Everybody wants to be initiated, nobody wants to be tricked

This is a post about three storytelling techniques I've seen in media - and at the RPG table. 

Initiation

In initiation stories, the audience is brought into some conspiracy or made privy to an essential secret of the universe. This initiation turns them into one of the elect. 

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo (and the audience) that the real world isn't the real world. Humans are being farmed by machines. The world we know is a shared mass hallucination. There is a prophesy that one human will be the One who can fully overcome the machine world and rescue humankind from their captivity.

There are games like Vampire: The Masquerade that tell their secrets in the opening pages of their introductory narrative. This isn't exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the feeling of giving the players a "Oh. That's what's going on" moment. 

In my experience, conspiracy games like Delta Green's Control Group module can elicit this effect. One or two sessions of the game are played with both the players and player character's in the "out" group. Then, they receive initiation and are told the secrets of the game world. 

It's fun to be initiated. To be in the know. To be told secrets. 

(This feeling is what keeps Q Anon morons coming back for more conspiracy slop. They're one of the smart ones! They followed the clues and did their own research and now they know that Joe Biden is doing the plot of Henson's The Dark Crystal.) 

Revelation

In revelation stories, the audience is told a seemingly normal narrative. At the very end of the narrative, there is a moment of revelation that changes the context of the entire story.

At the end of Fight Club, you realize that Tyler Durden was a figment of the narrator's imagination.

At the end of The Sixth Sense, you realize the bald guy was Bruce Willis the entire time.

This is a difficult type of story to tell in an RPG format. The fun of revelation stories is in the rewatch. You don't read Gene Wolf, you reread Gene Wolf. Still, I wanted to include this storytelling technique because it felt so close in theme to "initiation." If you have any good examples of this from a mainstream game, let me know.

Apostasy 

In apostasy stories, the audience is initiated and later told that their first initiation was false - an apostasy. They're then inducted into the true initiation.

In The Matrix Reloaded, the Architect tells Neo (and the audience) that the story of the One is a false narrative. The cycle of the One is all part of the machine's plan. There have been many Ones. Each One has collapsed the current Matrix, rescued a handful of humans, and restarts the cycle. 

Apostasy is not fun. The audience only has the text with which to understand the narrative world. We know only what the filmmaker/GM is telling us. If they're lying to us, we don't have a way to know that. The revelation-after-the-revelation isn't satisfying. We feel tricked. 

This is all to say:

Everybody wants to be initiated. Nobody wants to be tricked.