The rules of the game

There's a lot of human behavior that, looked at from a perspective as if you were studying us from the outside -- say, as an alien anthropologist -- is mighty weird.

One example is our fondness for playing games.  We make up lists of often arbitrary rules, then individuals or groups compete against each other while following those rules to achieve some sort of goal -- which almost always is itself symbolic (other than professional sports and gambling, most games don't actually involve winning some sort of tangible reward).  Despite the fact that there's every reason to care very little about the outcome, from a very early age we learn to care deeply.  Many of us have the attitude imbued in me by my high school track coach -- "Second place is first loser" -- and that applies to everything from the Olympics to a game of Monopoly.

This drive is so strong that a lot of us become seriously invested in vicariously playing games by watching other people play them -- i.e., sports.  There have been fan riots when the home team doesn't win; people are willing to go on the rampage, destroying property and risking injuring others or themselves, because they're so angry that "their team" lost.  (A guy who's a friend of a friend once actually went outside and smashed a chair when the Buffalo Bills lost.)

And as I've written about before, the tendency to take sports extremely seriously isn't limited to the industrialized world.  The Mesoamerican ball games of the Classical Mayan civilization were deadly serious, and I mean that quite literally.

The losers were sacrificed to the gods.

Game-playing is one of those ubiquitous behaviors that's so common it's taken for granted, and is odd only when you think about it too hard -- but once you do, it seems so weird you have to wonder why it's nearly universal in all human cultures.  Sociologist Jonathan Haidt speculates that it's what psychologists call sublimation -- that it's a way of processing aggression harmlessly.  "Sports is to war as pornography is to sex," Haidt says.  "We get to exercise some ancient drives."

Whatever the explanation, there's no doubt that game-playing is not only widespread, it's very, very old.  A paper this week in the European Journal of Archaeology describes the discovery of what appears to be one of the oldest known examples of a board game, painted onto rock surfaces in what is now Azerbaijan.  The pattern is very similar to a game known from Ancient Egypt they called "Hounds and Jackals" (from the shapes of the game pieces).  The rules aren't known, but it appears to be a chase game, with potentials for pieces to jump ahead or get set back -- so perhaps a little similar to the familiar games of backgammon, parcheesi, and "Snakes and Ladders" (more commonly known in the United States as "Chutes and Ladders").

Two of the Azerbaijani game boards [Image credit: W. Crist and R. Abdullayev]

The archaeologists who authored the paper, Walter Crist of Leiden University and Rahman Abdullayev of the Minnesota Historical Society,  found six game boards (if that's what they turn out to be) at sites in Azerbaijan --  three at Ağdaşdüzü, and one each at Çapmalı, Yenı Türkan, and Dübəndi.  It's difficult to date stone artifacts accurately, but carbon dating of organic remains in the area suggests that they're about four thousand years old.  The similarity between all six strongly suggests that playing this particular game was widespread at the time -- and that the pattern would have been as as familiar and instantly recognizable to them as a Scrabble board is to us.

"Whatever the origin of the game of [Hounds and Jackals], it was quickly adopted and played by a wide variety of people, from the nobility of Middle Kingdom Egypt to the cattle herders of the Caucasus, and from the Old Assyrian traders in Anatolia to the workers who built Middle Kingdom pyramids," the researchers write.  "The fast spread of this game attests to the ability of games to act as social lubricants, facilitating interactions across social boundaries."

So board games have a very long history.  Gaming in general is certainly even older than that; artifacts that appear to be dice made of bone were found at Skara Brae in Scotland, and dated to around 3000 B.C.E.  So whatever drive it is that induces us to invent new ways to compete against each other, it goes back into our very distant past.

I'm not immune.  Whenever I'm in a competition, I get ridiculously invested in it.  I'm a runner, and have participated in various 5K and 10K races, and even though I know going in I'm not nearly good enough to come in first (or even first in my age category), I still get wicked frustrated when I have to run my finger halfway down the page of standings to find out where I finished.  And although I'm not a sports fan, all you have to do is get me involved in a game of Scattergories to find out how competitive I am.

Yes, I know the outcome doesn't matter.  But hey, if the people four millennia ago were that invested in playing Hounds and Jackals, at least I come by the tendency honorably.

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Primed and ready

One of the beefs a lot of aficionados of the paranormal have with us skeptics has to do with a disagreement over the quality of evidence.

Take, for example, Hans Holzer, who was one of the first serious ghost hunters.  His work in the field started in the mid-twentieth century and continued right up to his death in 2009 at the venerable age of 89, during which time he not only visited hundreds of allegedly haunted sites but authored 120 books documenting his experiences.

No one doubts Holzer's sincerity; he clearly believed what he wrote, and was not a hoaxer or a charlatan.  But if you read his books, what will strike anyone of a skeptical bent is that virtually all of it is comprised of anecdote.  Stories from homeowners, accounts of "psychic mediums," recounting of old tales and legends.  None of it is demonstrated scientifically, in the sense of encounters that occur in controlled circumstances where credulity or outright fakery by others can be rigorously ruled out.

After all, Holzer may well have been scrupulously honest, but that doesn't mean that the people he worked with were.

I'll just interject my usual disclaimer; none of this constitutes disproof, either.  But in the absence of evidence that meets the minimum standard acceptable in science, the most parsimonious explanation is that Holzer's many stories are accounted for by human psychology, flaws in perception, and the plasticity of memory, and the possibility that at least some of his informants were exaggerating or lying about their own experiences.

As an illustration of just one of the difficulties with accepting anecdote, consider the phenomenon of priming.  What we experience is strongly affected by what we expect to experience; even a minor interjection ahead of time of a mental image (for example) can alter how we see, interpret, and remember something else that occurred afterward.  A simple example -- if someone is shown a yellow object and afterward asked to name a fruit, they come up with "banana" or "lemon" far more frequently than someone who was shown a different color (or who wasn't primed at all).  It all occurs without our conscious awareness; often the person who was primed didn't even know it was happening.

This becomes more insidious when it starts affecting how people understand the world around them.  To take another lightweight example, but which gets at how claims of the supernatural start, take the currently popular "paranormal game" called "Red Door, Yellow Door."  "Red Door, Yellow Door" is a little like the game that all of us Of A Certain Age will remember, the one called "Bloody Mary."  The way "Bloody Mary" works is that you stand in front of a mirror, stare into it, and chant "Bloody Mary" over and over, and after a moment, nothing happens.

What's supposed to happen is that your face turns into the blood-dripping visage of a woman, or else you see her over your shoulder.  Most of us who tried it, of course, got what the paranormal investigators call "disappointing results."  But "Red Door, Yellow Door" moves even one step further from verifiable reality,  because the whole thing takes place in your mind.  You're supposed to lie down and close your eyes, while a friend (the "guide") massages your temples and says, "Red door, yellow door, any other color door" over and over.  You're supposed to picture a hallway in your mind, and as soon as you've got a clear image, you give a hand signal to the guide to stop chanting.  Then you describe it, entering doors as you see fit and describing to the guide what you're seeing.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons dying_grotesque from Richards Bay, South Africa, Red Door (3275822777), CC BY 2.0]

Thus far, it's just an exercise in imagination, and innocent enough; but the claim is, what you're seeing is real -- and can harm you.  Because of the alleged danger, there are a variety of rules you are supposed to remember.  If a room you enter has clocks in it, get out fast -- you can get trapped permanently.  If there are staircases, never take one leading downward.  If you meet a man with a suit, open your eyes and end the game immediately, because he's evil and can latch on to you and start following you around in real life if you don't act quickly enough.

Oh, and to add the obligatory frisson to the whole thing: if you die in the game, you actually die.

What's striking about "Red Door, Yellow Door" is that despite the fact that its claims are patently absurd, there are huge numbers of apparently completely serious people who have had terrifying experiences while playing it -- not only manifestations during the game, but afterward.  (If you search for the game, you'll find hundreds of accounts, many of them warning people from ever playing it because they were so traumatized by it.)  The thing is, what did they expect would happen?  They'd been primed by all of the setup; it's unsurprising they saw clocks and eerie staircases descending into darkness and evil guys in suits, and that those same images haunted their memories for some time after the game ended.

And if a silly game for gullible teenagers can do that, how much more do our perception and memory get tainted by how we're primed, especially by our prior notions of what might be going on?  Hang out in graveyards and spooky attics, and you're likely to see ghosts whether or not they're there.

As I recounted in Monday's post, I've been fascinated by tales of the supernatural since I was a kid, and on some level, I'm like Fox Mulder -- "I Want To Believe."  But the fact is, the evidence we have thus far just isn't enough.  Humans are way too suggestible to rely entirely on anecdote.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it most succinctly: "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'  When you have something tangible we can bring back to the lab and analyze, then we can talk."

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A game with death

After yesterday's dismal political post, today we're going to look at something more upbeat and cheerful:

Playing a board game with your dead relatives.

Well, okay, that's not exactly upbeat and cheerful.  But it's pretty interesting nonetheless.  The topic comes up because of a recent discovery in Egypt of a board for playing the game of senet, which was apparently something like ancient Egyptian backgammon.  No one knows what the rules are except that it involved dice throwing, followed by moving pieces along a grid of thirty squares.  Squares number 26 through 29 had special characters on them, of unknown purpose, but probably corresponded to things like "lose one turn" or "go back five spaces" you find on modern board games.

So it looks like the idea that used to frustrate the absolute hell out of me as a little kid playing "Chutes & Ladders" was invented a very long time ago.  If you don't know "Chutes & Ladders," its a one-hundred-square grid with ladders (moving you ahead in one jump) and chutes (moving you backward).  And there's a chute -- on square #98, if memory serves -- that moves you back to, like, square #4 or something.

I'm guessing the Egyptians also invented the time-honored method of dealing with such circumstances, namely, picking up the board and hurling it at your opponents.

Be that as it may, when you get to Middle Kingdom times (2040-1782 B.C.E.) there are some tomb paintings that show people playing senet not against the living -- but against their dead family members.  And a new symbol shows up on square #27.

The symbol for water -- which Egyptologists believe represented a lake or river that spirits encountered on their journey through Duat, the realm of the dead.

The newly-discovered senet board [Image courtesy of the Rosicrucian Museum, San Jose, California]

You have to wonder what the purpose of playing a board game with a deceased person was.  Was it just supposed to be entertaining for the dead guy?  After all, there was probably not much to do, stuck in a pyramid forever, even though they did things like burying the dead with food, drink, their belongings, and even mummified pets.

On the other hand, the paranormal-fiction-writer part of me wonders if it might not be something more sinister.  After all, another age-old tradition is people playing against Death (or in Judeo-Christian cultures, against Satan) for their lives or their eternal souls.  I have a legend like this in my own family -- on my dad's Scottish side one of my ancestors is a gentleman named Alexander Lindsay, who was the 4th Earl of Crawford.  Lindsay, known as "Earl Beardie" or "the Tiger Earl" because of his flaming red hair and beard, was born in 1423 in Auchterhouse, County Angus, Scotland, and became well known for his violent temper and fondness for scotch.  The legend goes that he was playing a dice game with a friend on a Saturday evening, and the friend heard the church bells chiming midnight in the distance.

"We should stop now that it's the Sabbath," the friend said.  "The devil is always watching."

Lindsay laughed, and said, "Let him show up, then, and I'll play a game against him for my very soul.  Otherwise, I'm not stopping."

Well, the predictable result was that Satan showed up in person, said, in essence, "The hell you say," and held Lindsay to his word.  And Lindsay wasn't as lucky as Johnny was in the Charlie Daniels song "Devil Went Down to Georgia," unfortunately for him.  He lost the game and his soul, and now goes stomping around Glamis Castle, swearing drunkenly and throwing dice in a futile attempt to win his soul back.

I remember telling my dad about this years ago.  His response was to snort and say, "Yeah, sounds like one of my relatives."

But I digress.

Anyhow, the senet board and the research into what the game signified -- and what connection it may have had with rituals surrounding death -- is pretty interesting stuff.  A paper last week in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, by Walter Crist, describes the new find as follows:

Egyptian senet boards follow a very consistent morphology that varies in small but notable ways throughout the 2000-year history of the game.  A previously unpublished board, in the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, California, may provide new insight into the evolution of the game in the early New Kingdom.  A game table with markings distinctive of the Thutmoside Period, but oriented like Middle Kingdom and Seventeenth Dynasty boards, it is probably a transitional style.  It likely dates to the Eighteenth Dynasty before the reign of Hatshepsut, a period to which no other games have previously been securely dated.

So that's really cool, whether or not the game turns out to have any supernatural connection.  Myself, I'd just as soon it didn't.  The world's a risky enough place on its own, without adding the potential for playing a game with death.

Look what happened to poor Earl Beardie.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

An inoculation against nonsense

In my Critical Thinking classes, I always included an assignment that was a contest to see who could create the most convincing fake photo or video clip of a ghost, Bigfoot, UFO, or some other paranormal phenomenon.  The students loved it, but I had a very definite reason for assigning it; to show them how easy it is to do digital manipulation.  And some of the results were seriously creepy -- a few were so completely convincing that if I hadn't known better (and hadn't been a skeptic about such matters anyhow) I can easily see myself believing they were real.

My hope was that if they saw that high school students can generate plausible fakes, they should be on guard about believing photographic "evidence" they see online and in the news.  In fact, to mislead people you don't even have to manipulate photos, all you have to do is mislabel them -- look at the Oregon GOP's official site labeling a photograph of a protest by loggers as being a group of armed "militia" who were threatening the Democrats who had insisted that Republican congresspeople come back and vote on climate change legislation rather than skipping town so the measure would fail because of not reaching a quorum.

The result, of course, was like throwing gasoline on a fire -- which is almost certainly what the GOP wanted.

The ghost photo assignment, though, shows that you can inoculate people against being fooled by (oh, how I hate this phrase) "fake news."  And my anecdotal evidence of the success of such a strategy got a boost in a piece of research out of the University of Cambridge that appeared this week in Palgrave Communications, called "Fake News Game Confers Psychological Resistance Against Online Misinformation," by Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden.  In their study, they gave volunteers a game called "Bad News" to play, which challenges them to create the most convincing fake news article they can.  Players get points for how many people in the game are convinced, and lose "credibility points" if their stories get rejected.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons GDJ, FAKE NEWS, CC0 1.0]

What the researchers found was remarkable.  People who played the game showed a 21% decrease in their confidence levels toward fake news -- but no such drop in their belief in real news.  So it didn't turn them into cynics, thinking that everything they see is false, it simply made them aware of what kinds of features are woven into fake news to make it more attractive.

"Research suggests that fake news spreads faster and deeper than the truth, so combating disinformation after-the-fact can be like fighting a losing battle," said Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and co-author of the study.  "We wanted to see if we could pre-emptively debunk, or ‘pre-bunk’, fake news by exposing people to a weak dose of the methods used to create and spread disinformation, so they have a better understanding of how they might be deceived.  This is a version of what psychologists call ‘inoculation theory’, with our game working like a psychological vaccination...  We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news."

"We are shifting the target from ideas to tactics," added co-author Jon Roozenbeek.  "By doing this, we are hoping to create what you might call a general ‘vaccine’ against fake news, rather than trying to counter each specific conspiracy or falsehood."

All of which is a cheering thought.  There's always the problem, when you teach people critical thinking skills, for them to slide from gullibility to cynicism, and not see that disbelieving everything out of hand is as lazy (and inaccurate) as believing everything out of hand.  What we have here is a strategy for giving people immunity to pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, which in today's world we sorely need.

Of course, there'll always be the ones who resist what you're trying to teach them -- the anti-vaxxers of critical thinking, so to speak.  But with luck, techniques like this might reduce their numbers to manageable proportions, and increase the likelihood of herd immunity for the rest of us.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Poker face

A wag once said, "Artificial intelligence is twenty years in the future, and always will be."  It's a trenchant remark; predictions about when we'd have computers that could truly think have been off the mark ever since scientists at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence stated that they would have the problem cracked in a few months...

... back in 1956.

Still, progress has been made.  We now have software that learns from its mistakes, can beat grand masters at strategy games like chess, checkers, and Go, and have come damn close to passing the Turing test.  But the difficulty of emulating human intelligence in a machine has proven to be more difficult than anyone would have anticipated, back when the first computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s.

We've taken a new stride recently, however.  Just a couple of months ago, researchers at the University of Alberta announced that they had created software that could beat human champions at Texas Hold 'Em, a variant of poker.  Why this is remarkable -- and more of a feat than computers that can win chess -- is that all previous game-playing software involved games in which both players have identical information about the state of the game.  In poker, there is hidden information.  Not only that, but a good poker player needs to know how to bluff.

In other words... lie.

Michael Bowling, who led the team at the University of Alberta, said that this turned out to be a real challenge.  "These poker situations are not simple," Bowling said.  "They actually involve asking, 'What do I believe about my opponent’s cards?'"

But the program, called DeepStack, turned out to be quite good at this, despite the daunting fact that in Texas Hold 'Em there are about 10¹⁶⁰ decision points -- more unique scenarios than there are atoms in the universe.  But instead of analyzing all the possibilities, as a program might do in chess (such an approach in this situation would be, for all practical purposes, impossible), DeepStack plays much like a person would -- by speculating on the likelihood of certain outcomes based on the limited information it has.

"It will do its thinking on the fly while it is playing," Bowling said.  "It can actually generalize situations it's never seen before."

Which is pretty amazing.  But not everyone is as impressed as I am.

When Skeptophilia frequent flier Rick Wiles, of End Times radio, heard about DeepStack, he was appalled that we now had a computer that could deceive. "I'm still thinking about programming robots to lie," Wiles said.  "This has been done to us for the past thirty, forty, fifty years -- Deep State has deliberately lied to the public because they concluded that it was in our best interest not to be told the truth...  What's even scarier about the robots that can lie is that they weren't programmed to lie, they learned to lie.  Who's the father of all lies?  Satan is the father of all lies.  Are we going to have demon-possessed artificially intelligent robots?  Is it possible to have demonic spirit to possess an artificial intelligent machine?  Can they possess idols?  Can they inhabit places?  Yeah.  Absolutely.  They can take possession of animals.  They can attach themselves to inanimate objects.  If you have a machine that is capable of lying, then it has to be connected to Lucifer.  Now we’re back to the global brain.  This is where they’re going.  They’re building a global brain that will embody Lucifer’s mind and so Lucifer will be deceiving people through the global brain."

So there's that.  But the ironic thing is that, all demonic spirit bullshit aside, Wiles may not be so far wrong.  While I think the development of artificial intelligence is fascinating, and I can understand why researchers find it compelling, you have to worry what our creations might think about us once they do reach sentience.  This goes double if you can no longer be sure that what the computer is telling you is the truth.

Maybe what we should be worried about is not a computer that can pass the Turing test; it's one that can pass the Turing test -- and chooses to pretend, for its own reasons, that it can't.

I mean, the last thing I want is to go on record as saying I agree with Rick Wiles on anything.  But still.

So that's our rather alarming news for the day.  It's not that I think we're headed into The Matrix any time soon; but the idea that we might be supplanted by intelligent machines of our own making, the subject of countless science fiction stories, may not be impossible after all.

And maybe the artificial intelligence of twenty years in the future may not be as far away as we thought.

Pokémon no

In the last few weeks, Pokémon Go has been all the rage amongst the gamer crowd, to the extent that a Massachusetts man caused a major traffic pile-up when he stopped in the middle of a busy highway to catch a "Pikachu," an Auburn (NY) man crashed his car into a tree basically trying to do the same thing, two California men who neglected to take into account the fact that Pokémon, being imaginary characters, do not have to worry about gravity, fell off a fifty-foot cliff and sustained serious injuries, and the Bosnian government has issued an official warning for players to be careful not to step on a land mine.

So I suppose it was only a matter of time that the evangelical fringe felt obliged to jump into the fun and declare that Pokémon are creations of Satan.

It will come as no shock to regular readers of this blog that the origin of this jaw-dropping revelation is none other than Skeptophilia frequent flier Rick Wiles, who also thinks that the gays are organizing into an elite band of super-soldiers, that Christians in the United States are soon to be rounded up and executed wholesale, and that President Obama murdered Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

So it's apparent at the outset that we're talking about someone here who has a fairly loose grip on reality.  But this time, what he's saying is so much further outside of the realm of the normal that I can't help but wonder if this guy needs some serious psychological help.

Here's what Wiles had to say:

These Pokémon creatures are like virtual cyber-demons.  Digital demons.  Now, this is where this starts to get weird...  So this morning Doc and Edward and I were in an editorial meeting, we're talking about the topics for today's program, and Pokémon Go was one of the topics.  This is before the police officer showed up.  We're talking about Pokémon Go!  And Edward and Doc said, "Rick, we're going to present to you a really far out idea. about Pokémon Go.  What if this technology is transferred to Islamic jihadists and Islamic jihadists have an app that shows them where Christians are located geographically?"...   

After the police officer told us that this man we saw Friday on our property, riding around our property holding his phone, a grown man, a forty-year-old man on a four-wheeler riding around our building suspiciously holding his phone up like he's photographing our building, the police officer comes back and tells us, "Look, I solved the case, he was playing Pokémon Go."  This is why in the office today we all did a triple-take looking at each other.  Because the theory that Doc and Edward presented to me today before the police officer came here was, what if we find out that the demons, the Pokémon Go demons, are being located primarily inside churches?  Well, guess what?  They downloaded the app, they stood here and downloaded the Pokémon Go app, and lo and behold, there is the TruNews office, there's the outline of our building, there you can see where the exit doors and windows are, and there inside the building is a virtual cyber-demon.  And what this man Friday was trying to find was the Pokémon demon that had been placed inside the TruNews office.   

If this technology got into the hands of the wrong people, it could target the churches, it could target the elders, the deacons, the ministers, the Sunday school teachers, the youth pastors.  You could have an app that would lead you to the homes of these strong Christian leaders.  

Then TruNews co-host Edward Szali chimed in:

We found that the churches in our area were all portals.  They were rally points where you could put down bait.  This is where you can go to find and capture these demons.

Wiles then picked up the thread again:

The enemy, Satan, is targeting churches with virtual, digital, cyber-demons.  I believe this thing is a magnet for demonic powers.  Pokémon masters may soon start telling people to kill people in those buildings so they can capture more of these cyber-demons.  They’re spawning demons inside your church.  They’re targeting your church with demonic activity.  This technology will be used by the enemies of the cross to target, locate and execute Christians.

Righty-o.  Do I need to emphasize that what they're talking about is a game wherein players capture creatures that are imaginary?  I.e., not real?

Of course, given that Satan pretty much falls into the same category, I suppose it's not to be wondered at that Wiles and Szali have some difficulty with the distinction.

Don't be misled by this cheerful smile.  He's reaching out to steal your soul.

Anyhow.  You may want to keep all of this in mind, if you are a Pokémon Go player.  Not only do you have to worry about causing a car pile-up, running your own car into a tree, falling off a cliff, or stepping on a land mine, you now have to fret about your cell phone becoming infested with cyber-demons.

Me, I think I'll stick with birdwatching, which a student of mine aptly characterized as "Pokémon for adults."  You wander around for interminable periods outdoors in all sorts of weather, become obsessed with seeing species you've never seen before, and flock to places where other players have seen something interesting or unusual.  There's still the potential of accidents, but at least you don't have to worry about birds being demons, although I have to admit I wonder sometimes about starlings.

Flipping over "Flappy Bird"

I am astonished, sometimes, at how little it takes to generate a conspiracy theory.

Of course, at the bottom of it always has to be someone who is (1) delusional or (2) lying.  Or possibly (3) both.  In some few cases, we are able to figure out where the whole thing started (and as I mentioned in yesterday's post, it's frequently either The Daily Mail or The Weekly World News).  But more often, it's a random comment, claim, tweet, or Facebook posting by a random person, which somehow... improbably... gets picked up, is considered to be true, and goes viral.

That seems to be the case with the most recent conspiracy theory -- one that is only days old.  And wait till you hear what this one is about.

"Flappy Bird."

Yes, Flappy Bird, the new app that induces you to waste inordinate amounts of time trying to maneuver a deformed-looking bird through a set of steel pipes.  The game that generates nearly homicidal rage in completely ordinary, mild-mannered individuals when they almost complete level 8 only to run smack into a pipe because they tapped one too many times on the screen.

Flappy Bird was, for some reason, wildly successful, at its peak bringing in $50,000 of revenue a day.  This, by itself, caused suspicious narrowing of the eyes amongst the serious conspiracy theorists, who see dastardly plots wherever they look; but the real crazy talk didn't start until the news two days ago that Flappy Bird's creator, Vietnamese game designer Dong Nguyen, had removed the app from the market.

Within hours, rumors started circulating about why Nguyen had pulled such a lucrative game.  After all, having a blockbuster app is to game designers what having a bestseller and a movie contract would be to us novelists; "success."  It seemed impossible to believe that Nguyen had done it for the reason he stated, which was that he was overstressed by the game's wild success and "needed some peace."  Another suggestion was that "a major game manufacturer" had put pressure on Nguyen because the game resembled apps that they owned the rights to -- also possible, but at this time unsubstantiated.

But that was only scratching the surface, and both of those read like scientific text, plausibility-wise, compared to the claims currently zinging around the internet.  Here are just a few rumors I've seen:

• Flappy Bird was a Trojan Horse; while you are focused on guiding birds into steel pipes, it's stealing personal information from your computer.  Nguyen pulled it when Interpol realized what he was doing, and he's now on the run from the law.
• Flappy Bird has code in it that includes subliminal messages, rendering you a mindless automaton.  Given some of the behavior I've seen of students playing it, I'm not sure this is far off the mark.  But the game was withdrawn because the Illuminati threatened Nguyen, apparently because we can only have one set of Evil Brain-Stealing Overlords in the world at a time.
• Flappy Bird is a coded message having to do with the apocalypse.  Nguyen was trying to warn us of the arrival of the Antichrist, for some reason using a bizarre bird and pipes.  The order of the heights of the pipes can be decoded to tell us the date of the opening of the Gates of Hell.  Nguyen withdrew the game when he realized that the Minions of Satan had figured out what he was up to.

Then, the whole thing took an even more surreal turn when the rumor started flying about that Nguyen had not only withdrawn the app from the market, but had withdrawn himself as well, via a self-inflicted pistol shot to the head.  I was told this by some students this afternoon, and already there is an International Business Times article declaring that the story about his suicide is untrue, and further tweets and Facebook posts stating that either (1) yes, it is so true, or (2) okay, so it isn't true, but he's on the run so it could be true soon, or (3) Nguyen has disappeared, so we don't know if it's true or not.

And the whole time I'm reading this, I'm thinking: what the hell is wrong with you people?  How about let's see if we can find out some facts before we make pronouncements about why Nguyen withdrew the app, and whether or not he's still alive?

But as to Flappy Bird's purpose: as far as I can tell, it mostly exists to irritate the bejeezus out of everyone who attempts to play it.  I have yet to hear anyone say, "Wow, that is a fun game!"  Mostly what people say after finishing a game is unprintable, and is often followed by a wireless internet device flying across a room and crashing into a solid object, much like the bird did on the second pipe of Level 1 during my one and only attempt to play the game.

So I doubt if any of the other stuff is true, and my intuition is that Dong Nguyen is probably still alive.  But myself, I'm willing to wait to find out.  And until then: just calm down, okay?

And next time, can you spin a conspiracy theory around something more plausible?  Because this one kind of sucked.  If you people are right, and the Illuminati and/or the Antichrist have sunk to communicating via coded messages in idiotic computer games, then I'd just as soon throw my lot in with InfoWars and have done with it.