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Games In The Forest

Forest Horror Stories are in some way often close to the reality in a computer game or a simulation. This is because there seems not only the character’s misjudgment of the situation is leading him into dangerous territory. In the dark forest we are like Katniss Everdeen confronted with the interventions from an invisible game maker. It’s like being chosen for the hunger games without knowing it.

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Sometimes it´s surprising we accept the conceptual approach in forest horror because of course we know the story was written by an author and certain events in the forest are created by the director and his crew. This is always a problem in storytelling and drama and for badly introduced interventions which change the course of action there is even a term from the old Greeks. It’s called “deux ex machina”. Particularly if we see a so-called found coverage film it could easily look like some trick.

Of course good acting and the right use of effects and emotion could put the audience in a state where the audience doesn’t think too much about the construction of the story. However there is more about it. As said in the previous post it seems that on some level close to base reality the other world appears like a simulation (whereas it is questionable to interpret reality generally as simulation) or even a game where we have interventions of the “game maker”.

Perhaps we accept these stories because sometimes they feel true. Even in reality life is not “character-driven”. There are interventions from invisible forces from somewhere. Therefore the best writers are able to write something which rings true which make use of “cosmic interventions”. There are real cases which look like a weird constructed plot with supernatural interventions. This is an impression particularly if it comes to stories and reports of real events in the forest. Naturally its difficult to distinct between reality and “scripted reality” – every witness report gets interpreted, fictionalized or becoming a folk tale with some sort of morale in the end.

If we look at the real accounts of “forest horror” as described in “Dangerous lights” with cases in Brazil, Jacques Vallee’s investigation of the Happy Camp events in California, The Freetown Fall River Forest case or the Hoia Bacu Forest we find the same dramaturgy at the bottom of the story as in many forest horror stories. It looks like some “Elder Gods” orchestrating supernatural events which are overwhelming for the human mind. The events often go far beyond the “local old legend” encompassing some ghost roaming the woods.

A typical difference between “real accounts” from haunted woods and fictional horror is the forest as a physical attacker. What’s happening in the forest in most real stories is not so much a physical attack from the woods itself its more as something which happens somewhere in-between reality and imagination, somewhere between dream and real experience. Forest horror feels true if we understand Lovecraft’s idea of cosmic horror: “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present” It all happens more on an atmospheric level rather than a pure physical level in the first place, only later it could lead to physical consequences.





These forces tend to play tricks with the mind. Indeed some events and sightings sound like a part of a game or like everything is happen in a form of virtual reality. However we don’t know the mechanism of the game or the intentions of the game maker. Thus we try rituals and study magic, often we need to solve a riddle in the forest and getting lost. We don’t understand any longer what’s going on. Perhaps this is the true nature of the game: It’s all about not losing your mind in the first place. Then we might be able to understand the nature of our own role in this game and overcome its limitations. Perhaps this is the trick both in a forest horror story or in real life: don’t do what the game maker wants you to do and overcome your limitations.

Is Our Reality A Computer Simulation?

What’s really going on? This is the question at the bottom of my movie project as many others.

Space X Pioneer and Tesla founder Elon Musk said “The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is “one in billions”. He is not alone and the “Matrix”-like idea has become a legitimate scientific hypothesis.

Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the museum’ Hayden Planetarium said: “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment” (Scientific American, Clara Moskowitz, April 7, 2016: Are we living in a computer simulation? ).

It seems that the simulation hypothesis is a simple explanation for the dark forest we are living in.

What if its another theory hiding just what’s really going on and making us fatalistic? What if there is a someone out there using such beliefs to oppress people?


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At first sight the computer simulation theory makes a lot of sense because it suits not only our everyday life experience but could also explain supernatural encounters and religious experience.

Many people feel they are part of a larger drama, but don’t know the director or the screenplay of their lives. They encounter the same situation and similar characters again and again.

Moreover there are repeating patterns in life as in a “Game Of Thrones” where often a similar twist does happen.

Are we trapped in some sort of “Truman Show” or even the “Hunger Games” without even knowing it?

THE VERGE asks “if we are avatars being guided by creatures in another reality” (Richard McCormick, Jun2, 2016).

Yes it feels a lot like this because we can’t see the driving forces in the universe but there is a strong perception of some (divine) intervention in many situations.

Hauntings in the forests and Ufo-Encounters often appear like paradox stage-plays or some video-clip played again and again. This is like part of a computer game or simulation.

However there are some simple questions which are often avoided. What we can actually do by ourselves is creating some very convincing cyber space which looks very real.

But what is about physical objects? Could a solid object like a wall or a tree be nothing else as some sort of cyberspace-reality? Maybe in the future, but it couldn’t be easily imagined from our experience.

What’s happen is that the advocates of simulation theory are blurring the distinction between mind and matter. It’s true that living in an online world is changing perception and virtual realities become very real. But that doesn’t change base reality. Sometimes we need to be careful not mixing up things here. If we take a walk in the forest without any mobile devices we experience base reality again. And hopefully we’re still sometimes “offline”.

What makes simulation theory very interesting is that indeed visionary encounters and supernatural events could happen in some sort of realm of reality which resembles a computer game. The reports often sound like some sort of “cinematic” experience and we ask where is the projectionist. However this applies to a level of the other world, like the celtic otherworld, which is still close to base reality.





Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University writes about the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation created by posthumans, who want to simulate the world of their ancestors: “the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws”, Nick Bostrom, “Are you living in a computer simulation”, Published in Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 53, No, 211). This sounds like typical alien encounters and alien intervention from outer space and gives perhaps some bizarre events some meaning.

But is it more realistic or more credible as a highly developed extraterrestrial visitor who is guiding our civilization in a subtle way?

And, there is an account of visionary experience as long as mankind exists and these accounts tell a different story. On some level the other world is abstract and can’t be encompassed with our models of the universe.

We may be indeed part of a big game but it doesn’t work the way we usually think. Archetypical images for example are often simply disturbing and cannot be explained or interpreted.

It’s no surprise that simulation theory is basically an adaption of much older theories going back to ancient times. Seeing the world as a computer simulation is in a way like Plato’s allegory of the cave. Computers didn’t exist at this time. But the philosophers knew that what we see might be a simulation but in the end its much more then simple simulations.