Now, we’re not going to be touching on the “ARG”. As silly as it may seem, maybe it’ll develop… somehow, and we’ll actually see something concrete. We’ll just give the hard-working ARG folks the benefit of a doubt for now, rather than rain on their parade for no reason. No, now I’m going go to town on all those other rumors. Rumors propagated by video game journalists who hardly have time to do a bit of research before they are forced to push an article out prematurely.

So, in the midst of all of this VGA-related mayhem, some people have managed to… well, troll a certain number of people. As if that wasn’t enough, another, completely unrelated number of people is now convinced that the VGA 2011 Wheatley Character of the Year nomination short somehow contains Half-Life 3 ARG clues. The bad thing is these groups appear to have combined, and we now have a tremendous number of people who believe Valve is about to announce Half-Life 3.

First off! These e-mails. Look at them.

I’m going to do the impossible and sum up both of these e-mails in exactly four letters. Fake. If you want, you can add a fifth to make it sound more attractive, in which case you’ll get “fakey”. You can even make it rhyme, “wakey wakey, fakey jakey” and other good stuff like that. But the point is both of these e-mails are completely fake. Gabe never said any of the stuff found in these e-mails. Not only do they look really fake, but it makes no sense that Gabe would suddenly open up to a random e-mail man, with exclusive Half-Life news. When the only things e-mail folks have managed to get out of the man in 4 years have been nothing but cryptic non-answers. It’s just silly.

Now. This Twitter is called “Doug_Rattmann”. Just because it spews out cryptic shit every few hours, and just because it’s named after a very significant Portal character doesn’t make it real. Quite the contrary: it’s completely and utterly fake. It’s been fake since April 2011, when it was being used to sidetrack and confuse participants of the Portal 2 Potato Fools’ Day ARG (the Potato Sack one). Now, it’s right at it again. Whatever numbers it spits out – feel free to ignore them, because this Twitter has absolutely nothing to do with Valve.

Remember, just because certain publications (PC Gamer, Shacknews, Gaming Blend, Vivid Gamer, Game Rant and Destructoid, I’m looking right at all of you) fell prey to trolling attempts such as these doesn’t mean that you should too. You actually have time to apply common sense and do research on this stuff. They don’t. Just because the name is reputable doesn’t mean the content is.

Whether or not the Wheatley short “ARG” turns out to be frutiful – well, that’s a different story. But for now, don’t just believe everything you read on the Internet. That’s how World War I got started.