We Tell Stories is a new alternate-reality game that tasks players with finding their way through six story lines based on classic Penguin novels and a seventh story that ties them all together.
(Credit: Penguin Books/Six to Start)The alternate-reality game genre has a new friend, and a new format, thanks to Penguin Books, the famous British publishing house.
On Tuesday, Penguin and startup Six to Start launched their new ARG, We Tell Stories, a new-style game that its creators say is a hybrid of traditional story-telling, Web 2.0-style mashups, interactive games and classic novels.
We Tell Stories is actually a seven-part adventure, said Jeremy Ettinghausen, the digital publisher for Penguin. It will begin with six weekly installments, each of which is based on a classic novel--and written by a different Penguin author--and which tasks participants with finding their way through the story using tools developed for the game.
After the six installments, We Tell Stories will continue with a seventh weekly piece that will be a game tying the six stories together.
"There is a seventh story, where the game element exists," said Etthinghausen, "and it links the other six stories."
Added Adrian Hon, the chief of creative for Six to Start, "the seventh story is a more traditional ARG, and it sort of feeds into the other six stories and binds them together. The seventh story gives you motivation to read all six stories, and explains why they're written."
Six to Start was founded by veterans of Mind Candy--a UK company that produced the well-regarded but ultimately financially unsuccessful ARG, Perplex City--including Hon and Mind Candy's former COO Dan Hon and
In the case of the first installment, which went live Tuesday morning, players will use a Google Maps mashup to work their way through a brand-new story line based on John Buchan's famous novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Ettinghausen explained that the story incorporates Google Maps in such a way that participants can work their way through the narrative not only through the text but also by using the map mashup.
"We knew when we came up with the idea that using Google Maps (would allow) lots of movements," said Hon, "like running down streets and driving down roads. It's a bit like The Bourne Identity."
Hon explained that the game's creators imagine players using Google Maps as a way of locating themselves in the larger narrative. So, for example, at a moment in the story arc where the protagonist finds himself locked in a shipping container and doesn't know where he is, a player could turn to the maps mashup and see dozens of points where he might be.
But while We Tell Stories uses Google Maps for its first installment and will continue to leverage Web 2.0-type tools in the following chapters, players shouldn't expect those tools to be the same.
Further, the entire body of work, while derivative, was created strictly for Web users.
"Each of the six stories has a completely different mechanism for telling them," Ettinghausen said. "But as a whole, these are stories that couldn't have been written (in the past). They're native to the Internet."
"What we tried to do here," Ettinghausen said, "is create a native Internet experience. The stories couldn't exist on paper. But it's not a gimmicky thing. We pushed our authors to look at how viewers and readers are going to view them, thinking about different points in the story, and about how the mechanism in the story is going to effect their writing."
At the end of the game's rainbow is a prize that any erudite player would certainly desire: Penguin's complete library of 1,300 books.
And while the game is based in England, the organizers expect thousands of players from all around the world. They said they expect a third of participants to be American, a third from the UK and a third from other countries. However, only UK residents are eligible to win the library grand prize.
'Find the Lost Ring,' a brand-new alternate-reality game, is a promotional vehicle for McDonald's and the Beijing Olympics. The game, which went live on Monday, is centered on a woman named Ariadne, who claims to have woken up with amnesia in a South African corn maze on February 12.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)
For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.
Until now, it was only suspected--though with extremely high levels of confidence--that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer's Beijing Olympics.
But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International Olympic Committee and that McGonigal's partners in the creation of the game were McDonald's and global interactive experience design shop, AKQA.
"This ARG extends McDonald's historic sponsorship of the Olympic Games in a brand-new direction," said McGonigal, who is a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. "Its goal is to create global collaboration and bring the spirit of the Games to people around the world. It will invite players from across the globe to join forces online and in the real world, as they investigate forgotten mysteries and urban legends of the ancient games."
McGonigal, an alumna of leading ARG design firm 42 Entertainment, has either been lead designer on or helped create a wide variety of multimedia games such as A World without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Last Call Poker, and I Love Bees.
Since The Lost Ring went live on Monday, its Web site has offered up a number of clues for players to follow, while ARG-related sites like ARGNet and Unfiction have been actively discussing the game. It will play out over many months, likely not finishing at least until the closing ceremonies of the Olympics on August 24, 2008.
'Find the Lost Ring,' a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the Olympics in Beijing, went live Monday morning.
(Credit: findthelostring.com)
As I predicted Sunday night, the Web site for a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing went live Monday.
The game, known as Find the Lost Ring, is built around a story line in which a young woman named Ariadne says she woke up on February 12 in a South African corn maze with amnesia and knows nothing about who she is or where she comes from.
The game's conceit will be to have players help Ariadne find her identity through a complex series of online and, most likely, real-world clues and puzzles. Somehow, it will all be tied in to the Olympics. One clue on the game's site says she offers up the "fact" that, after waking up, she spent a week in the hospital being treated for her very rare form of amnesia and that doctors there "say I'm an Olympic-caliber athlete."
To me, it's all very Bourne Identity-ish, except probably without a lot of gun play and CIA involvement.
For the full list of clues that launched the game, see my blog entry from Sunday night, which includes photos and the text of the initial clues.
The clues from a new alternate-reality game that seems tied to the Olympics and which is slated to start Monday.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)For months now, I've been hearing whispers that a big new alternate-reality game was on the way. I never got any details of what it was about, but when a box arrived at my desk on Friday filled with clues, I knew this was it, and it seems that it's linked to this year's summer Olympics.
If you're not familiar with these types of games, known popularly as ARGs, they tend to be mixed-media affairs that task players the world over with solving puzzles, both individually and working with others, online and in the real world, with the goal of reaching some ultimate solution.
Often, these games are put on as a publicity adjunct to some larger product. For example, I Love Bees, perhaps the best-known of this genre of game, was built around the larger story line for the hit Halo video game franchise and was timed to finish just as Halo 2 was set to launch.
Now, I'm not going to pretend I'm all that good at solving puzzles, so when the box arrived Friday, I was a bit at a loss to figure out what the included clues meant.
The box included three postcards with historical Olympics pictures.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Inside the box, there was a reproduction of what appears to be a 1920 Olympics poster with a figure of a discus thrower on the front, and the text, "VIIe Olympiade. Anvers (Belgique). 1920 Aout - Septembre 1920. Subsidee par les pouvoirs publics."
On the reverse, there's also the text, "It's a secret someone has been keeping for a very long time."
There was also a ball of string and three postcards with historical Olympic images on them. The reverse sides of the three cards were endowed with the clues, "March 3, 2008. Find her...," "March 4, 2008?? Find the others...," "March 5, 2008? Find him...," "March 11, 2008?? Find the secret..." and "August 24, 2008. Save the world."
And August 24 is, in fact, the closing ceremony of this summer's Beijing Olympics. As a result, it's a fairly quick, logical jump to conclude that the ultimate goal of this game is to save the world at the closing ceremonies. Or some such.
The box itself, which came FedEx, had the return address of "T.L. Ring, 1920 Olympic Way, San Francisco, CA."
No such address exists.
A clue on the back of the Olympic poster that came in the box reads, 'It's a secret someone has been keeping for a very long time.'
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Others, apparently, got other post cards, all with the same clues on the back.
According to the leading publication on ARGs, ARGNet, this game is called, Find The Lost Ring.
The way these games work, there will be months of developing story line, with players all over the world working together to try to keep up. There will be active Web sites and there could well be mobs of people running around various cities trying to solve different elements of the game.
That the Olympics would be the subject matter for an ARG is rather exciting, it seems to me, because it's almost certain to bring a great deal of attention to the game and the genre.
Each of the three postcards had clues on the reverse, each with a date and a cryptic command. The final clue reads, 'August 24, 2008 Save the world.'
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)For years, ARGs have been existing just below the mainstream surface. To be sure, thousands upon thousands of people have participated in the most popular ARGs, but if you were to stop random people on the street, I'd be willing to bet that most would have never heard of the genre.
No one knows who created this game, but you can be sure that it wasn't the International Olympic Committee. Usually, an agency is hired by a client to put an ARG together. The leading ARG creation agency is a small company known as 42 Entertainment.
If the clues are to be believed, this game will kick off in earnest Monday morning. So be prepared, if this is your thing.
In the meantime, if you have any idea what these clues mean, feel free to drop me a note. I'd love to know.
Update March 2, 2008, 9:49 p.m.: I discovered just after I posted this entry that there should have been a slip of paper tucked into the ball of string in my box. I don't know whether I missed it, or whether it wasn't there. But according to the site, Despoiler.org, the slip of paper reads, "You will soon discover an alternate reality. The adventure begins when you meet Ariadne. www.findthelostring.com."
A visit to that Web address returns an odd error message: "SRVE0255E: A WebGroup/Virtual Host to handle / has not been defined."
I don't know if that's a valid error message, or if it's related to the game. But I would guess that if it is a valid error message, that site will be live and begin to have some information on it as of Monday, which is, after all, March 3.
Unfortunately, a Whois check on that URL returned no useful information.
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