A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon - Playing with reality (20min+ read. A bit lengthy, but it worth)
In brief - apophenia. Just a tad more elaborated - induced/guided aphonenia.
What's fascinating is the buttons of human psyche that are pushed to sink people deep into the rabbit holes:
- Follow The Breadcrumbs - don't tell, just select the dots that are to be connected
- The Eureka Effect - the rush of the Aha! moments and the feeling of being rewarded
- Lamestream Media - passivate against the reality that's not supportive to the agenda
- Community - sense of belonging, behavior reinforcement; a population large and motivated enough to adopt an evolutionary strategy in selecting the best CT-es
All the above are exemplified - and these examples is how I got to get WTF Beyoncé has to do with QAnon.
So, if all it's an Alternate Reality Game, there's no harm, right? Not so fast, the US Military Academy ran the The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making? article in its "Combating Terrorism Center" journal, stating
QAnon represents a public security threat with the potential in the future to become a more impactful domestic terror threat. This is true especially given that conspiracy theories have a track record of propelling terrorist violence elsewhere in the West as well as QAnon’s more recent influence on mainstream political discourse.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 19 2020, @03:13PM
Note the phrase "at least one murder". So right there we have at best one victim not plural victims. What I find particularly interesting about this whole FUD blurb, is that one doesn't even know if the QAnon thing helps create more crime and hurting of people, or helps create less! Perhaps the time these people spent in QAnon participation reduced the time they spend committing crime! Because anyone who gets this deep into QAnon that they're doing this stuff, then they'd probably cause some degree of mayhem anyway, and it may have well been worse!
QAnon may well be a much better outlet for that negative action.