The Seam is a pervasive, collaborative fiction game played earnestly. The world it describes is imagined together by its players, one true-life sighting at a time. Sightings are real events players witnessed; making meaning of them is the game.
House rules: avoid real, living people, medical or political claims. "Yes, and" is the correct response.
What is a pervasive game?
A pervasive game is one that escapes the usual boundaries of play. Instead of happening on a board, screen, or field, it unfolds inside ordinary life: your streets are the map, your texts are the dialogue, and strangers are NPC's. The "magic circle" that normally separates a game from reality is stretched until the two overlap, so playing changes how you see the places and hours you already inhabit.
Some classics include: Assassin, Geocaching, The Beast, Perplex City, Humans vs. Zombies, and Pokémon GO.
- Discordianism (1963) — a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion, worshipping the goddess of chaos; its Operation Mindfuck seeded playful conspiracy into the culture and is an ancestor of this whole genre.
- The Philip Experiment (1972) — a Toronto parapsychology group invented a fictional ghost and then held séances for him. The table rapped back. Collective belief in a known fiction produced real experience.
- Ong's Hat (1980s–90s) — the proto-ARG legend of an interdimensional cult in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, transmedia seeds across zines and early message boards.
- World Without Oil (2007) — thousands of players lived a fictional oil crisis as if it were real for 32 weeks, documenting how their lives changed; "play it before you live it." Produced with PBS's Independent Lens, and the heart of Jane McGonigal's TED talk on games remaking the world.
- Year Zero (2007) — Nine Inch Nails' dystopian album universe, leaked through USB drives left in concert venue bathrooms, dozens of hidden websites, and images buried in the songs’ own spectrograms.
- Foldit (2008) — mass play doing real science: gamers folding proteins solved a retroviral enzyme structure that had stumped researchers for years, and were credited in the published paper.
- The Jejune Institute (2008) — thousands of San Franciscans were inducted into a fake mystical institute via sidewalk flyers, all in service of urban re-enchantment; the closest ancestor of The Seam. Chronicled in the documentary The Institute and dramatized in the miniseries Dispatches from Elsewhere.
- Cicada 3301 (2012) — the anonymous internet-wide cryptographic mystery that began with this recruitment post; no company behind it, never fully explained.
- QAnon (2017) — never built as a game, but it ran on the same machinery: it "pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence," as game designer Adrian Hon wrote in What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon.
