Free eBook of Chasing The Wish comic!

Produced in close collaboration with the late Dave Szulborski, the comic tied together his previous, massively successful ARG Chasing The Wish, with an ARG that was running simultaneously with the comics production and release called Catching The Wish.

Dave was posthumously named the World's Most Prolific ARG Producer by Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer's Edition.

Peter and I are happy to share this comic with you, free, in memory of Dave's creativity.

FULL BOOK 1 (PDF)
FULL BOOK 1 COVERS (PDF)

Chasing The Wish comic credits:

Written by: Jason Stackhouse with James Curcio.

Based on the ARG by Dave Szulborski.

Art: P. Emerson Williams, Jessika Kaos, James Curcio. 

Human Demonology: The Betrayal of Sabu

LulzSec are the Daily Mail readers' wet dream and were probably dreamt up and promoted by like/right-minded journalists in the service of the Stazi State. -Guardian Comment 29 June 2011 6:09AM

By P. Emerson Williams

Last year was marked by a seeming endless thread of DDOS attacks and new video declarations, tying in or not, intersecting or not with boots on the ground protesting across the cities of the West. Common wisdom among anti-authoritarian types was that the establishment was too big and lumbering to ever catch up with or even understand any of this. (Also see: the "piracy" issue.) Large financial institutions, big media and government looked form the outside to be playing whack-a-mole, running defence against the actions of Anonymous and Wikileaks.

Recent acts of Anonymous, or more specifically Lulzsec include the interception and release of an FBI conference call, and a dump of five million emails exchanged between emplyees of intelligence firm Stratfor, the publication of which by WikiLeaks made headlines. Not the massive coverage the Cablegate release garnered, but after the loss of the Bank of America documents in a manner suspicious to all but the most credulous, this is understandable. The fact that these emails were supplied by Lulzsec did make the ears of conspiracy spotter prick up. This cooperation between Anonymous and Wikileaks fit the narrative that has both parties being part of a massive psyop.

Synchronicity and a Call for Papers - All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming

By Mr. VI

Synchronicity works in funny ways:

I came up with the idea of incorporating Dragon Age 2 into a post on interactivity, incorporation, identity and storytelling. I mentioned this to James and discovered he'd been thinking on ARG's and transmedia projects - you can read some of his thoughts here and listen to an intriguing podcast here on the subject published by the folks who are also publishing the forthcoming Immanence of Myth book.

So this morning, I was cruising through my livejournal friends-list when I came across this:

All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming (more details below after I've finished pontificating)

I know, I know. LJ is so very stone-age, so very Web 1.0 but I love it anyway, even though as writer Warren Ellis says: '[I]t's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands.'

And actually, Warren's a bit of a favourite around here. His epic Transmetropolitan cyberpunk comic series has a main character who seems to have mainlined the Gonzo journalism of the late, great Hunter S Thompson which in turn has inspired the Gonzomentary of the CLARK webseries.

Warren's also no stranger to games either; he wrote the script for the 2001 game Hostile Waters:Antaeus Rising and more recently worked on the storyline for the well known survival horror game Dead Space - which the Call for Papers below actually refers to in terms of 'templarization of history'.

Interestingly enough, I didn't originally intend the remark about LJ to be anything more than a throwaway one - I missed the original reference to Dead Space in the Call, and yet it's there; an acausal connection.

Because here's the thing, narrative doesn't have to flow one single way. As James has already said in his post on time, place and convention of literature:

[O]ur expectations of narrative structure are actually incredibly unnatural. Our cognitive experience is not linear. Someone says something to you. You are reminded of something a few years ago. You wonder about the future. All of these things can happen while you are also walking and other things are happening around you which themselves may have past, present, and future layers occurring simultaneously, again from the perspective of their perception.

Weaponized: Reality Games and the Dystopian Future

There is a secret that haunts Haze01, the original treatment facility. Two patients, locked deep within its walls, contain archetypes that reject all reprogramming. They channel portents and omens of another future, a world where myth and divinity remake reality, manifesting a planet fit for Gods. In this season of the Y show, the doctors of the facility make their final attempt to process these two patients, before they break free and unleash total anarchy. Tune in. (Alterati)
PRE-ORDER CITIZEN Y: BLUEPRINT OF A RITUAL EXPERIENCE
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Questions Towards A Philosophy of Gaming, Transmedia, and Myth

By James Curcio

As Mr. VI has started to explore, there is a clear connection between games and gaming, and modern myth. However, the layers of this connection cut much deeper than surface analogies. I'd like to look a bit at the process of analysis, or de-construction, that many of the writers here on Modern Mythology have been taking. And I'll keep it to gaming, in hopes of seeing more posting about games of all kinds to come. This is a tip of the iceberg, off the top of my head type of inquiry.

There's a layer of looking at something - let's say a specific game, like Final Fantasy VII and then saying, "look at how this other specific myth was an intentional or unintentional influence..." The villain is named Sephiroth. What does that do for us? Sometimes you can make an interesting point with those analogies. Most college papers work like that- relate Charles Dicken's Tale Of Two Cities to Marx or whatever.

That kind of analysis is OK, we've done some of it here for instance looking at various vampire or apocalypse myths in modern media. But this is generally done as a means of getting a glimpse at a larger picture, or process, at work. So, we're not actually pointing to a deeper relationship which could be represented through the example of the relationship of characters in a Disney film, if we so choose. But we're not scrutinizing Disney.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer
And Philosophy.

We want to look at those deeper trends, the holographic or fractal view one can catch by blowing things up or scaling them down, twisting them around, looking at them in a way that most people might not consider. But it can only be done sometimes through an allegory or metaphor, even in an essay. That is what I would hope to do whether we're talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the "end of history." This approach to analysis is not about 1:1 analogies, "what Hindu goddess are the female character in Buffy?" but instead a new vantage point that we're trying to point out by making associations - top down, bottom up.

For instance, in biology there's the argument that competition drives evolution, and there is a counter-argument that there are co-operative factors. These are two myths, especially when rendered as "evolution is inherently competitive," (and co-operation is incidental), or vice versa. Of course, we can create synthetic myths that encompass both views.

So we're looking at games in myth, right, that's what we're here to do - but we want to cut deeper than just sifting through video games and finding the shallow points of overlap between myth and gaming, like when a mythological character appears, or even the plot-line of a game follows a pattern in a myth - unless if we can draw something insightful out of that association. That's been the goal here. Sometimes, maybe, we succeed and sometimes we stay on the surface. Blog posts have to run fast, you have to hit hard and keep going, so you just keep swinging hard as you can.

Let's take that swing. We've talked about competition and cooperation as ways that we can view evolutionary progress. Where do we find that in gaming? Do some games emphasis one rather than the other, and what are the results of that emphasis? In a narrative sense? In terms of the gamer or participant? The game system elements of competition and cooperation can apply to anything, even SEO. Our world really is a sprawling hub of networked information, and hierarchies are myth-dependent.

A lot of the material written about gaming and its social or cultural effects are some kind of alarmist noise, or they come out in support of gaming. Books and articles are constantly re-acting to this. The first time I can recall it being a major thing was around the time of the Tipper Gore family values thing, and the ripples off of that. Though I'm sure it began before then.

From Techshout

All such stories have stats peppered throughout, to prove their point, and they all allow an opportunity to take a position and spin it towards an overarching thesis. "Video games are destroying our attention span," is a popular myth, but what about ones like "games are actually a fundamental part of how we learn about ourselves and the world and game design that realizes this also must take responsibility for that role, and thusfar it does not"? Is that question too hard to formulate, so we just go for the cheap fear question?

But if we ask that question, suddenly knowledge of the mythic implications of gaming becomes of utmost importance. The only way to know the cultural effects of a myth are to understand the interplay between the two. Our moral myths will sculpt any kind of moral conclusions or presuppositions that we'd draw from this. Throw them out as garbage.

In the Immanence of Myth, Stephen Hershey does a brief exploration of the military and their utilization of myths in video games to recruit and train, and how these games and the overarching military rhetoric forms a myth that draws in their would-be converts. But that just means they understand something about how to market. Why can't we sell intelligence? Why can't we sell education and team-work without making it hokey and awful? The moral failure isn't the military using these things. It's that no one else does. The fact the military knows games are great recruitment and training tools and yet the schooling system does not? Unconscionable. Watch this presentation by Jane McGonigal. It covers what I talk about in this post, and then some, in very direct terms.

Mythological Sandbox: Dragon Age 2, and Global Conversation

By Mr. VI

Storytelling is about manipulating the audience; about leading them where they want to go and showing them something different. The old stories are familiar, like worn paths tracked through a dark forest, all pitted and uneven, but they are not paved roads. Here and there, the environment erupts and diverts them; trees have fallen or thickets have sprung up, and because they are paths, those who journey simply route around them and carry on.

The best storytellers and the best explorers don't just avoid these interruptions, they incorporate them into the journey, make them part of the experience. A good story is both inexorable and yet also allows you to move, to indulge in multiple divergences; switchbacks, digressions, stories within stories.

That's how Sheherazade kept her head in the epic of A Thousand and One Nights – by drawing the king further and further in. It went beyond cliff-hangers. She lead him so far down the twisting pathways that he simply forgot the route back to the place where he was going to kill her – he became so enamoured of the journey that the origin and destination were unimportant.

As Shakespeare says through the mouth of Hamlet:

I'll have grounds
More relative than this—the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 603–605

Hamlet's play was designed to elicit visible proof from his audience. Proof that Claudius had killed his father, confirming what the ghost has to say. If that's not manipulation of your audience, I don't know what is.

As the saying goes: 'Give them enough rope to hang themselves.'

Again, there's the notion of space to move, space for things to 'play out'. And speaking of playing, those of us in Europe will soon be looking enviously at the US, because you get the eagerly anticipated Bioware epic, the fantasy RPG-sequel Dragon Age 2 three days earlier than us.

You bastards.

Still, I'm not that bitter. Come the 11th I shall be sitting down in front of my Xbox and entering a familiar world. I may not surface for a good long while, because frankly, I love the world they've created and want to see what happens next in it.



The arc of a character over from humble beginnings to world-shaking hero is a mythic theme which has been repeated over and over again, in various cultures. What's more, there are over a million downloads of the demo across all the platforms, because the publisher promised goodies if it happened.

Viral Infucktions.

Viral marketing. It's become a buzzword that most people don't understand, but more corporations are getting hot under the collar when they hear it. "I don't know what this thing is Bob, but the kids love it!"

And if you haven't heard the term before, or don't know what it is... Well, I'm not going to explain it to you right now. I've worked on "viral" campaigns, so maybe at some point I'll bite off a large enough chunk of time to spell out some of the techniques... Probably not. (Another well considered piece of advice from a very successful marketer that I know: most people who have had some success at this don't have the time to explain how to do it. Those who do are often trying to reveal their MARKETING SECRET: pay attention to them, and give them money. SECRET REVEALED.)

Be that as it may, there are an increasing number of viral campaigns going on now, many of them funded by large corporations. Just yesterday I saw an ad on Myspace which read "CHOKEmate - satisfy your need." And which was laid out to look like some kind of horrific dating site ad. On Myspace, these are common, so I gave it little thought- except for the name. Was this some kind of auto-erotic asphyxiation thing? The hell?

I finally got curious enough to actually click on the damn thing, which I never do. And sure enough- it's a promo for the upcoming movie CHOKE, (based- somehow?- on Chuck's book.)

Good? Bad? Indifferent? Well- in a sense the ad worked. I had already seen an ad on TV and was vaguely aware the movie was coming out. I clicked on the ad, and now I have 2 points of contact- I am reminded that the movie exists. Now, based on the usual formula, I need to talk to my friends about it.

And here I am blogging about it. You see how this works?

Heaven help us.