Apophenia, joining the dots, and the art of the Dungeon Master

...or 'why Marisha Ray enjoys putting clues together'.  

 ap·​o·​phe·​nia | \ ˌa-pə-ˈfē-nē-ə  \

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

This is a word that's come up quite a bit frequently, in a number of interesting articles by some of my ex-colleagues, analysing the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and comparing them to ARGs. I'm not linking them, but there's enough keywords in the post for you to... um... find a connection :D

"What's an ARG?", I hear you ask.

Back in the day (around 2005) I used to work for a small company called Mind Candy Design, which some of you with kids of the right age may know as the creators of Moshi Monsters, but before that an ARG - Alternate Reality Game - called Perplex City, involving collectible puzzle cards and a range of websites tied to a story that... for want of a better world... manifested in the real world. It was the successor to games like The Beast (a promotional tie in to the "AI: Artificial Intelligence" movie), which again, posited a future reality overlapping the real world for the players to look for carefully placed clues in. 

One of the problems with an ARG is apophenia: in short, the players' tendency to see a connection where there isn't one, and go off on a wild goose chase. This can be a little bit more of a problem in an ARG, because the last thing you want is your players deciding that, for example, the letter counts of the words in the cryptic text message sent to all registered players represent a phone number via some transformation hinted at on a website (which you as GM never intended), or something more complicated. So they post their conclusions on whatever player forum they're sharing with other players. and good old confirmation bias and mass apophenia take hold, because people want the rush of solving something. And some poor sod who is absolutely nothing to do with the game winds up getting a whole load of cryptic phone calls....

I'm not going to go deep into the parallels with modern conspiracy theories, other than to note that the key difference is that in an ARG there IS a solution to the puzzle. And you can come down from On High and head your players off if they're causing a public nuisance based on incorrectly piecing together the facts - sure, it breaks immersion, but the alternatives are worse! Conspiracy theories, by contrast, just give you the dopamine rush of making the connections, and in the really scary variants, someone is feeding the 'players' with the clues to what they want them to believe. 

So, coming the other way? Do your players ever jump to the wrong conclusion and proceed to worry on it like a dog with a really juicy bone? That's apophenia. If you're at all the kind of DM who gives them clues and puzzles, that's what they're getting off you anyway, by design - the dopamine rush of having the bits fall into place (just watch Marisha Ray in Critical Role campaign 2 episode 111 - she even says she's unpicking a whole bunch of background clues 'conspiracy theory style'!)

But the connections are all fictitious, because it's just a game, except that you, the DM, know which ones are right. So... interesting question, then? If the players pull together some clues that aren't connected in your notes, and come up with some brilliant conclusion, what do you do? Can you actually exploit this human trait?

I think my answer is 'it depends'. It is (and I have done this), if you can bluff really well, possible to run a mystery scenario by throwing half a dozen clues out into the ether, and let apophenia do its work. Your players will find connections, and if you listen and keep a poker face, you can give them the rush of solving a mystery that never existed. As I said, I have done this - my players (we were sharing a house) demanded I run something when our scheduled Sunday afternoon event got cancelled. There were times when I was literally 10 minutes behind them in figuring out what was actually going on in the crime-solving scenario I set going - and they openly admitted afterwards they never knew. (I literally figured out 'Diamond' referred to a racehorse 90 mins after it cropped up in the scenario!)

Conversely, of course, you may have a brilliant set of interconnected plot threads, and your players have just managed to fixate on the fact that the BBEG and another NPC have the same colour cloaks and weapons, and draw a chain of conclusions that have precisely zip to do with the plot you had in mind. Again, what you do here is kind of your call. You can run with it, you can tweak your plot such that there's another clue to get them back on the rails at the end of this rabbit hole, or you can disappoint them when they find out they're wrong...

Part of the joy of D&D (as well as the 'winning' reward for beating up the bad guys) is that rush you get for figuring out what the BBEG is up to - 'winning' is at least partly predicated on hooking the clues together. In short, D&D and other RPGs reward your players' desire to join the dots. As a DM, sometime before that, it also rewards your desire to join the dots when creating the scenario or campaign!

Moreover... you are (at least, if you're running and plotting that kind of setting) telling a story. One of the tenets of the good fantasy quest story is that of not leaving loose ends. Part of the reward of reading, again, is that you get to share in the rush of seeing all the little threads tie up (except for the hook for book 2 in the epilogue, of course :D). D&D, at least for me, and I hope for my players, is like that: the story needs to wrap up (eventually) neatly, sometimes in one go, or in other cases with a thread that leads them on to book 2, the next session, the next chapter, call it what you will. 

For me then? I welcome apophenia. It helps me tell stories.