“Who Buried Paul?”, 1999-03-17 (; backlinks; similar):
[March 1999 talk (video) by video game designer Brian Moriarty on conspiracy theories, gamification, art, and human psychology, in the same vein as his “The Secret of Palm 46” talk.
Moriarty discusses the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory: that the Beatles Paul McCartney has in fact been dead for the past 54 years, replaced by a lookalike to keep the Beatles media empire going.
The theory began as a rumor, and spread through early Beatlemania forums among obsessive young students, who began analyzing songs (playing them backwards as necessary) to discover hidden messages and developing an elaborate symbolic mythology where it is held that the lookalike & Beatles themselves are covertly alluding to their coverup through coded messages (possibly out of guilt), where the positioning of stars, garbled lyrics, which hand a cigarette is held in, hands held up as benedictions/wardings, interpreting scenes as funeral processions, and so on. No amount of denials or interviews with Paul McCartney could kill the theory. Most of these ‘clues’ can be debunked, given the wealth of documentation about the most minute details of the production of Beatles albums. A few oddities remain, but Moriarty suggests they are covert messages or allusions for other things, like the ‘walrus’ references, and may even have been the Beatles playing along with the theorists! What is the point of discussing this? See QAnon.]
This silly event, which happened way back when I was a kid, made a really big impression on me. It was so eerie, so deliciously creepy. And so… consuming! Clue hunting occupied me and my friends constantly for nearly 6 weeks! It was all we ever talked about! We spent every school night and entire weekends going over every square millimeter of these 5 records. We destroyed every copy we had, spinning them backwards on our cheap record players. It drove our parents nuts! “Turn me on, dead man! Turn me on, dead man!” And they hated it even more when they heard it again on the evening news!
I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun.
And, although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, something wonderful happened as we scoured these records, backwards and forwards, line by line. We memorized them. “Who Buried Paul?” is one of the best games I ever played. This ridiculous rumor sucked my entire generation into a massively multiplayer adventure. A morbid treasure hunt in which accomplices were connected by word-of-mouth, college newspapers, the alternative press and underground radio. We can only wonder what would happen if something like this were to happen today, in the age of the World Wide Web. Imagine how such a thing might get started, by accident…
…put something like this in front of people, and all kinds of evocative coincidences become likely. Why is this useful for us as entertainers? Because that moment when you peer into the mirror of chaos and discover yourself is satisfying in an uniquely personal sense. You get a little oomph when you make a connection that way. Those little oomphs are what make good stories and puzzles and movies so compelling. And those little oomphs are what made the Paul-is-dead rumor so much fun…Let your players employ their own imaginative intelligence to fill in the gaps in your worlds you can’t afford to close. Chances are, they’ll paint the chaos in exactly the colors they want to see. What’s more, they’ll enjoy themselves doing it. But the credit will be yours.
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