Regarding the Witchways Alternate Reality Game (ARG) and the Witchcraft Community
First off, let me assure you of a few things.
I myself am a real person and a practicing witch. I’ve studied magick in various forms since I was a teenager, and while I’ve detoured into things like ceremonial magick and Thelema, my main focus is witchcraft, and also Tarot (hence the diviner part of my name).
I’ve been on Tumblr since September of 2014, and I strive to create interesting, helpful and informative content for fellow witches while improving and practicing my own writing ability and learning more and more about magick.
So, yeah, I’m not a fictional character, since some folks were asking. I also don’t think witchcraft or witches are a joke or game in real life, but magick has a long tradition of appearing in fiction, and as someone who has even verged into pop culture magick before, I personally have never saw a problem with writing fiction about witches, even if it verges into impossible magick.
Christinia (@vaguemagick) and her (admittedly quite creepy) mentor Leda are fictional, though. I know, because I’m part of the ARG troupe that created them, and, in fact, I wrote many of the scripts for the ARG, namely outlines for Chris’s blog posts and scripts for the videos that will eventually be posted as part of the game.
Some folks have been saying they’re getting tons and tons of messages from many different blogs that are part of this game, but I’m afraid those messages are either from actual witches and being misinterpreted, or were sent by opportunistic trolls, because there is exactly one blog involved in this (Chris’s blog).
Some other characters were planned to show up later and we have accounts for them (empty), but right now, Chris’s blog is the only ARG blog in the community whatsoever.
As well, I do want to note that Chris’s blog has not been sending out private messages or asks to any actual witches, aside from those who contacted us via the website specifically asking for a trailhead. The blog in question has been responding to messages it receives and reblogs, but beyond that, there is not, nor would I want there to be, a horde of fictional witch characters invading our community.
And, as you might expect given recent events, it goes without saying that from now on, Chris’s blog and all related in-game Tumblr blogs will have a disclaimer on them, and all posts will be tagged with ARG.
The main reason a disclaimer was not included originally was, as silly as it sounds, tradition. As you’re probably aware if you’ve been following this, traditional ARGs (such as I Love Bees, the Beast, and ChangeAgents) did not include disclaimers.
I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure how the tradition developed, but during this game’s development we consulted with some ARG players, most of whom said disclaimers break the verisimilitude of the game and that they disliked them. Nevertheless, given things being as they are, I think we can all agree that disclaimers are necessary now.
As you can see from this tag, I’ve run alternate reality games before with various troupes, nothing major and many of them were quite small. I mention in my bio that transmedia storytelling is a major interest of mine, and has been for some time.
I’m also one of those people who often likes to combine my interests, so around fall of 2015, I began thinking about designing a witchcraft-inspired alternate reality game, and gathered together a small troupe to do that.
The idea was to have a game designed by witches, for witches. As in, a game that, while having some fantasy elements, would feature mostly actual witchcraft practices that we (the main creators, witches ourselves) are familiar with and actually practice ourselves. We thought this would be a neat twist on the fantasy genre, which, as I think we all know, usually has very little in common with actual magical practices.
Someone had made a comment earlier that we’re treating witchcraft as a joke and disrespecting actual witches. While I understand most of the concerns people are having with interpreting the blogs as real, I must say I can’t understand that comment.
As an actual witch working with other witches on this game, I certainly don’t believe I treat witchcraft as a joke, in this context or any other. Witchcraft can and often needs to be light-hearted, but it’s not a joke, and, as a witch, I know this. The game is fictional, yes, but I honestly don’t feel like we’re disrespecting witchcraft because we, as witches, have created witch characters. The other concerns, regarding confusion being caused, I do completely now understand.
As alluded to in this post, we conceived of the concept of this game and the basic storyline in late 2015, and spent that time putting it all together, finding people for various tasks, and putting together the puzzles (which, yes, there will be puzzles later on). We had planned to fully launch the game in April of 2016, but that didn’t materialize due to financial considerations and the fact that at the time I was impromptu relocating to Poland. We, at that point, shelved the project for almost a year.
A few months ago, I personally began poking at the assets created for the game again, and discussing it with other people who had worked on it. We eventually decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and relaunch it, so we made plans to do that, and created new sites.
I made a series of posts (visible, again, in this tag) about this, both to the blog @alternaterealitywitch and to @maddiviner, about the site and game launching. Given the positive response I seemed to get from the community with regards to these posts, we decided to go ahead and launch the game.
Unfortunately, as you all likely know, many people felt deceived when the game formally launched (we count the post about the package as the launch, long story) and it became apparent that it was, in fact, just a game.
A lot of people felt it was deceptive and manipulative for us to make posts to Chris’s blog that could be mistaken for a real person’s account, and at this point, given all the conclusion, I have to concur that it was a mistake. As I’ve said, all future ARG-related blogs will include a disclaimer. As well, all individual posts will include the tag #ARG.
I really do have to apologize for this. It was never my or anyone on the team’s intention to manipulate or deceive the community, and I was quite naive to assume that most people in the community would have seen the initial posts about this and know the blog was a game. I also must apologize to those who messaged or directly interacted with the character’s blog not realizing it was a character blog prior to the package post.
We were both unaware of what was really going on, insofar as 1) they thought the character was a real person, and 2) the ARG troupe thought they were playing the game, when in reality they didn’t know it was a game.
In any case, I hope this clears things up and prevents any future mishaps or problems. Once again, we’re quite sorry about all this, and most of what has happened today was unanticipated by us. In hindsight, many mistakes were made, and we must apologize for our lack of forethought.
On a final note, an apology for not addressing this sooner. We’re scattered around timezone-wise, and many of us had other commitments as well. This all transpired overnight where I am (Poland) and it was only upon waking that I became aware of the confusion.
