unforum

[tongues]

[ARG] Ideasfest

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Not sure about the rest of it, but I believe Rosevelt should get on the train:

[goatman]

[IDEASFEST][REF] ARG up and running. Come one, come all.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Posting again in case my previous comment may have kept anyone from looking at this project. I've seen the "einstein puzzle" or variants of it so many times, I didn't even do the logic problem when I initially replied. It turns out that those who went to the site and stuck around found an engaging, humorous and so far, well-run mini ARG. See the IDEASfest post in "ARGs with Potential"

EDIT: I set the link above to a new post in ARGs with Potential, but it just redirects back to here, now. Seems we're locking it in as a timewaster even though it is something a little more.

[chippy]

for the record, IDEASfest http://ideasfest.org/ 2006 is also a real life bona fide festival too...

you can see the website from last year http://www.ideasfest.org/2005/

[sixsidedsquare]

I heartily second the fact that this has been lots of fun so far.

Some cool things are the two sound files of Silas McGuffin's escapades back in history ("Oh dear god! There's corn everywhere!" and "Does Canada have a death ray? Disintegration ray? Any kind of ray?") Also some of the text on the sites and forum too. A few of my favourites:

- "10. Insert into Time Machine. Press GO!! Pray any spare folds do not send you into the past to meet Hitler, dinosaurs, or some sort of disastrous mixture of the two."

- "Temporal Hurricane: If you encounter a temporal hurricane, please be careful not to fall out of your seat / hover chair and knock the hat off of an ancient Frenchman. There is a 200K newYen fine per Frenchman for doing so."

Come join in, it's lots of fun

[chippy]

hey theres http://www.ideasfest.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9 Garith Yung,
the hippy character from Ares Station!!

and benjamin stove is there too causing mischeif!

/me wonders...

oh, and whats the difference between
http://www.ideasfest.org/time/black.php search and
http://www.ideasfest.org/time/ search?
----
ROFL!!
"the FBI is in the TV?"

[Rogi Ocnorb]

[addlepated]

I've also found:

Dave Szuborski
Jane McGonigal
Elan Lee
Dale Sprague

They've all been corrupted.

[chippy]

and there Simon Miller (from ares station) too.

so, recapping, so far the canadian launch codes have been found... is there anything else we need to be solving? Who is freeman anyhow, and why isnt he arrested? Does he have an entry in the log?

as for unfiction, i think, as http://www.ideasfest.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9
illustrates, discussing our discoveries on their forums may not necessarily be the best route - plus we can talk here explicitly about it being an ARG, but it feels wrong (to me anyhow) when we do it on their forums...

[chippy]

that crisis is over...

[Guest]

freeman is Silas McGuffin's future self gone back in time to where his relative past self already went to try and stop himself.

Same deal with Sueno...but Sueno 2698 hasn't come back in the past yet...we need that password!

[chippy]

i sent a pm to freeman asking who he was
me: "you said you are silas, but rather he is not you yet. But what about agent sueno 2693? was he you in the past?"
him:

[sixsidedsquare]

So far this has been a great ARG, so much fun and brilliant humour all through, as well as great design. I HIGHLY recommend, even if your not following this fully, to check out the 3 audio files from the 3 times (1906, 1936 and 1965) as they are very funny and well put together. Also all the headline info on the different times sites are great, in fact it's all pretty great and amusing


Here's a bit of a sum up for anyone wanting to join in, though I'd advise you to read all the actual site stuff because it's filled with so much good stuff:

Silas McGuffin has been marauding round in the time line trying to make himself well known by taking modern technology back and starting his own IDEASfests back in the past.
Problem is in doing so he is largely mucking up history, so the TimeCorps agent tracking him (Agent Sueno 2693) is setting these things straight with our aid through the primitive 21st century communication portal.

Things started out in 1906. Silas messes up America's train service. Mr. Roosevelt accidentally travels to Canada instead of Panama. Panama, seeing this as a deliberate insult, declares war on the US. France and Germany enter the war against the US based on secret treaties they have with Panama. The UK and Russia come to the aid of the United States, precipitating World War I.
We had to work out which train Sueno 2693 had to push Roosevelt onto to get him to the correct destination through a logic puzzle about the trains at the station.

Meanwhile a mysterious man started posting on the ingame forums calling himself 'freeman'. He seemed to be someone Sueno 2693 noticed in 1906, and had information Sueno 2693 seemed to be withholding, and knowing a lot about Silas himself. We helped him fix his time machine and in exchange got some info on TimeCorps, and Silas's next location.

That took us to 1936 (check out the "Snakes on a Train, the radio drama - There's nothing you can do with snakes on a train!" ). Here Silas caused mass hysteria with a War of the Worlds esque sound recording that convinced people that the martians had just attacked New Jersey. This caused Joesph McCarthy to be voted in as president due to his Anti-Martian platform "I vow to find all Martian sympathizers in this country and incarcerate them for the common good."
To set things straight we had to create fake documents showing McCarthy to be a "Red" sympathizer, stripping him of his citizenship due to the law he passed himself. This done, the time line was restored once again. Also in the sound clip from 1936 we heard some weird goings on of there being a young Silas and a Silas with a cane and beard.

Back in the forum freeman's time machine had broken down once again and he offered explaining why he and Silas shared some of the same features (he being the one with the beard in the audio) if we helped him fix it. After doing this, he told us that Silas was now off to 1965 but more interestingly he explained (in his somewhat cryptic way he always does) that he and Silas were in fact one and the same, only he is the future Silas, having been locked up for a century due to the crimes his younger self is committing (aint that a mind bender). Thing is, he didn't really like those 100 years spent in solitary, and is now somewhat mad even, so he is trying to stop his former self from committing the crimes and going to prison.

So now in 1965, Silas riles up the hippies causing them to distrust the government and money, so they all decide to migrate to Canada, where money isn't worth anything. Seizing the Canadian Space Association they send the first man to the moon, and as you can imagine, this makes the world powers upset that they were beat. Without the calming influence of the hippies, the US and USSR threaten military action on America's Hat and World War III breaks out. Canada is destroyed and as the headlines say 'world deprived of caribou. Quebecois refugees flood France: guillotine-related deaths up 500%.'

Sueno 2693 was obviously shaken by finding out Silas is a 'Recursive' man (interacting with his past self) saying he is under qualified for this, but also gives us hope to fix time by destroying the hippies shuttle before they board it. All we had to do was decipher the self destruct note the Canadians put on the ship. Rogi and I did some Swedish chef type interpretation of it and time was set right once again, although it did leave a lonely march of defeated hippies back to America.

So now that's caught us back up to where we are, Sueno 2693 is trying to contact his HQ while we wait for our next tidbit of information from freeman (his time machine has bound to have broken again)

A few other things that have popped up are the Time Corps Agent Database and the Time Corps Criminal Database which are filled with ARGing Easter Eggs (many mentioned above)

(P.S. this has got to be my longest and most informative Evar. I don't know how you people do it.)

[Varin]

Thanks for the excellent summary sixsidedsquare!