO’s), which act as the operating system on top of which most social and commercial exchange occurs.

The main character, on the run from mysterious corporate forces, escapes into an alternate world lived online through LARP-style augmented reality games. Each game represents a complete story universe overlaid onto the real world, involving a mix of virtual and real world tasks. Each game also has its own currency that can be exchanged for physical goods and services in the real world. As the main character is drawn deeper into these worlds she ascends to the highest levels of the game system and becomes part of a guild who create (or “frame”) the worlds and their dynamics.

Although the story draws from previous science fiction stories such as Bruce Sterling’s Maneki Neko, it is perhaps the most comprehensive vision of transformative AR enabled LARP’s that I have ever read. What is interesting about Schroeder’s vision is the combination of the gig economy, ubiquitous sensors, automation, and augmented reality. He paints a compelling picture of how people’s need for meaning and participation could be harnessed to real world economic dynamics, shifting power balances and ultimately our relationship to the natural world.

Clearly we don’t have ubiquitous IoT tags on every object, ultra high resolution AR glasses, or algorithmic world building AI yet. But we are getting close. The widespread popularity of Pokemon Go set the template for what Hollywood-scale AR game engagement could look like. The recent release of Harry Potter: Wizard’s Unite is a derivative of the same. “Turking”, a phrase borrowed from Amazon Mechanical Turk that describes the allocation of small, apparently unrelated tasks performed by disparate people, is already manifesting itself the gig economy through platforms like Task Rabbit, Porch, Fiverr, Agent Anything, and others. And legal precedents for the legal incorporation of objects, systems and geographies is being trialled in places like New Zealand on the Whanganui River. 

Although still nascent, the key ingredients for a large scale, meaning-driven social game with real world consequences are in the making. What might such a game look like? It would need to integrate several components:

1. Stable, character-driven alternate identities for players

2. A world and narrative plot that provides context for, and inspiring motivation to, these characters

3. A series of small, medium and large tasks that players must perform in order to advance the story, their character and achieve their goals, linked to real world actions or outcomes 

4. An in-game scoring system or currency mechanism that rewarded players for accomplishing these tasks

5. A marketplace for characters to spend this currency in exchange for other goods, tasks and services.

All of these ingredients can be achieved today without the need for anything more sophisticated than the Internet and a recent smartphone. But the true transformative potential will become apparent as the technology and social conventions develop in the coming years.

Let us imagine what the future might look like when these forces come together. On the one hand, there will be around 1.5 billion young people entering the workforce between now and 2030. On the other, estimates of technological unemployment range from 20 to 50% in the same time period. They will live an increasingly large portion of their lives online, in some form of mixed reality. They will be entering a world of increasing ecological instability that will contribute to the economic and political challenges facing many countries. Business models, governance agreements, and cultural norms will be strained to the breaking point, which will open new opportunities for alternative social and economic experiments. And, like many young people today, they will long to be part of something that makes a difference in the world, that provides a sense of meaning and significance (if not actual impact).

Seen in this light, it is quite likely that mixed reality social gaming (and the economies that infuse and surround them) will becoming a major of entertainment, community-making, and livelihoods for millions, if not hundreds of millions of young people. Returning to Hassan Ibn Sabbah and the Assassins, how will this new arena interact with deep currents of religious belief and identification in a world most certainly full of people looking for meaningful answers?

In his 1964 short story The Little Black Box, science fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote about a the emergence of a new kind of tele-religious experience, facilitated by the “empathy box”; a small device with two metal handles that let you physically experience the pain of a single individual, Wilbur Mercer. Billions of people tune in to the trials of Mercer as he walked his way across a barren, painful desert. They experience religious gnosis through his pain, causing billions of people to stop working, drop out of society, and organize against government crackdowns designed to suppress his broadcasts.

This points to a deeper potential for mixed reality social gaming; the emergence of religious and semi-religious movements linked to real world activities, facilitated through game-like narratives, producing tangible economic and political outcomes. 

A rich narrative background combined with ritual micro-patterns of activity are the key to unlocking this potential. Let us explore the narrative context first. The obvious framework would be an existing, widely practiced religion such as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. They have a huge user base, well-known canons, and explicit moral goals, ritual activities and objectives. The challenge with such a traditional approach is that it is likely to be both intensely polarizing for members of that faith and distinctly uninteresting for those who don’t currently consider themselves religious (including large swaths of the game-playing West, not to mention China).

Older, more universal themes may have more universal appeal. In his extraordinary work on the history of myth, Harvard historian Michael Witzel identified two main patterns at the root of most human cultures, whose spread followed Homo Sapiens’ journey out of Africa and across the world. He named these the “Gondwanan” and “Laurasian” family of myths, after the original continents of Gondwana and Laurasia. Gondwanan myths are found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, the South East Asia, the Pacific Islands and Australia, with smaller pockets elsewhere, while Laurasian mythologies are found across North Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.

What is remarkable about these mythological structures is that they cut across thousands of years and dozens of religions, cultures, and civilizations. The Gondwanan family of myths are typified by older, more animistic forms of spiritual experience, where time is seen as cyclical and life take place in a continuous cycle of death and rebirth. A “High God” exists in an abstract sense, having originally created the universe, but most experience is mediated through a series of “lower gods” who embody key aspects of human life (including natural phenomenon like fire, sunlight, death, etc., specific plants and animals, and other phenomenon such as fertility, luck, love, and warfare). Humanity’s job is to work with these spirits and maintain a balance of life.

In contrast, Laurasian belief systems follow a pattern more familiar to most modern readers. They are linear in nature and posses a single grand story line, beginning with the creation of the world and running through to its destruction. The “Higher Gods”, in the form of either a Divine Father or Mother, are more actively involved in the creation and maintenance of life for humans, having both created the universe and actively engaging in its daily affairs. Laurasian myths begin with a paradisiacal world created just for humans (the Garden of Eden), in which humanity falls into conflict with a serpent or a dragon. Their subsequent bad behavior results in their expulsion from this paradise and spend the rest of history attempting to regain divine favor through the aid of moral activity guided by holy spirits of various forms (angels, saints, etc.), often in conflict with darker forces in the form of devils, demons and evil demigods. Laurasian myths end in a final battle of good versus evil which results in the destruction of the world and the re-integration of heaven and earth (as described in Ragnarok, Judgement Day, etc.). 

Laurasian myths offer a particularly powerful template for deeply meaningful activity in online social games. Many games already contain core concepts like good versus evil, communities of underdogs working together to achieve heroic goals, fighting an overpowering enemy, seeking redemption, and other similar moral sentiments. Stories such as Star Wars, the Dark Crystal, the Matrix, Princess Mononoke and others are Laurasian myths at their core, often taking the form of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey - a journey which connects a personal quest for self-realization with a larger framework of good versus evil. Many contemporary political / religious struggles follow this template, from ISIS to the war on terror. 

Both Gondwanan and Laurasian narrative structures could be used effectively to create powerful, non-denominational stories of enduring social purpose. Given the demographics of gaming populations, I believe that a linear, good versus evil storyline of personal achievement in the context of a battle for the fate of the universe could be the most resonate (i.e., a Laurasian mythic structure). This would be intuitively recognizable to a huge population and makes it easy to overlay familiar rituals of initiation, purification, and proving oneself in a series of increasingly difficult tasks leading up to an eschatological moment.

In his research on gamer motivation, Stanford researcher Nick Yee found that the most powerful motivations for playing video games were “learning about the stories and lore of the world”, “feeling immersed in the world”, “chatting with other players”, and “becoming powerful” in the world. All of these speak to a primal need for people to feel part of a larger story and part of a community where their actions matter. The pain of loneliness, joblessness, environmental disruption, crime, and social failure will increase the numbers of people seeking such fulfillment and drive a renaissance of immersive storytelling. This in turn will create powerful blocks of economic and political actors which are ripe for incitement, organization and activation for real world political goals. The next section dramatizes what such a movement might look like.

6. The Political Future of Gamecults

The year is 2026, the setting, Western Europe. The weather has gotten worse and worse and it’s now widely acknowledged that we’re in the early stages of run away climate change. People’s reactions differ, from increasingly reactionary hold-outs still refusing to acknowledge the climate crisis to large scale militant Extinction Rebellion style protests led by young people across Europe. Governments and corporations are investing heavily in climate hardening, but the ongoing disorder caused by the UK’s crashing out of the EU has led to a complicated mix of priorities and debates. At the same time, immigration (primarily illegal) has increased three-fold as severe droughts and political violence has driven millions of more North Africans and Middle Eastern refugees to seek the relative stability of Europe over their home countries. 

Populism has grown increasingly violent as social services are stretched pass the breaking point even in the wealthiest countries like France, fueling both organized and intermittent protest movements and right-wing political action. The left, in the form of a rejuvenated Green Party, has claimed significant influence in many national parliaments but a coherent response to climate instability and its resulting disruptions has not been found. Amidst this muddled political situation, several independent foundations funded by technology billionaires have begun large scale experiments in everything from geo-engineering to biotechnological food modification, causing further debate and confusion about who to support and how to proceed. 

Whilst automation of the economy has yet to reach scale, the combination of infrastructural stress, political disorder and digitization of many parts of the economy means that over 100 million working age people are either partially employed in the gig economy or entirely outside of the employment system and strained social support networks. The grey and black markets are booming and the political landscape is full of contrary voices, pressure groups, and unstable alignment blocs ranging from fundamentalist Christian groups on both the left and the right to technocratic science advocates. 

While many participate in these debates, the majority of Europe’s 800 million residents (legal and otherwise) seek a more regular escape from their daily challenges in the form of increasingly immersive social media and entertainment. The gaming industry is booming and large-scale augmented reality games are flourishing, especially amongst the under- and unemployment youth and middle aged populations. The wealthy have higher end augmented reality glasses, but most engage with these games through their handheld devices and home gaming systems.

Amidst this churn, a strange series of events were unfolding across the continent. Trees were mysteriously being planted in public spaces, disused lots were turning into community gardens, buildings were being retrofitted with solar, weather stripping, and home IoT systems, refugee camps were turning into self-sufficient schools, clinics, and IT hubs. Hundreds of thousands of people were apparently being rewarded with free food, supplies, and credits. 

Entire storefronts devoted to a mysterious game called “The Greening” started cropping up in derelict neighbourhoods, acting as small scale fabrication centers and community hubs. People of all ages started to be seen on the streets of many cities, wearing simple brown and green clothes which look suspiciously monastic in style, yet carry a variety of tools and useful items. Strange “shrines” also started cropping up in apparently random locations, where groups of “Greenies” (as they’ve started to be called) could be seen leaving offerings of fruit, vegetables and other small tokens. 

The group didn’t garner much attention until a media exposé funded by the wealthy father of one of their members who had cut contact with him accused them of being a “pagan cult” and “eco-terrorists”, alleging that they were subjecting their members to mind control and were behind a string of industrial sabotage events ranging from tearing up survey stakes at new housing developments to firebombing private genetics research facilities. The Greenies suddenly took on a decidedly sinister tone in the eyes of the public, leading to several acts of vigilante violence and police raids in Eastern Europe.

How did the group work? Subsequent reporting and media interviews with active members of the group muddied the waters even further. Spokespeople for “The Greening Foundation” claimed they were only a game based on social entrepreneurship and sustainability. Religious groups accused them of being a cult, which was difficult to refute given many of the overtly spiritual themes of the game. 

Many players of the game came out to defend their participation, with a charismatic young woman from Spain emerging as one of the most persuasive voices. “I started playing the Greening because I couldn’t get a job and felt frustrated by how the world was falling apart around me. I saw my parents made redundant from their jobs and grow deeply bitter, depressed, and withdrawn. None of my friends from college could get work and a lot of them starting blaming the Africans. After the drought of 2024, you couldn’t even get tomatoes or fresh fruit in the stores anymore. My nan had to go to the hospital twice with heat stroke. And what are the companies doing about it? What are the governments doing about it? Arguing over whose fault it is and refusing to accept any responsibility for the fact that our world is broken. It’s broken, don’t you see?

“Some of my friends turned to the Church, if you can believe that, but that wasn’t for me. Then a friend introduced me to the Greening, which was really fun to get out of the house and play. I started out helping them grow tree saplings in their back yard. I learned more about nature in those first two weeks with the tutorials and leveling system than I’d ever learned in my years in university. Sure, the in-game spirits might not be real, but they spoke to me in a way no one else did. They asked for me help and it felt great to give it to them. I felt like I was making a difference, plus it was fun and I was meeting new people who were hopeful, enthusiastic and engaged. Not like everyone else, who is just angry and frustrated these days. I cried when my group and I planted those trees in the center of town and I watched that wasted plot of land turn blossom into a spirit center of regeneration. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. I felt like I was making a difference and that made me want to help more. Now, six months later, I’m an apprentice Forest Sage and I support over 35 nurseries and green temples around the world. Most of my food comes from the Greening Network in exchange for helping teach others and tending the nurseries and I’ve had experiences you wouldn’t even believe. I’m happier than I’ve ever been and I’m helping to heal the Earth. How can this be bad? It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

It was hard to untangle what was the game, the world of the game, and the activities which people engaged in to support it. Was it still a game? Was it a new religion? Regardless of the controversy and attempts to shut it down, the Greening only grew and grew, attracting thousands of players a day as more and more people identified with its quest for healing the earth and were attracted by its real world benefits. Maybe everyone didn’t buy into the “spirit mythology” behind it, but that didn’t seem to matter. By the end of 2028, over 90 million people played the game every day and identified as Greenies, building a powerful political lobby which brought about a significant shift in politics in the European Elections of 2028.

7. Conclusion: The Future of Politics is Communities of Believers Playing Games That Matter

It has been said that jobs are just crappy games. In the example above, climate change was used to illustrate both the compelling call that a myth-based social game could provide, as well as possible real-world activities which might produce significant impacts in the real economy. The array of solutions necessary to adapt to climate change are vast, ranging from planting trees to reducing waste to the invention of new technologies. The social and psychological challenge of confronting this crisis is equally profound. By combining game-like actives that rewarded players with a deeply meaningful context for their beliefs, significant change could be enacted in a way that public service announcements and government incentives simply have not been able to achieve. 

From growing saplings (“Gardener Badge, unlocked”) to distributing them to planting teams (“Logistics Ninja, achieved”), to planting them (“Domestic Terraformer, maxed”), to nurturing and protecting them (“Earth Guardian, rank achieved”), every step in large scale re-forestation could be linked to a moral narrative in game-like mixed reality settings. Providing support, infrastructure and maintenance to these teams could be equally rewarded, earning game-world currencies in exchange for playing a role in the overall logistical supply chain of such an effort. This could be further reinforced through team vs. team competition, distribution of real world rewards, and the facilitation of basic needs like housing, education, nutrition and health care. The same could be imagined for more protest oriented actions such as preventing harmful corporate dumping practices, lobbying for more progressive legislation, getting candidates elected, and more. Imbuing real-world non-human actors with “Non Player Character” rights and roles, such as legal personhood for rivers, trees, and forests, augmented with simple AI, would add further fuel to the fire.

Swapping fiat currency for in-game currencies and providing real world sustenance based on in-game performance would enable millions of people to participate in meaningful, socially oriented activities which truly matter. Enabling charismatic leaders with a profound message to speak, inspire, and guide the actions of these distributed teams in a spiritual or religious framework would provide an even sense of social purpose, camaraderie, and pride for those living entirely or partially in these worlds. 

While the specific narratives that will inspire people may differ, the core components of meaning-driven, morally empowered actors playing a role in imagined communities, executing real world actions in the service of a greater good, is easily visualized. Early experiments in tele-religion using VR have already demonstrated the willingness of faith-based participants to experiment with new technologies. All that is missing is a breakthrough platform that enables large scale participation, a compelling narrative, and the emergence of the world’s first virtual reality prophet. Like Hassan of Alamut, the potential for world-changing social movements using these tools is significant, possibly even imminent. As the economy continues to stumble under the weight of automation, larger and larger numbers of young people will turn to online worlds to seek connection, fulfillment, and even sustenance. It is only a matter of time until someone connects the dots to create the first version. The question is, will the game be one of healing and renewal or subjugation and domination? The answer will depend on the game, the prophet, and the players.