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[PUZZLE] Wired Mini-ARG
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jegger
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Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 222
Location: Atlanta, GA

[PUZZLE] Wired Mini-ARG

Just went through a cute little mini-ARG in the latest version of Wired (May? It's the "Rocket Boom" issue). Just take a look at the article on ARG's. It only takes about 10-15 minutes if you know what you're doing. I'll leave it at that.

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Playing: Dharma Wants You

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 9:50 am

Uberg33k
Entrenched

Joined: 10 Apr 2006
Posts: 905
Location: Atlanta

Re: [PUZZLE] Wired Mini-ARG

jegger wrote:

Link?

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 10:50 am

jegger
Decorated

Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 222
Location: Atlanta, GA

Re: [PUZZLE] Wired Mini-ARG

Uberg33k wrote:

Link?

It actually starts in the magazine, but here's the link that it points to:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):

www.hivemindcorp.com

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Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 11:24 am

Cortana
Decorated

Joined: 25 Sep 2002
Posts: 200
Location: Arlington, VA

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Code:

ampersand:~ tom$ whois hivemindcorp.com

Domain Name: HIVEMINDCORP.COM
Registrar: GO DADDY SOFTWARE, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: NS45.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server: NS46.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 10-apr-2007
Creation Date: 10-apr-2007
Expiration Date: 10-apr-2008

Registrant:
42 Entertainment
5900 Hollis St., Suite G
Emeryville, California 94608
United States

If you email infoSPLAThivemindcorp.com, you get a response from Victor Kamal:

Quote:

Thank you for your interest in Hive Mind Corporation! The content of your email has already been intuited by the slaved hindbrain array droning peacefully in the 6-sided cubicles here at HMC - but if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me any time!

Working for a Distributed Tomorrow,

Victor Kamal
Human Resources (& Biowaste Removal)
Hive Mind Corporation
(626) 737-0036

Calling the number listed, you get Victor's voicemail, which leads us to our first challenge:

http://www.hivemindcorp.com/hmclogin/

Victor and Kamal are both familiar names in the space, let's start thinking about what this means and what we need to take a trip into their processing plant.

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 11:44 am

AtionSong
Unfettered

Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Posts: 352

I have a locked thread that covers the wired stuff if you're interested:

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19240

BTW, could this possibly be Halo 3 ARG (hive=bees=ilove?)

Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 5:48 pm

Francus
Decorated

Joined: 19 May 2007
Posts: 180
Location: N 51�845661' / E 4�627433'

Is figuring out the login-name and password part of the puzzle, or do you get that information from the voicemail-message?

Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 6:25 pm

Rogi Ocnorb
I Have 100 Cats and Smell of Wee

Joined: 01 Sep 2005
Posts: 4266
Location: Where the cheese is free.

The LonelyGirl/Sawyer/Hiro/Hanso Guy/etc. pic on the Wired site seems kinda odd. Why post a scan from the printed page instead of using the original graphic created by Sean McCabe? It looks like it might be encoded with something akin to a Dataglyph. I tried to decode it on the parc site, but it wasn't recognized as a Dataglyph.
Linking to the original Wired graphic:

Incidentally, The standard values for resistor colors are"

Code:

0=Black
1=Brown
2=Red
3=Orange
4=Yellow
5=Green
6=Blue
7=Violet
8=Gray
9=White

in case anyone wants to play around with the print registration marks.

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Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 11:54 pm

RedHatty
Unfictologist

Joined: 08 May 2006
Posts: 1428
Location: x��Jy��VJvk

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Currently playing Callum Felderi

Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 12:28 am
Last edited by RedHatty on Wed May 23, 2007 10:59 pm; edited 1 time in total

Rogi Ocnorb
I Have 100 Cats and Smell of Wee

Joined: 01 Sep 2005
Posts: 4266
Location: Where the cheese is free.

RedHatty wrote:

Gut busting, LOL Laughing

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Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 1:24 am

Wakkadude21
Boot

Joined: 09 Mar 2007
Posts: 62

That doesn't work for me.

Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 10:38 am

Phaedra
Lurker v2.0

Joined: 21 Sep 2004
Posts: 4033
Location: Here, obviously

I think you may have transposed some numbers, RedHatty. Wink

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Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 10:50 am

Rogi Ocnorb
I Have 100 Cats and Smell of Wee

Joined: 01 Sep 2005
Posts: 4266
Location: Where the cheese is free.

If you're having trouble following along, heres a link to the online version of Page 76.
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-06/ps_bee
(The "Colophon" link within the "Wired Mag" area of the Wired home page).

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Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 2:03 pm

AtionSong
Unfettered

Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Posts: 352

Well, that was fun while it lasted. Smile

Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 5:31 pm

konamouse
Official uF Dietitian

Joined: 02 Dec 2002
Posts: 8010
Location: My own alternate reality

Elan's interview and Jane's interview I want to archive some of it here (cause you never know when online content is gonna disappear).

Quote:

WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 15.06

Gaming : Virtual Worlds
Q&A with Alternate Reality Games Director Elan Lee
05.17.07 | 6:00 PM
- Mary Jane Irwin

Wired: What is your attraction to the alternate reality game medium?

Elan Lee: I want to make you a superhero. That's my goal. You get to be that secret agent, that superhero, that celebrity, that person who possesses skill above mortal man that you've always kind of suspected you had. [The game] is going to let you actually show off those superpowers � and reward you for it and entertain you for it, and do it in a way that you can't help but experience because your life is the entertainment platform.

Wired: How exactly do you come up with an alternate reality game?

Lee: We spend a lot of time playing the "What if?" game. What if when you woke up in the morning none of your friends remembered your name, and your car only drove in reverse, and you got strange mail from a stranger telling you to meet him on a street corner because he has a briefcase that you absolutely have to get.

In the case of I Love Bees (an ARG promoting Microsoft's Halo 2), all my life I have answered randomly ringing pay phones. It might be someone who urgently needs to talk to me. I am that superhero. So I remember starting at that point and brainstorming with the guys at 42. We played the "What if?" game�what if you answered that pay phone and someone actually did want to talk to you? From there it snowballed into a six-hour radio drama ultimately delivered over randomly ringing pay phones around the world.

Wired: Are you ever concerned a task or puzzle will be too difficult?

Lee: When we were creating The Beast, we had that exact question. How do we scale this thing? How do we make sure that nothing is too hard? We had this great plan: On the first day, we'll have all these really hard puzzles�there's no way anybody's going to be able to solve them. At the end of the week, we'll release all the same puzzles but make them way easier. They'll be clued differently, and they'll be much less obscure. Most people will be able to solve them by then. And a week after that, for the people who still haven't quite gotten there yet, we'll release a really, really easy version of the puzzle that everyone can solve.

We had this 15-day roll-out plan. Day one comes, and we release the hardest version of the puzzles. Within two hours, every single puzzle we had thought up was solved.

We learned two very important lessons here. One: This is not a single-player game. We are dealing with a large community, and collectively they are smarter than any of us. We should not try to match wits with them. And the second: There really is no such thing as a puzzle that is too hard. But you have to treat that very carefully because there absolutely is such a thing as a puzzle that is not fun. We want to make sure no matter what the insane thing we're asking you to do is, you're always having fun while you're doing it.

Wired: What is the biggest design challenge you face?

Lee: On a meta level, the biggest problem we have to tackle is beating ourselves. Every time we start a project it has got to be better than every previous project. When we succeed we always sort of slap ourselves and say, "Oh man, now we've got to beat that one, too."

Wired: With ARGs so dependent on community, how do you ensure one exists to support your game?

Lee: Any time we start a new campaign we look for two things, and you need to have at least one or the other, but ideally both. One is a network, and two is a story. Whenever we start we do that query. Does a network exist? Does a story exist? Whichever one doesn't exist, we create.

In the case of Halo, where there's a great story and a community really excited about that story, what we had to do was create a network. That's what pay phones were. Any time you have both a network and a story you have the potential to deliver a compelling breakthrough experience.

But when we have the opposite scenario ... what we try very hard to do is create the most compelling story possible within that framework. Microsoft Vista was a great example of this in which we created the Vanishing Point. Microsoft has an amazing network. It has access to TV spots and Web sites, and it has this massive community. But it's an operating system. There's no story there. We have to activate the community so that it'll feel inspired to use the existing network to find bits and pieces of the story, to reassemble them and to share them with everyone.

Wired: What's the most surprising thing you've seen from a community?

Lee: When we were doing I Love Bees, we had all these theories that these guys were talking to one another and were really well connected. We ran this crazy test on one of the last days of the contest. We picked a random pay phone somewhere in the United States and [called] it. We had our actress, a live actress who would talk to whomever picked up the phone, and she would say, "OK, I'm going to call another phone somewhere in the United States in five seconds, and I want them to tell me the password I just told you." Five seconds [later] we would call another phone, and they would know the password. It was crazy. How many other jobs are out there where you can discover this multibrained organism that is willing to play with you all day?

Wired: In ARGs audiences can influence the game while it's unfolding. How quickly are you able to react to community opinion?

Lee: That's one of the cool things about ARGs. They operate on the 80/20 model. We have 80 percent of the content ready to go when we start. But we leave a good chunk at the end to give us the ability to react to the players. When they really like a character, we can give that character a larger role. When they really hate a certain type of interaction, we can downgrade that type of interaction.

In the case of a Web site, we can turn something around in a matter of hours. In the case of live actors and phone calls that need to go out, that can take place in a day or two. We always try to make room for that level of reaction.

Wired: Most ARG players are rather connected individuals. What does the genre need to do to include those who aren't constantly connected to a network?

Lee: Anytime we design a game, we always have this [inverted] user pyramid in mind. It's cut up into three sections. The large broad part at the top is the very, very casual player. These are the guys we're not going to rely on for having cell phones; we're not going to rely on them being connected; we're not even going to rely on them to know where the community is. But there are more of them than anyone else. So we try to make sure that there's at least some easy way into every game we create�a two- to 10-minute experience that is rewarding and fun, and that will hopefully encourage you to come back.

The middle part of that triangle is not nearly as populated as the top. They're pretty well connected. They're probably not going to shy away from calling a phone number if they see one. They probably have email access, and they probably at least know where a community lives�whether or not they choose to engage with that community. We tend to assume that they won't. Those guys are going to maybe check in every week, every two weeks. We try to make sure they have plenty to do whenever they want to experience it.

And then the very tip of the triangle. Those are the crazy guys�the hardcore guys. Those are the ones answering pay phones, going to live events, hosting chats, and really participating at the very lowest level of the game and really know the story very well. And the cool thing about this pyramid is there's a really lovely side effect where the bottom parts entertain the top parts. The casual guys get to experience not only our cool story and our cool interactions but also the hardcore guys experiencing it. They get to read all these posts about going out in the middle of the night to answer pay phones or meet strangers to exchange briefcases. And that's just as entertaining. That's like reality TV right there. It's a really fun player model. But in order for any one of our experiences to be successful, we have to have some mechanism to allow all three of those kinds of players.

Wired: What will it take for ARGs to be a stand-alone form of entertainment � more than a really intense marketing campaign?

Lee: We're anxiously looking for that line. We all really want these things to become huge, and ultimately we want them to be their own story. Earlier I spoke about every one of these things needing a network and a story. The goal, the holy grail of all of this, is to create a product that supplies both of these things for itself.

This is a genre in its infancy. If you used an airplane metaphor, we've got a little thing with wings and it has floated off the ground. That's a huge success. We're really, really excited about that. We all have this dream of what actual flight would look like. We're in a unique situation where we get to try a bunch of things, learn from our successes, and learn from our mistakes. Every time we build one, it's better than the last one.

Quote:

Q&A with Alternate Reality Game Designer Designer Jane McGonigal
05.17.07 | 6:00 PM
� Mary Jane Irwin

Wired: Why design ARGs instead of more established forms of games or entertainment?

Jane McGonigal: There are important things happening in the alternate reality game space, particularly the nature of collaboration. People work together on really large scales. In a game like World of Warcraft, you're still collaborating with a pretty small number of players. In alternate reality games, you're asked to collaborate with tens of thousands, or even hundreds or thousands, of players. If you show up in a physical space, you might be doing real-time mobile coordination with hundreds of other people. That scale of collaboration is interesting and unprecedented in the ARG space. It relates in really provocative ways to the general emerging field of collective intelligence, wisdom of the crowd, and smart mobs.

Wired: Why are games a good vehicle for exploring collaborative intelligence?

McGonigal: In the future I think it's pretty plausible that collective intelligence tools and skills will be important in order to be a part of global dialog, global business, and global creativity. People who know how to negotiate collective intelligence networks are going to be in a good position to contribute to global society. Games are a way to start bringing more diverse populations into that network. Instead of it being just the alpha geeks who are pioneering platforms and beta-testing collective intelligence applications, we can get the everyday person to become literate in massively collaborative tools.

Wired: When you spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, you mentioned that ARGs could develop scientific minds. How do ARGs foster scientific pursuits?

McGonigal: I'm talking about a more popular science and a more public science. You've got things like seti@home or folding@home or fightaids@home that allow amateurs to donate processing power. But you've also got more ambitious projects like Citizen Science at the Royal Society in the UK, where individuals are asked to go out and collect information about their local environment�air quality, water quality, climate information�and contribute that information to global databases. It's not just processing power but actual data collection.

The other strand is this open-sourcing of science where you've got institutions trying to open up literature so people in different fields can read one another's papers. If you're a working scientist, you can't necessarily afford membership in all the different societies or don't have access to all the research. So you have groups like the Science Commons project trying to promote free movement of research so that you can get these really creative mash-ups.

Those two strands, the open-sourcing and the popularization of scientific contribution, partner well with something like alternate reality games. There's all this kind of supercomputing and massive data collection and massive data analysis happening among the players. ARGs are definitely teaching people how to be a part of huge communities of data collection and data analysis. And, you know, formulating crazy hypotheses and testing them and negating them.

At the same time, I think alternate reality games are actually a platform for scientific research. They're not just creating a scientific mind. We could actually embed real-world problems in alternate reality games so that when players are grinding away at these games [for] 10, 20, or 30 hours a week, they could be grinding away at real scientific data. An elegantly designed game could really motivate participation in these big research projects.

Wired: So what sort of scientific data would lend itself to an alternate reality game?

McGonigal: One simple example is an alternate reality game in which the fiction of the game requires your computing power, and [you] siphon off the players' real power to these real, existing scientific research projects. [You] then formulate a series of fictional discoveries that correspond with the amount of power and usage you're generating. One problem with science is that there isn't the same kind of regular positive feedback that there is with games�games are designed for success.

You have to supplement the real findings of science with the fictional, fantasy world findings in order to motivate participation. The idea is that the game would progress more quickly than the scientific research, but what you're still getting is massively more people.

Another example: Researchers developing sophisticated AI systems are increasingly trying to develop machines with natural language and natural thinking and learning. To make that happen, they need people to interact with AIs a lot�not the people who wrote the program and sort of understand its limitations, but real-world people who will try crazy things and constantly push the limits and try to increase its learning and give it a sort of natural childhood experience.

Alternate reality games have a long history of players interacting with fictional AIs. You could sneak some real AI programs into an alternate reality game so that researchers who are trying to develop more sophisticated AIs could benefit from players who want nothing more than to constantly engage these characters and try and push them and get them to do cool and interesting things.

Wired: How would you get someone interested in playing?

McGonigal: A call to action is really important. You want to get people involved in some kind of mission or mystery, or big confounding enigma that makes them feel like they have a purpose in playing. Every good alternate reality game asks a question. In the game Perplex City, the opening question was: Where is the Cube? Find the Cube. For I Love Bees it was: Who hacked the site? For AI it was: Who killed Evan Chan? You need some kind of a central problem that people can rally around.

Wired: Who is the target demographic?

McGonigal: That changes from project to project. A lot of these games start out by engaging an existing community of fans. So the Lost alternate reality game started with people who liked the TV show Lost. It actually engaged a fairly large subsection of the TV fan audience.

Right now you've got an interesting alternate reality game running for the TV show Heroes. The people playing that are fans of this comic book-inspired TV series. I Love Bees started off with a huge amount of Halo gamers, which is a different audience than the one watching Lost.

A lot of times you start with a fan group with one common love for a certain medium or a certain kind of intellectual property. Beyond that there are a lot of women playing these games�more so than we typically see with videogames or [massively multiplayer online games] or console games. It tends to be more in line with casual games, which they say is about a 50/50 split men and women. And then there's the whole range of audience, from high school students and college students to people in their thirties, forties, and fifties. We've had people in their sixties show up to live events. It's a pretty big demographic reach in that way, but your particular player base will be largely determined by working with an existing fan community or trying to create one from scratch.

Wired: If there isn't a preexisting community, how do you go about creating one?

McGonigal: We have one really interesting historical precedent. It's this grassroots alternate reality game called Metacortex. It was developed by fans of the genre around one of the Matrix movies. They hijacked the release of that film to create an alternate reality game.

They had lots of ideas about how to make a great alternate reality game, and they basically partnered, without the film company's explicit permission, with that release to help increase the pool of people who would be attracted to play. That's considered one of the best-designed ARGs and a really successful grassroots effort.

There's no reason why the Lost alternate reality game had to be officially made by the Lost production crew. A project like Perplex City was developed around a kind of gamer - a kind of hobbyist. [It] was going after people who enjoy collectible trading cards and people who like Sudoku and puzzles. The strategy was to go after a certain enthusiast.

Depending on whether you're doing commercial or going grassroots, you can look at niche audiences or communities and try to make a game that will lure them in as well as draw the existing alternate reality gaming fan base. If you launch an ARG and announce it to the ARG community, you're guaranteed to get eyes on the game because the ARG community is pretty supportive, and they'll check out anything that launches to see if it's any good. You can always speak to the ARG community, but if you're trying to go massively scaled, with hundreds of thousands of players, it's good to look for a subgroup to hack into.

Wired: Why are we seeing this influx of media-created ARGs? What do you think is the appeal to the creators of shows like Lost or Heroes?

McGonigal: There may be characters you love but can't really develop in 60 minutes. Or there may be themes to a song that you've released or an album you've released, but you can't articulate them explicitly in the lyrics. Part of it is the idea that you have all this content that you wish you could share - ideas and possible subplots and inspirations - that don't neatly fit into that single entertainment object, but that you could really develop if you had the whole world as your platform. Think of it as unlimited space, unlimited time, and unlimited media to develop what's at the heart, or even on the periphery, of the main story you're telling. I think that it's the biggest story ever told. It's the most expansive experience ever designed. So there's something really exciting about being able to unfold a story or a concept that you love in all of these new dimensions.

For the players, I think there's an intimacy in the contact that you have when you're playing one of these games. So in the Heroes ARG, when I get a text message on my cell phone from this game it feels personal to me and intimate to me in a way that mass communication doesn't. And, sure, I might know that there are thousands of other people getting this message, but it comes to me in this very personal way. I feel more connected and more engaged. I think it's a way of letting the stories and characters you love fold themselves into your real life in a way that lets you live with them, lets you dwell with the story. It feels so personal. I think that's the appeal.

Wired: What is the future business model for ARGs? Will the games be self-sufficient?

McGonigal: There are all kinds of viable business models. A cool white paper put out this year by the [International Game Developers Association] special interest group [www.igda.org/arg/] outlines a whole range of business models, and anybody interested in trying to pioneer in that space would definitely benefit from looking at this free online paper. I think there's a big potential to partner with all kinds of technology companies and not-for-profit groups that would benefit from having gamers as part of their culture, whether it's a new online application or a particular scientific research think tank or a public institution that is interested in learning, education, and quality of life. A number of projects coming out are exclusively funded not as marketing but as a core practice of an organization's efforts to create online or networked content. That's a model I'm really interested in. There are a lot of people looking at serious gaming, trying to find out how to throw money at the gaming culture and engage gamers. There's just a huge opportunity right now to use alternate reality games to address solutions to online community problems, digital learning problems, local community problems - everything from pay-to-play to [creating] objects in games to sell as collectibles. There is no limit to imagining how people can try to support themselves by doing these games. It will be interesting to watch how people invent ways to make money with this. Certainly, it's well beyond marketing now.

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Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 5:58 pm

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