This Twitter based netprov was organized, launched, and led by a transmedia storytelling guru, responsible for numerous similar events in entertainment media. It arises out of a pun, and a fascination with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu stories, famous for their mythos, iconography, and verbal style. This alternate reality game is fascinating to reconstruct 3 years after the event because of the challenge in capturing such a distributed event it was documented in a variety of Web services and pages that are no longer available, except through services like the Internet Archives.
The event organizers— Jay Bushman, Kris Kowall, Ryan Paul, and Josh Lewis— created a wiki to sketch out an overarching narrative, inform prospective participants about the Cthulu mythos, and script archetypal roles for players to breathe life into. The roles were “the questing professor,” “the tormented artist,” “the suspicious citizen,” and “the gibbering cultist.”
