The Game Dame

Someone might possibly be punking me. I can’t prove it (yet) but I’m beginning to suspect that something’s not on the level with one of the 128 blogs I read. Let’s just say that a dramatic marriage was announced and, despite my having a relative in the office of the county in question, no marriage license exists. My conclusion can only be one of the following: (1) the names or the city of the married people mentioned were incorrect or changed for privacy purposes, (2) the writer himself has been fooled by the people he’s writing about, or (3) the entire blog story line has been faked.

How can you tell if you’re being hoodwinked? Here are some things that make me suspicious of a person’s self-narrative. The more of these that are present, the more suspicious I get.

The wall of text
Let’s say that your blogger has mentioned that he has a full-time job, maybe a wife and kids, and even possibly plays several level 70 WoW toons. Now, how in the heck does he have time to write daily 1,000 word blog posts with detailed descriptions of his non-job, non-family, non-work adventures, including quoting dialog, scene descriptions, and his own analysis of events? How can he find the time write about these things and also to live through them?

Disappearing characters
Maybe your blogger has been telling you about some fascinating people with whom she hangs out. She describes meeting a new boyfriend… and hilarity, of course, ensues. Comments are flowing into the blog! But then after a few posts about the new boyfriend, people aren’t commenting as much. Or maybe your blogger notices a drop in hits. Suddenly, boyfriend is no longer mentioned. Or he dumps her for no reason given. Or, even more outrageous, your blogger simply starts talking about a new person as if the previous boyfriend didn’t even exist any more. If your blogger is really obnoxious, she might even kill them off for dramatic purposes.

Dodging
Some obvious warning signs occur when commenters start asking your blogger direct questions and the answers come out dodgy. Maybe he only answers comments that are compliments. Maybe he answers skeptics by turning the question around on the asker or completely changing the subject. He might use the “right to privacy” argument so he doesn’t have to be specific about details that don’t add up. He might even promise to post evidence (pictures, video, guest bloggers) just to get you off his back, but for some reason these never appear. Maybe she says she has kids but they never show up in her writing. She dodges writing about them because she doesn’t have any and forgets to do it.

Bad fiction writer’s syndrome
I’m not talking about grammatical mistakes, but rather something about the story that just doesn’t add up for you. Trust me, given my own life, I realize that Truth really is stranger than fiction, but if something sounds too amazing to be true, it’s probably fake. Big examples of this include people rallying from death’s-door illnesses, revealing terrible secrets like sexual abuse or incest, and lovers or relatives appearing out of the mist for a fateful reunion. (Think soap operas.) Perhaps your blogger is supposed to be a 12-year-old boy, but he writes in an inspiring, reflective way that would be very odd if it were true.

You know better
Your blogger’s story mentions people, places, historical events, or other things about which you are personally familiar and they don’t ring true. Just like my example at the top of this post (no marriage license). Verifiable parts of the story do not check out via the shallowest research (I’m looking at you, Wikipedia!).

But there are smaller hints, too. These mistakes are so subtle that as a reader, you usually don’t see them so much as feel them. Something just doesn’t feel intuitively right with what you’re reading. A big one for me is when a male tries to write a conversation that allegedly occurred between two females. If the man was actually there (fact), or if he is an accomplished writer (fiction), he can usually pull it off convincingly. However, if the “dialog” is coming completely out of his head, there are usually plenty of signs, patterns, and subtext that I can pick up that tell me, “this guy has no idea how women really talk to each other.” (I’m betting that men can also smell when a female writer can’t pass off male conversations.) Another insidious sign can show up when a “guest blogger” writes in a voice that sounds exactly like the regular blogger. Or worse, the writing sounds as if it is being forced to sound exactly opposite of the normal blogger. (For example, your regular blogger is American, but the alleged guest is Aussie and thus a preponderance of “mates” are sprinkled throughout the text.)

In summary

The biggest question, when faced with these kinds of inconsistencies on a blog that you read is: do you care if the story you’re enjoying is faked? Plenty of people had no problem continuing to follow the YouTube adventures of LonelyGirl15 after they found out it was fiction. The popularity of reality TV shows us how pleasant a certain type of voyeurism can be. On the other hand, some hoaxes hurt. For me it depends on the emotional connection that I may have with the blogger and how big the possibly-faked issue is. Life and death hoaxes would really upset me and make me angry with the blogger. Faked WoW stories, however? Meh. Don’t care. Romances or personal struggles lie in a gray area for me that I would need to judge on a case-by-case basis. I can’t bear to be emotionally invested in a person who blogs about repeatedly getting kicked in the nuts by life, propping him up with my supportive and encouraging comments, only to find out later that it was all a lie. (In this case, I might be tempted to do a bit of my own nut-kicking on him.)

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself two questions: (1) why is this person telling this story, and (2) why am I reading it? For some, if there’s no harm, there’s no foul. But personally, I’d rather know that you are writing fiction instead of putting one over on me. That makes us — the reader and the blogger — equals. If you need to get your jollies from being more powerful than your readers by withholding secrets from them, then I’m probably not going to hit your site any more.