You Shouldn't Have Done That

I really enjoyed Jadusable's Majora's Mask ghost story (crash course HERE). Stories of haunted games have drifted around the internet for years. This one was different.

Careful and planned yet somehow chaotic. I loved the truth claim and the obviousness that it could not be true. And I loved the fact that the question "Why?" burned so brightly, more so than the "how?" or the "who?". Was it viral marketing? It was too dark for Nintendo and it why would someone market something with an old zelda game? And the the direction of the story moved away from the marketable, not towards it. Someone was, most likely, doing this for fun.

But what I loved most was the gentle invitation to the audience, first to read the story, but then watch, download and interact with the ghost himself via a learning bot and a website and an ominous countdown to "The Fourth Day". The escalation of reality, as the narrative spiralled away from the ghost simply being in the game to one that was actively tampering with the various pieces of the story. Jadusable told us a story that caught our attention and then, only once we were listening, asked us softly, "Hey, you wanna play?"

And we did. We really really did.

Once the ghost was out of the game, so to speak, the internet was abuzz with people dissecting each aspect of the story for clues, breaking it apart to search for the "truth". Not the truth that this was a made up story told through clever use of the internet, that one was too simple. No, the internet went looking for the "truth" within the story. The one where a lifeless statue told us every step of the way, "You shouldn't have done that."

Well done sir, I thought when "the truth.txt" told us that BEN communicated through CleverBot. A bot that learns as people interact with it. When hundreds of people talk to the bot associating "BEN" and "drowned" and "Majora's Mask" the bot began to do it automatically. Simple, effective way to let the audience experience the haunting themselves.

He brought the creepiness of Majora's Mask, and the ghost that haunted it from the game to the internet at large  putting up a countdown clock and telling us only that it was counting down to "The Fourth Day". By including a website with ties to Ben and parallels to the apocalyptic moon in Majora's Mask, he brought his story a little closer to "real".  Suddenly there was a nagging doubt, was this the work of someone desperate for attention before committing some horrible act in the real world? The question again, was "Why?". The increasing sense of reality forcing us to wonder, if only for a moment, if this was a warm up for something much worse.

It wasn't of course, but that's not the point. He played with our anticipation and our doubts to the point that what we knew (this was not real) mattered less than how we felt (intrigued and unsettled). Well done sir. I'll look forward to the next haunting.