I am Simon Ordo. It's time for me to move on.

Please see the initial thread and the follow up thread for context, if you please.

Thread: I am Simon Ordo. I was born in 1977 and I am 49 years old. I have a warning for you.

[link to godlikeproductions.be0.biz]


We had a good time together, but all good things must come to an end.

As the vast majority of you have guessed, Simon Ordo is not a traveler from the future.

For more than a decade I have made a living as a professional story teller. I sincerely hope a taste of my tale has inspired or at least entertained you to some degree.

“Conversations with Simon Ordo” is an upcoming novella that I’m working on and I thank you all for helping me to define the points of interest of the story more clearly. The book is meant to be primarily a social commentary on our current way of life as told from the viewpoint of a traveler from the not-so-distant future. While I was primarily responsible for Simon’s dialogue, there were three of us in total working on the specifics (although admittedly, the premise of the story wasn’t entirely original - but then again neither was that of James Cameron’s Avatar [it’s Pocahontas]).

You might ask “why bother”?

Since the late 90s I have worked for various interactive entertainment companies including Electronic Arts, which is incidentally where I first encountered the project that inspired this exercise. The project I’m talking about was called “Majestic”. Majestic never quite made it out of the door for logistic reasons, but it was essentially designed to be an interactive story telling vehicle with a Conspiracy Theory theme.

The “game” interacted with participants in the real world (not on a computer or console gaming system). It wasn’t entirely unlike the film “The Game”, except on a larger scale. Participants would help shape the direction of their individual experience based on their responses to real life interactions that the “game” fed them. It has been several years since I’ve worked for EA, but the concept has intrigued me ever since.

I wanted to write Simon Ordo in a similar fashion.
These last few days have been an experiment in social media interactive story telling.

Simon’s initial dialogue is primarily an extrapolation of current world events set in the context of recurring conspiracy theory website themes. I also run a Survivalist website for which I’ve been collecting volumes of information that I drew on to flavor the presentation. The “characters” in this story are not so much the people but the various “facts” that Simon presents to you.

Like the characters of many stories, some of these facts are inspired by parts of my own life. It’s easier to keep track of them that way and it makes for more natural interactions between the facts. The dialogue itself was not composed ahead of time. Instead, it was written on the fly, guided mostly by the line of questioning the participants presented.

The title of the initial post was carefully designed in such a way as to draw many of you in with a juicy bit of bait – that of a semi-obvious fallacy in the form of a simple math problem while at the same time alluding to content of the story itself. As a benchmark, the goal was to achieve 50k views and 1k replies.

I thank you all for participating, even considering the circumstances under which your participation was elicited. I trust that the underlying premise of time travel and an ultimate apocalypse in a few years was absurd enough to where 99.99% of you participated for the fun of it, not because you were actually concerned for impending doom.

I would estimate that 99% of the items posted to GLP result in 0.1% actual doom, so this shouldn’t really be a surprise.
Please accept my apology if you experienced any sort of real anxiety over the contents of the story. Consider the openly stated disclaimers of reading anything posted to GLP: Don’t believe anything you read. Most of what you see on here is entertainment. Once I personally realized that fact, GLP was a natural choice for this brief experiment.

Being a good story teller is like being good close-up magician. It’s not about flash or high dollar production value. When you execute the effect with enough precision and subtle consistencies that hint at whatever “truth” you want to project, the magic becomes real. The spectators become part of the effect. Everyone knows that magic isn’t real, but we *want* to believe.

That’s why it works, and that’s why GLP itself is so popular. If you were to put half an effort into figuring out how the effect was performed, you could easily figure out the mechanism. But you don’t want to, because the magic is more satisfying.
That is what Simon Ordo is all about and I hope you “felt the magic”, even if only for a moment.
Thank you all once more.

p.s.

Special thanks to a kind stranger, Rickster58, who upgraded Simon’s account to help provide some protection from the defensive systems in place here at GLP. I never meant for this experiment to cost anyone anything, Rick. I will be returning the favor shortly, now that I have regained the use of my “electronic payment method”. It’s true that I don’t like to owe people. ;-)