The Parasite is no exception, although its funding—about $150,00—didn’t come from marketers. Instead, it was cobbled together from a variety of sources (including a grant from the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, several fellowships for student workers from the College, the university’s Committee for Theater and Performance Studies, and a University Arts Grant) wrangled by a team led by Patrick Jagoda, a professor of English and cinema and media studies at U Chicago. He's also one of the cofounders of Game Changer Chicago, a lab that designs digital games, board games, and ARGs for Chicago high school students.

Jagoda’s enthusiasm is boundless—for games, for television, for books. (He studied with David Foster Wallace, and lived with him for a summer in the mid-‘00s. They went to a midnight screening of The Matrix Reloaded. Wallace reportedly hated it, while Jagoda defended the Architect—himself a kind of proto-ARG designer—as a clever use of the work of French theorist Jean Baudrillard.) Jagoda was also one of my teachers: I took multiple classes with him when I was an undergraduate at the university, and I was one of the more engaged players for The Project, the last ARG he ran on campus, in 2013. (He has worked on seven other ARGs.) As a result, I was not exactly an objective observer for The Parasite—but no one really could be.

This is part of what appeals to Jagoda about the format. Simply interacting with players and maintaining the fourth wall would of necessity make me a character in the game, even if that character was almost identical to the “real” Eric Thurm. The nature of ARGs is to be infectious and immersive, assimilating people, places, and events into their narratives like a sort of playful Borg.

Jagoda conceived of the project that became The Parasite while on a road trip with his partner, U Chicago sociologist Kristen Schilt, who ran an ethnographic study of freshman orientation in 2016 to identify spaces where a game would make sense in the Orientation Week experience. The pair also brought in Heidi Coleman, director of undergraduate studies in the university’s theater and performance studies program, to oversee the performance elements of the game.

The rest of the design team included undergraduates (several of whom took courses taught by Jagoda and Coleman as preparation for the project), graduate students, professional artists, and staff from several corners of the university. Many are queer, several are first-generation immigrants, and almost all have been marginalized by the university in some way. (Members of the design team were also active participants in the successful effort to unionize the university’s grad students.) As graduate student Omie Hsu puts it, the team was composed of “people dedicated to world building for whom the world has not been built.” Each came into the project with an intimate knowledge of the ways in which the University of Chicago was uniquely suited for this experiment.

Patrick Jagoda conceived of The Parasite. He brought in Heidi Coleman, director of undergraduate studies in the university’s theater and performance studies program, to oversee the performance elements of the game. Grace McCleod The rest of the design team included undergraduates (several of whom took courses taught by Jagoda and Coleman as preparation for the project), graduate students, professional artists, and staff from several corners of the university. Many are queer, several are first-generation, and almost all have been marginalized by the university in some way. (Members of the design team also participated in the successful effort to unionize the university’s grad students.) As graduate student Omie Hsu puts it, the team was composed of “people dedicated to world building for whom the world has not been built.” Each came into the project with an intimate knowledge of the ways in which the University of Chicago was uniquely suited for this experiment.

The university that’s sometimes called the place where fun goes to die has an odd relationship to play. The administration encourages Scav, an annual scavenger hunt that has been running since 1987, where hundreds of students compete to do everything from building a nuclear reactor to summarizing The Wire solely through cannibalized clips from The Lion King. Some people consider Kuvia, a week of 5 am wakeups for yoga and stretching, a “fun” tradition. Even the university fight song references Thucydides. In other words, it’d be difficult to find a campus better prepared for a meta-fictionally slippery, puzzle-based conspiracy.

The Squids certainly embraced it. And as they coalesced into a tight-knit group of students (about 20 in the core group solving many of the harder puzzles, with more than 100 floating around in various side chats), they became more willing to play back against the design team—that is, to stretch the boundaries of what The Parasite could be. The design team, for its part, went along with the fun. For example, a Facebook post by incoming student Katie Delong asking if any other members of the Class of 2021 played Dungeons and Dragons prompted the design team to create a specialized, 35-page, Parasite-themed D&D campaign.

Three other examples: Mateo Rey, a first-year student from Argentina, cracked a series of codes produced by bots in the Squid’s Discord room (an online chat service primarily used by gamers), allowing the students to create their own bots. The Squids set up fake email accounts to communicate with Adrian, a suspicious shill character created by designer Jesse Martinez. And during orientation, one of the Squids made a Grindr profile for one of the Reticulites, who the Squids affectionately named “the Grindticulite.” Unbeknownst to the Squids, members of the design team had joked for months about creating a Reticulite Grindr profile.

Then there was the time over the summer when two incoming freshmen who happened to be in Chicago interpreted a vague message from one of the game’s characters to mean they should head to campus. Sneaking into the university’s Reva and David Logan arts building, they stumbled on in-progress sets for The Parasite—a moment that could have cracked the shell of plausibility around the game. Instead, it prompted the design team to create a new character who was, in the narrative of The Parasite, in charge of construction.