As has often been pointed out, Q’s posts are so vague and disjointed they are mostly nonsensical. From the “bakers’” view (Q researchers call themselves that because they are picking up Q’s “crumbs”), they are decoding a message that will clue them in on the great battle between Trump and the deep state, between Trump and the cabal of Satanic child abusers. Frequent prompts like “keep your eye on the ball” and “find the connections” encourage researchers on their quest for the truth. Skeptics would call it finding meaning where there is none and conjecturing wildly off a few disparate phrases and links to obscure government data on missile and aircraft specs; but the point is that this is essentially a game, one which the bakers believe is grounded in real world events.

Q has dropped nearly 2000 posts since late October 2017. The Q account pushes out so much content that the aforementioned analyst of Q posts, whose channel is called “Pursuit of Truth,” admits he’s “drowning in Q.” His shows are a half hour to an hour long and air almost daily. The scope the Q conspiracies and the constant drip of new content make “The Storm” immersive and engaging, much like a video game.

The greatest similarity between “The Storm” community and the gaming community is the crowdsourcing of solutions. In the gaming community, threads with thousands of members allow gamers to collaborate, solve puzzles, and unlock prizes within the game. From what I’ve been told by my gamer husband, many of these challenges can’t be solved by any one gamer in isolation, but require many gamers working on the same problem to solve it.