Fortune Tellers, Nostradamus,
and the Mystical Con

Reed Berkowitz is a designer of alternate reality games, experience fiction, and interactive theater.
The next 8 paragraphs (with an occasional change,) are borrowed from his brilliant article published at medium.com.

Apophenia is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)

[Note from Roy: Apophenia is obviously a function of the pattern-seeking right hemisphere of the brain, which, the cognoscenti will recall, cannot tell fact from fiction. That’s the left brain’s job.]

A Mystical Con grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding.

Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the message the conman is delivering.

There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of putting it all together, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at. 

The Mystical Con uses the oldest trope of all mystery fiction. A mysterious stranger shows up and drops a strange clue leading to long-hidden secrets which his clues, and your detecting power, can reveal.

Let’s think about this for a minute. How many great movies, books, and TV shows would have been forever ruined if the mysterious stranger just laid it all out for the protagonists in the first meeting. “Jim did it. It’s Jim. He’s laundering money for the mob. Check his bank records. Never mind, I have them right here.” The X-Files would be a lot shorter if The Smoking Man had just used his words!

It doesn’t work that way. The fictional mysterious stranger already knows, but instead of telling you the answer in the first ten minutes, they give you clues. Hard to follow clues. Ambiguous clues. They say things like “Follow the money. Don’t let them fool you. This goes all the way to the top.”

There is no reason for this in reality, but fictionally, this is what creates the whole plot, the sense of mystery, and everything entertaining that is to follow. This is the white rabbit that Alice followed. This is the breadcrumb trail out of the forest. But the breadcrumbs are not facts, they are questions. Puzzles and clues for the “investigators” to uncover. It’s easy for these “investigators” to forget that they are not discovering the story, but creating it from random data.

– Reed Berkowitz