Dan Hon, who used to design and run alternate reality games for a living, has an excellent long read on QAnon and ARGs. Worth every scroll.

The problem is, I don’t see how QAnon ends. QAnon is a meme-directed game in the Dawkins sense. It can be understood as a game about an idea that doesn’t really have anyone running it. There’s no singular author, showrunner or writer. There’s not even really a writer’s room. There’s no game designer, no dungeon master. It can make predictions about the world and those predictions can turn out to be consistently, verifiably wrong. What it can do is just keep going and going and going, consuming more links and more information into one giant morass.