Apophenia:
Berkowitz compared the experience of becoming involved with QAnon with that of someone playing “experience fictions.” Some of these games have been elaborate efforts to bridge the gap between fiction and reality. Participants may receive mysterious packages in the mail. Or get a panicked late night phone call. They may be directed to a seemingly innocuous web site that turns out to have hidden information if you look at it just right. These games can also happen in person in the form of escape rooms or other participatory events.
In discussing these games, Berkowitz touches on the idea of “Apophenia,” — the tendency of human beings to find patterns, even where they don’t exist. Give people a handful of random information, and they will find a pattern, even if they have to create elaborate rules to make that pattern fit. It’s sort of the broader version of the way people will find faces in the patterns of wallpaper or the leaves of a tree.
In game design, apophenia is a problem, because it can cause people to plunge off in the wrong direction, losing the thread that the game designer meant them to find. In QAnon … it’s all there is. The sporadic bits of “information” issued from Q or other supposed sources at the heart of the conspiracy don’t have to make sense. They don’t have to go anywhere. Through apophenia, someone is sure to create an apparent set of connections. Then, through a community process that rewards the most elaborate, most obscure, most twisted interpretations, the theory adds new layers of complexity. [“QAnon was at the center of the Capitol assault, and could get worse after Trump is gone,” Mark Sumner, The Daily Kos]
