Updates/Connections to the Slender Man or Fears

First things first before I launch into this: a few important or interesting updates.  Everyone who has joined has been assigned to a team and you should have your team assignments in the e-mails you’ve given us.  If you’d prefer to get updates and information from a different e-mail, please, let us know that one instead.  Also, the team lists on the blog have been updated, so you should know everyone who’s on your team.  They’re lopsided now, yes, but they’ll never exceed more than a one-person advantage.

We’re planning on closing comments on the first posts on Friday (though we haven’t decided what time yet), so be sure to get your comments in before then!  We’ll be sure all comments get approved and considered as long as they’re made by a member of the blog’s Team.  We’ll try to update sometime during the weekend, hopefully Monday night at the very latest.

I’ve heard whispers of plans to start up some sort of Team contact, though I haven’t heard that any of those plans have come to fruition yet.  Let me take this moment to remind you that Team contact is neither prohibited nor required.  The choice is up to you.  You do, however, have at least most of your teammate’s e-mails available through the application page, though, just in case you do wish to contact them.

Finally, we now have 31 Players, almost double what we had the last time we announced the numbers.  Wow.  I’ve been overwhelmed with the response so far, especially considering that we haven’t even put out the second update yet!  Thank you all for playing.  It’s meant so much to both of us.  We’ve only been able to hit our own circles, though, so if you really think what we’re doing is worth participating in, feel free to advertise it to your own circles or blog about it or hashtag it on Twitter or something.

Now for the reason I posted in the first place: some of you might be wondering what our connection to the Slender Man Mythos or the Fear Mythos is.  I’d like to clarify this now: it’s not.  If you have no clue what the Slender Man or Fear Mythos are, you don’t even need to read any further. 

While we have both written for one or both ‘Verses and while our contacts in said ‘Verses are probably the largest audience we’ve advertised to (and consequently makes up a large portion of the Players), the Game of the Gods has no connection to either.  During a conceptual phase, we considered the possibility of a connection, but we ultimately decided against it for several reasons. 

For one, there’s really no reason to do so.  We set out to provide something somewhere between chaotic fiction, interactive fiction, and an ARG where the audience writes the story and controls what happens.  We didn’t set out to create a story about the Slender Man or the Cold Boy or the Wooden Girl or something.  It wasn’t our original purpose, and it wouldn’t really add anything to what we’re trying to do apart from being a gimmick.

Secondly, we didn’t want to risk the communities derailing our plans (the Slenderverse in particular tends to jump on new blogs and inadvertently drag them into the community) and we didn’t want our game to ruin their immersion.  The way we’re running things almost requires us to use this blog to update you, and consequently makes it hard to remain completely in-game.  We don’t want Players having their immersion ruined just because they assumed that this was part of the Slenderverse or Fearverse.

Third, we wanted to make this accessible to anyone.  You don’t need to know who the Slender Man or the Rake is to read or participate.  The work is original and independent, and we don’t want our readers or Players to need any backstory to participate.

Finally, we’d both like to distance ourselves a bit from the Slenderverse and Fearverse, as neither of us want our online work to be defined by them.  We’d like a chance to do something experimental like this without the attachment to those communities.  To branch out a bit, if you will.  We both appreciate the communities, the work they’ve done, the work we’ve done for the communities, and what the communities have done for us.  However, neither of us plan on writing in the two ‘Verses forever, and we don’t want to take on another project related to either.

So tl;dr: are we in any way related to the Slender Man or any of the Fears?  No, and we never will be.