Regarding Chronus RPers and Gamejacks
Hi, everyone! This is Astartus, fellow SBARG player and ARG veteran. Some of you might even know me from ARGs as "Year Zero", the Jadusable ARG or EndlessInsanity. I am writing this article for SBARGhq in an attempt to talk about something that hasn't been covered yet for you Homestuckers unfamiliar with the ARG genre: general ARG courtesy.
Most of you have been getting into the basic puzzle solving patterns, the omegle hunts and whatnot, and this is a good thing. Lately, however, especially on Pesterchum, but also on tumblr, there have been a huge amount of people roleplaying as canon SBARG characters like the HorrorTerrors or Chronos, trying to rally factions, posting puzzles and so on. While this might be considered harmless roleplaying, it harms one of the most iron-clad rules of ARGs: DON'T GAMEJACK.
Gamejacking isthe act of pretending to be a canon character in an ARG, maliciously or not, and therefor muddying the line between what is and is not canon. Mind you, that in this context, canon does not mean "what is part of the universe"; we all are, as the players, of course. It does rather mean "officially sanctioned by the ARG puppetmasters", in this case, the SBARG tumblr. Generally, if a page, a character or a puzzle is not directly found by another page considered canon, it is not part of the ARG. So far, in SBARG, the SBARG tumblr is the only canon page.
Think of the ARG less as a role play and more as a D&D campaign. The canon SBARG folks are our gamemaster, telling us what we can do and cannot do, what happens and how the story unfolds, introduce new characters and let us grab sweet loot. Us players can influence the game, but only in the way the gamemaster allows us to: we can interact with the characters, but we cannot start randomly dispensing magic swords to the other players. Unless the gamemaster gives us a magic sword dispenser first. So while roleplaying is fine by itself, pretending to be a part of this canon team is the equivalent of the gamemaster taking a bathroom break and someone else claiming to take over for now and wrecking his campaign. Especially new players and players not familiar with ARG structures can find this extremely confusing.
So, I ask all of you: Please, when you roleplay, follow basic ARG courtesy and somehow mark your RP as non-canon. Add a small line with a disclaimer, move your chat RP to a roleplay room (in fact, there's been created a SBARG-RP memo on Pesterchum just now!) and keep the canon clean from stains. Theorycrafting and musing over the true motivations of certain characters is fine, of course, as long as you keep it strictly OOC. Everyone else will thank you for it!
PS: As there has been a lot of confusion, the status quo is as follows: There has not been any kind of communication with Chronos whatsoever. There are no unsolved puzzles, unless we overlooked some extremely well-hidden ones, and mysterious lines, poems and riddles found somewhere else than the SBARG tumblr should be disregarded. Currently, we have only two goals: Collect more grist and show up to the msparg meeting, whatever it will bring.
[This was written and submitted to me privately by Astartus. I want to give him a huge amount of thanks for putting this into words for everyone to see. This really needed to be said!
Remember also that the whole 2--x story is also not canon to SBARG, but is also a stand-alone ARG that you shouldn't attempt to gamejack or interfere with.
