A photo of a meeting between a participant in Must Love Robots, a small-scale alternate-reality game put on recently by the New York duo, Awkward Hug, and the game's signature robot.
(Credit: Flickr user Tim Scribbles)For Kiaya Steele, the men in suits and dark glasses who appeared suddenly through the raindrops of a New Hampshire morning were the first sign that something very unusual was going on.
One of the men stood under an umbrella next to the car Steele and her friend Kellin had been riding in moments earlier and delivered a message. As Kelli's sister Jenna was brought out of a second car that had pulled up mysteriously behind them, Steele was told that if she couldn't quickly prove that she was "the real Kiaya," the bomb planted inside Jenna would explode.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg of a day spent driving all around the countryside, complete with vans, staple guns, cameramen in trees, threats, red phone booths, and a series of hidden clues.
But this wasn't a situation for the FBI. Rather, it was a very small-scale--and low-tech--version of what is known as an alternate-reality game, an entertainment genre that has grown in popularity in recent years, especially because its traditional use of mixed-media--the Web, cell phones, social media, and others--can allow large numbers of people to play together collaboratively.
Over the years, the games have become a favorite marketing tool of large companies like Microsoft, which has commissioned huge ARGs, as they're known, for the launches of things like the video game Halo 2 and Windows Vista. Indeed, the first widely known ARG was called The Beast, and was used as a promotion for the release of the Steven Spielberg film "AI: Artificial Intelligence."
Those versions of ARGs have seven-figure budgets and allow thousands of people to participate. Yet while they get most of the ink written about ARGs, there has long been a steady stream of games built for very small audiences or, as in the case of Steele and the friend with a "bomb" insider her, an audience of one. It turned out that the intrigue was all part of a day-long mystery concocted by Steele's boyfriend, and involving several of their friends, as part of an elaborate marriage proposal.
"We use a lot of fictional analogies in our lives--gangsters in an alley (and) later in the quest there was a Soviet scientist, all themes that had played out in our courtship," Steele recalled. "We would write stories of sorts to one another before we dated. We'd take an image and run with it until it was too tired to move anymore. The whole thing was kind of a collaboration of our lives together."
Given that the game Steele's new fiance planned for his proposal had such a small audience, it was, to be sure, at the extreme end of the size and complexity spectrum for ARGs. But at any given moment, there are several ARGs being played that have slightly larger, yet still very small, numbers of participants. And it is these games, usually carried out at minimal expense and with no deep-pocketed sponsor, that may well be the true lifeblood of the increasingly popular world of ARGs.
And while there are practical limits to the kinds of interactions that are possible between the people running the larger games--the so-called puppetmasters--and the players, these smaller adventures offer everyone involved a much greater chance at direct communication.
"There are quite a few people making [small] ARGs, either without profit in mind or marketing [who are] saying, 'Look at me, I can do this,'" said Michael Andersen, who runs ARGNet, the leading source for news and information about the genre. "The motivations for a lot of these things vary. [One] advantage of doing these grassroots games is working for yourself. [And], it becomes a lot easier to have those one-on-one interactions [and the] feeling that not only can you communicate, but you can change what's going on" for fans.
Robot love
Earlier this year, a New York duo calling themselves Awkward Hug built and pulled off a small-scale ARG called Must Love Robots, which was centered around the idea of helping make love connections between people and robots.
Through a series of Web sites, social media, YouTube videos and more, Awkward Hug founders Jim Babb and Tanner Ringerud turned a $3,000 budget into a 3-month-long game with at least 300 participants.
Babb said that the project, which was entirely self-funded, came out of an original desire to create a Web series about a robot. But when the two realized that they could "make it so much more" by adding the various multimedia elements, they set out to build a bona fide ARG, one that would allow them to communicate directly with almost anyone who wanted to talk with them, even to the point of playing online games of Scrabble. And, of course, there were real-world meetings between prospective "dates" and the game's signature robot (see video below).
Given the huge gap in size between a large-scale ARG and something like Must Love Robots, it might be surprising that many of the ultimate goals are the same. It certainly was to Babb.
"What surprised me the most," Babb said, was that "players want more and they want to do things with you. It becomes a collaboration. The audience becomes characters."
And while it's not always possible for everyone to participate in person--Must Love Robots attracted players from around the world--one of the great things about the ARG genre is how many people who play do participate directly in one way or another. In Babb and Ringerud's game, for example, 20 people created costumes related to the story line and sent in pictures of themselves wearing the outfits, all of which were intended to be folded into the larger story line.
Kids creators
A different kind of small-scale ARG was Find Chesia, a project put on by the Finksburg, Md., library on behalf of its local schoolchildren and their summer reading program.
The story, said organizer Heather Owings, was centered on the story of Chesia, a 14-year-old girl whose parents have gone missing on an archaeological dig and who sets out to find them. The game was designed by five small teams of 11- to 15-year-olds.
Like with many small-scale ARGs, Find Chesia encountered a series of structural problems, most notably, Owings said, the fact that the kids turned out to be resistant--mainly due to regular conditioning about the dangers of online anonymity--to the idea of posting information in character to the game's Web site. In addition, there was the unforeseen problem that almost none of the kids were old enough to drive to the game's real-world locations.
This bracelet is an important element in the ARG, Finding Chesia, which was put on by a Maryland library on behalf of a town's schoolchildren and their summer reading program.
(Credit: Finding Chesia)Still, the game was successful enough for Owings to want to run the game again next summer, incorporating some of the lessons they learned this year. And despite the problems, Owings said that she came away with an appreciation for what the ARG genre can offer its organizers and participants.
"I like that ARGs use tools that were set up to do something else, and they're used to create something new," Owings said. "It's the taking of something and changing it and using it for something it wasn't intended [for] in a new and creative way."
Plus, she said, Finding Chesia turned out to be a perfect way to get the kids in on the enjoyment of building their own game, even though they lacked many of the skills generally considered necessary for such a task.
"It's a way for teens to create their own game," Owings said, "and we really enjoyed that aspect of it...They don't need to be computer programmer [and] here is a way for them to take ownership for creating a game on a fairly small level. [As well, it] helps them to realize how much the Internet does facilitate networking within the community, as well as outside the community."
These days, said ARGNet's Andersen, there are at least as many small, grassroots ARGs being produced as the larger, corporate-backed games. And those numbers could grow as an increasing number of people become versed in the tools for building them. According to Andersen, teachers at the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Mary Washington are both teaching classes about ARGs.
But the real upside in the genre's growth will come naturally, as more people in more local communities get exposed to ARGs and discover the joy of playing something truly interactive and truly collaborative.
And while it's true that most small ARGs quickly peter out as players and organizers discover that they don't have the time or energy to follow through, there are those who feel that the ultimate payoff of participating is there for anyone with the stamina or commitment to grab it.
"For an independent ARG, the most successful thing you can do is complete it and have your core audience go all the way through," said Awkward Hug's Babb. "It's such a cool format, and the people who can make it through a whole one of these get an experience that no other media can provide."
Wired readers who want to try to win the $5,000 prize for finding reporter Evan Ratliff may not be able to use clues posted to his Twitter account, as the account has been suspended for 'strange activity.'
(Credit: Twitter)Update (2:27 p.m.): The account is now back up. According to a Twitter spokesperson, it was "infected" for some reason.
When Wired recently launched its Vanish contest, a challenge to readers to locate reporter Evan Ratliff, who has gone on the "lam," it suggested that a major source of clues would be Ratliff's Twitter and Facebook accounts.
But as of Friday morning, his Twitter account (@theatavist) had been suspended for "strange activity."
Whoever finds Ratliff (and is the first to send his editor a photo of him) will win $5,000. And while there are a number of different ways to source up clues as to his whereabouts, one of them was supposed to be his Twitter account.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for information as to why the account was suspended.
The challenge is an interesting way to draw attention to a recent article of Ratliff's about the difficulties of disappearing from society. And in the original contest challenge, it was suggested that contest participants might draw some conclusions as to the methods the reporter would use--or wouldn't, as the case may be--from that story.
Of course, given that Ratliff is surely employing everything he can think of to stay below radar (theoretically not using credit cards or doing anything that might too easily give away his whereabouts) the Twitter account suspension might somehow be intentional. Then again, one would have to wonder what he would have had to do to get Twitter on board.
In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to find clues. One is another Twitter account that was set up as a clearinghouse for information (@EvansVanished). Another is a Facebook account called The Search for Evan Ratliff, where fans are posting clues and working collaboratively to solve the puzzle.
This game, then, has many of the makings of a traditional alternate-reality game: online and offline components, widespread community involvement, clues spread across a wide swath of the Internet and a prize that may, in the end, have to be shared by a number of people who worked together.
And as is often the case with ARGs, this game, too, is in the service of promoting something else, in this case, Ratliff's larger article.
For now, those trying to find him and win the cash--and no doubt, bragging rights, as Ratliff said that to collect the prize, the winner has to agree to be interviewed on his or her methods--will have to do so without the assistance of his Twitter account. Then again, Twitter has been going through a rough time recently, with several periods of downtime.
Still, I really want to know what "strange activity" caused the service to take down the account. I'll update this article if I find out.
The Institute for the Future has released its initial findings from its alternate-reality game, Superstruct.
(Credit: Institute for the Future)Last year, the Institute for the Future created an alternate-reality game, Superstruct, designed to crowdsource scenarios to try to save humanity from fictional "superthreats" discovered in 2019 that are thought to mean the end of humanity by 2042.
Now, the IFTF has issued its first findings from the 1,000-plus stories, 500-plus discussions, and 500-plus "superstructures" created by the worldwide community of the game's players, and while there's some reason for hope, there's also a lot to be pessimistic about.
In a report issued Wednesday evening, Superstruct's program director, Kathi Vian, lead scenario designer, Jamais Cascio, and lead game designer, Jane McGonigal, that they had crunched the community's collective submissions and settled on three main scenarios.
First, "The Long crisis," which "plots a path of slow response, resistance to change, and attempts to maintain current power relationships."
Second, "Emergence," which "follows a course of rapid adaptation from the bottom up, without much unifying direction."
And finally, "The great transition," which "envisions a world remade by technology, a challenge to the planetary dominance of humans as a species."
"All these scenarios are troubling," the report concluded. "They challenge us to ask hard questions about the choices we're making today and are likely to make tomorrow. They disabuse us of utopianism. But perhaps they also inspire us to think beyond our current tracks, to search for the breakthrough ideas that will provide a fourth, fifth, or tenth scenario."
"The Long Crisis" posits a timeline starting in 2010 and ending in 2060 that spells out a series of grim climate changes, as well as a general deterioration of geopolitical stability and the human condition.
Yet, the report also has some hopeful conclusions about general human behavior.
"Superstructing means reinventing our tools and processes, our organizational structures, and even our concepts of cooperation and collaboration," the report's summary reads. "So how do we know when we're on the right track? How do we know when we've gone beyond the best practices of contemporary organizations to superstruct our projects?"
The conclusions are varied, but the IFTF summed them up in five pithy, bullet-pointed sections that are expanded upon in the report's summary. Briefly, though, the report's authors wrote:
"You'll know you're superstructing when you've achieved: More and different participation."
"You'll know you're superstructing when you begin to implement what once were: Nearly inconceivable possibilities."
"You'll know you're superstructing when you're inventing and testing: Smaller and bigger practices."
"You'll know you're superstructing when you are creating: Stranger and more shareable products."
"You'll know you're superstructing when you are designing and participating in: New and world-changing processes."
There's much more about the results of the months of data-crunching in the report itself, which is easily found online. All told, though, I suppose the findings shouldn't be all that surprising. We can all see the direction the world is heading and the urgent necessity for massive intervention. Yet any such intervention is made difficult by the political, military and physical challenges involved in implementing them.
Still, while purely fictional, the point of Superstruct, and the value in the findings, is that we should now have a little bit better sense of what's coming, and perhaps, how to stave off the things we don't want.
'Breathe' is a new style of entertainment that mixes film, alternate-reality games and Web 2.0 media into a single, multi-installment experience.
(Credit: Expanding Universe)If you think you know what a movie is, get ready to have your assumptions dashed to pieces.
That's because of Breathe, a multimedia, multipart film project that is in the works from the London-based social entertainment company, Expanding Universe.
Equal parts cinema, alternate-reality game (ARG), dance club, and social network, Breathe is Expanding Universe's attempt at both redefining existing entertainment genres and inventing entirely new ones.
At its most basic level, the project is a multistage, interactive murder mystery with a time line, said Yomi Ayeni, Expanding Universe's creative director.
But Breathe, which the company hopes will see the light of day some time in 2009, is expected to be much more.
To begin with, Ayeni explained by phone from London, the project opens as a traditional ARG that will be promoted by a series of dance club-oriented Web sites. The idea is that the sites will pull people in who are interested in finding out what's behind a series of mysterious and unusual deaths.
The sites will lead people to watching a 15-minute film which will delve into the police's murder investigation, introducing Breathe participants to the lead detective and letting viewers in, to some extent, on his crime-solving methods.
Where things take a turn for the innovative is what happens next.
What happens next
After watching the film installment and reading more about what's going on with the murders on the club music Web sites, some will begin to get invitations to exclusive nightclubs in the London area.
The idea with this, said Ayeni, is to remove people from their passive positions at their computers and bring them close to the action.
For those who avail themselves of the invites, they'll find themselves at nightclubs where they may end up mingling with various characters from the developing drama.
Some who attend will then find themselves offered further real-life experiences--and what happens after that leads to the second installment of the film.
What's interesting about Expanding Universe's technique is that they expect to turn the second film installment around in a week and incorporate footage shot in the nightclubs, meaning that participants may find themselves ensnared in the drama.
Then, as Breathe continues to evolve, as some people have become directly involved, and as more people spend time online reading about the drama, looking for clues to the developments and at the same time, enjoying what they're finding on the various dance club community Web sites, as well as a host of other online destinations, select participants will be presented with invitations to delve further in.
"And that is how we then move people on to the next stage," Ayeni said. "They become actual parts of the narrative itself, with interactions with people in the (fictional) drama."
"Set over a four-week period, viewers watch (four 15) minute shorts, and try to help Detective (John) Franks solve the case by working through puzzles, infiltrating the underground club scene, trying to locate the venue, and save the next victim from running out of air," an official Breathe summary explains. Using blogs, YouTube, GPS, telephone, secret meetings, IM, auditions, immersive role-play, cinema, and music, Breathe stands to be one of the most audacious multi-media experiences to leap from a cinema screen--'all you have to do is breathe...'"
How big can it get?
While the carrying out of the drama depends on the real-life participation of individuals, Ayeni said he thinks Breathe can scale to fairly large size.
That's in part because Expanding Universe is hoping to partner with nightclubs that can hold thousands of people, and also because the company hopes to carry out different versions of the project in different cities--each of which would be based on local DJs, local actors and other regional talent that could make each version similar, but would also vary enough to attract a new audience that would be kept in suspense, waiting for a unique cliffhanger ending.
Further, Ayeni said that at the conclusion of each city's edition, Expanding Universe could put out complete versions, perhaps on DVD, or online, that could both let everyone see how it played out, and also raise money.
It's not totally clear yet what the business model for Breathe is, though Ayeni suggested that it would bring in revenue through a series of sponsorships and partnerships, product placement deals and direct financing.
But with some time before Breathe becomes a reality, Expanding Universe still has time to work out the financial details.
In the interim, Ayeni and his partners are working on the structure of the project and hoping they can create something that turns entertainment--and the concept of how audiences interact with entertainment--on its head.
The murder mystery "has to become wrapped up in what is the alternate reality existence of the drama," Ayeni said. "We want the viewers and the people following this to step into the (installments), to be the bridge between what they're watching online and what they're watching in the cinema. We want people to step in and embody these experiences."
Creating new audiences
One person who thinks Expanding Universe could well succeed in its mission is Liz Rosenthal, the director of Power to the Pixel, a spin-off of the London Film Festival that focused on digital advances and resources in film.
Recently, Rosenthal invited Expanding Universe to make a presentation about Breathe to a gathering at Power of the Pixel and she said that the crowd of a couple of hundred movers and shakers in the media industry were impressed by what they saw.
"It created new audiences," she said of Breathe, "people watching things in new ways and in new places, and (it's) a way to reach audiences in more direct ways online."
Rosenthal said she thinks that Breathe utilizes one of the most impressive story-telling mechanisms she's seen, largely because the film itself isn't the starting point, but rather the story is the starting point.
"The way he's involving audiences is very extreme," she said of Ayeni. "He's involving audiences by getting them involved in a game (and that's) a totally new concept. (He's) one of the people at the forefront of this" new methodology.
In particular, Rosenthal said she appreciates the way Breathe is likely to get participants involved in shaping the media itself.
"They don't just sit back, they get involved," she said. "I think (Ayeni) is taking them a step further...They're kind of the protagonist."
The Institute for the Future is launching a series of what it calls 'massively multiplayer forecasting games' designed to help researchers come up with solutions to long-term global problems. The first game, Superstruct, will launch October 6.
(Credit: Institute for the Future)As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.
That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.
And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems.
That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line.
... Read more
This memo, dated January 30, 1985, supposedly comes from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and concerns the demanded resignation of a scientist named Eugene Gough. The memo came in an unmarked UPS package containing several very odd items.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Update 1:14 p.m. PDT: This has been edited to reflect some new information about what's in the package and its source.
Usually when I get a UPS package it's some boring book or prospectus. But the Express Envelope that landed on my desk Wednesday certainly got my attention.
Inside were the following things: a sticker with the words "Scientific Anarchy Now" and "Holomove;" a photocopy of a memorandum purportedly from Los Alamos National Lab dated January 30, 1985, regarding the termination of a scientist named Eugene Gough; and lastly, and most disconcertingly, a cut-open package of Emergen-C vitamin C powder. The tracking number on the package had been manually scratched off.
The package contained this 'Scientific Anarchy Now' sticker and a cut-open package of Emergen-C powder.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Now, if it hadn't been for the powder packet, I would have taken little notice of the package. I would have assumed--and actually, I still do--that the contents were clues for some new alternate-reality game. I am one of the most frequent writers about ARGs, and it was only a few weeks ago that a box arrived on my desk with a series of odd items that ended up being clues for a large-scale new Olympics-themed ARG called The Lost Ring.
But the powder packet, I must admit, is pretty worrisome. This, after all, is the age of anthrax attacks and the Unabomber. True, the anthrax attacks came in envelopes with hand-lettered addressing and not via UPS packages.
True, even though the tracking number had been meticulously gotten rid off, CNET's mail room slapped on its own sticker that did have the tracking number on it. So I was able to determine, by calling UPS, that the package originated from the San Francisco office of the global ad agency McCann-Erickson.
Still, this is pretty weird. A call to the ad agency got me nowhere and some woman in its mail room is supposedly trying to find out where it came from. I don't really expect a call back.
But as my editor put it, even though these probably are just clues for an ARG, it's in pretty bad taste. Does anyone really think sending unmarked packages with cut-open powder packets is a good idea these days?
The tracking number for the package was also scratched out, though a secondary sticker had a tracking number that seemed to originate from the San Francisco office of ad agency McCann-Erickson.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)What if, instead of trying to track down the package, I had freaked out and called security? I think the folks over at McCann-Erickson probably would be getting a visit from some law enforcement officials right about now.
Of course, PR agencies sending clues to odd projects in bad taste would be nothing new. My colleague Charles Cooper said that in 1989, he got a package sent to him that contained a spent bullet and a hostage-note-like letter--compete with cut-out words--that said, "Who's killing all of Computer & Software News' readers?" He later got an apologetic call from a PR person taking responsibility for the package.
Back to my package...the included memo, by the way, purports to involve the employment status of Eugene Gough, a LANL employee who was supposedly up for the position of the leader of the lab's Weapons Physics division. But the writer of the memo seems unhappy with Gough's personality and says that rather than promote him, Gough should be forced to resign.
"This isn't a policy position, nor is it personal," the memo, written to "Pat," reads. "(Gough's) work ethic is outstanding--how many people regularly get in before you!--but the emotional issues...and his reluctance to meet with the counsellor leave me with few options. We've got a role to play here, and he's made his choice. Now, it's time what we do the same. We'll need his resignation by the 1st."
The memo is signed by "Michael."
The back of the Emergen-C package had the logo from the Scientific Anarchy Now sticker pasted over the nutrition facts part of the package.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Lest you think I'm lazy, I Googled most of the phrases (see addendum below) involved with this package that I could think of. And nothing came up. There were some results for "Eugene Gough," but nothing meaningful. Nor was there anything at all for "Scientific Anarchy Now."
Generally, these ARG clues actually lead somewhere when you Google them, so I'm a bit confused by the lack of any search results.
Neither did the two leading ARG Web sites, Unfiction.com and ARGN.com, have anything on this.
So, for now, I'm waiting for my call back from McCann-Erickson and hoping that someone who reads this blog post will know what it's about.
In the meantime, I know that I've probably started the PR campaign for whatever game this is. If so, then I guess the package was successful.
Addendum: A reader of my Twitter post about this rightly points out that the "rabbit hole" for this--which indeed is an ARG of some sort--was the word "Holomove." I had Googled it, but never clicked through to Holomove.com because the Google result didn't look relevant. But now, clicking through, it becomes obvious that it is, in fact, related to this package.
Among the information on the Holomove.som site is a link for information on "Dr. Eugene Gough," who "was the founder of Holomove, Inc....Gough worked as a researcher at the Los Alamos National Lab as well as Ames Laboratory. In 2004, Dr. Gough's interest in holographic representations led to the creation of NexTech, which subsequently became Holomove."
The site says that Gough died in 2007.
So, now that my fear of dying has been alleviated by a little bit of smart sleuthing by an astute reader who pushed a little farther than I did, I'm mixing up my Emergen-C and looking for more clues to this puzzle.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a story about a company called Edoc Laundry and its line of clothing that featured a built-in alternate-reality game.
On Friday, I read about a new line of T-shirts available at Target that feature images from experimental games and which come with free CDs on which are the games themselves.
Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow wrote about the new shirts Friday, and it reminded me of the Edoc Laundry experiment, which, while innovative, never quite took off.
A new line of T-shirts that features images from experimental games is reminiscent of Edoc Laundry's clothing line with a built-in alternate-reality game.
(Credit: Edoc Laundry)Apparently, the new T-shirt line comes comes from a company called EGPApparel, and each individual shirt has an image from one of the games developed under the Experimental Gameplay Project, in which participants have one week to create an all-new game all by themselves.
As a promotion, the shirts come with the games the images are based on.
What's striking to me about this is that people are still pursuing the idea of putting original game-related content on clothing. I love the idea, especially when the imagery isn't something everyday folks will recognize.
In the case of the Edoc Laundry line, I've been seeing clothes ever since I wrote about it that remind me of the company's products but which ended up being just something that looked similar. And in the case of the EGPApparel clothes, I suspect these, too, will begin to take shape in many, many outfits that I see, few of which will actually be legit.
And as posed on Boing Boing, the very idea of taking images from obscure games and using them to sell clothes is rather fun. I don't know that it will end up doing much for the designers of the games, but it's worth trying.
'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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