A couple of years ago, before Y2K failed to dim so much as a single light bulb at midnight, studying bizarre and wacky conspiracy theories was quite a hobby of mine. I used to spend hours reading through the more bizarre conspiracy sites, looking up black helicopters, Men In Black, the Majestic-12 group, and so on. I enjoyed reading the rants of William F. Cooper, and a couple of others whose name I’ve completely forgotten at this point. And while I never believed that JFK was killed by anything more complicated than a single gunman with very good luck, I always found it intriguing to learn what people thought about the idea that the US Government had signed a treaty with alien visitors to exchange technology for human experimental subjets, or whether the United Nations is set to invade the United States and turn the world into a single government police state.

Personally, I think that believing such tripe is giving way too much credit to the ability of the US Government to keep secrets. Yes, small secrets can be kept for a good amount of time — there are people I know who performed secret operations in the Armed Forces decades ago and who still won’t talk about it — but massive conspiracies just won’t work for long periods of time. It would involve the willingness of everyone involved, from the highest to the lowest, to keep their mouths shut forever about massively important issues, and people just aren’t capable of doing that. And the government, after all, is composed of people who are capable of the same mistakes and screw-ups that you and I are capable of.

On the other hand, it is fun to speculate. Does the government really engage in mind control experiments under the umbrella of MK-ULTRA? Does Majestic-12 really exist? Are there really aliens that maintain regular contact with the US government? And so on. I especially enjoyed making up my own wacky conspiracy theories using the same evidence that many of the other conspiracy theorists out there used (the best ones always claimed that the official denial of the existence of a conspiracy was outright proof that a conspiracy exists — which is sort of like saying that my denail that I own luxury yacht harbored in Boston is absolute proof that I do own such a yacht).

And so now there’s this game, Majestic, an on-line role-playing game which incorporates all of these elements and throws you deep into a storyline involving the conspiracy. But Majestic doesn’t just keep itself confined to the computer screen; oh, no. You get telephone calls, you get e-mails, you get instant messages, you get faxes… It’s an immersive sort of experience. I’d first heard about Majestic at DunDraCon 2001, and I checked it out briefly one night while I was in Portland last March, but I avoided getting involved. I just didn’t have time for it.

But the other day my friend PurplKat sent me an instant message telling me that I just had to check out this game. So I went, I signed up for the free preview and played it through, and found myself getting caught up. I finished off the free preview in a couple of days, and decided to splurge and go for the full experience. The game is meant, really, for people like me, who don’t really have the time to get fully involved in a long term game, so the puzzles are relatively simple and can be solved in a few minutes with the clues that the game gives you. Sometimes you have to go back and look up some things that you hadn’t considered important before, and some times it’s possible to miss something completely.

But my main interest is in the unfolding storyline, which is what I always get intrigued by (I’m the kind of guy who, when playing a game on my computer, almost always turns off the "battle" features, or sets the battle difficulty at minimum so that I can concentrate on the mysteries and plots at hand). Seeing the names of secret groups like Majestic come up, or MK-ULTRA, or HAARP, or even Pale Horse is like re-encountering old friends… delusional friends, of course, but it’s still fun to get wrapped up in a story like this which involves some of the same elements I played around with just for fun a few years ago.

Of course, if you’re the type of person who believed that The Blair Witch Project was real, then, obviously, Majestic isn’t for you. Nevertheless, though, I’ve encountered a couple of people playing the game who believe that "it’s more than a game". One fellow I chatted with joked about "they" tapping our IM conversations, but I did encounter someone who really does believe that the government is keeping an eye on the people who play this game.

I always worry about people like this. When I ran a Live Action Vampire game in Davis a couple of years ago, I included on our website a link with the words "So you think you’re a real vampire?" which led to Bellevue Mental Hospital. There really are people out there who think that they’re vampires, and some of them play in LARP’s. There really are people who think that their Dungeons and Dragons characters have some sort of life outside of the game. There really are people who believe in these "shadow governments" and the aliens and that the United Nations is going to take over at any minute and confiscate all of our guns.

It’s the people like these who give fodder to the anti-gaming nuts, the ones who go on daytime talk shows with stories about how Dungeons and Dragons caused their kid to commit suicide. The truth is that the kid was probably already troubled to begin with, and the game gave the kid an outlet for their troubles. In such cases, I blame the parents for not seeing the signs before hand, and for essentially neglecting the kid’s emotional needs.

But I guess that’s all beside the point. The real point is that I’m getting more deeply involved in this game, and I’m enjoying it immensely. For the small price that it costs and the fact that it requires very little time commitment, it’s worth it.

And who knows? Perhaps there is a grand world conspiracy to let the Illuminati control the United Nations through the extraterrestrials who are breeding hybrids with human beings and using top secret mind control devices developed by the US Government during the Vietnam War to turn us all into slaves of the New World Order. And perhaps Kennedy was killed because he knew all this and was about to tell the truth.

Nah. That’s preposterous. And besides, if I knew, would I really tell you?

But now I’ve got to go. Jennifer and I are headed out to Boston to take a cruise.