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Forum index » Updates » Press and Other Analysis

NY Times Article
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NY Times Article

There's a pretty lengthy article in today's NY Times about ARG Games in general, and several current games including search4e, noahboddy, CTW, and L3. Good reading.

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 2:06 am

Diandra
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Joined: 27 Sep 2002
Posts: 390

Link

Link: (free registration required) http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/technology/circuits/06game.html

Dia (thanks Danny for finding the link!)

_________________
You can't solve vast puzzles with half-vast ideas!

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 2:11 am

danman_d
Decorated

Joined: 10 Feb 2003
Posts: 233
Location: New York, NY

article

The article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/technology/circuits/06game.html

If you'd rather not do the free registration, here's the content of the article:

Quote:

It started with The Beast, although no one knew it was The Beast at the time. Some people say it really started with Pink Floyd. Majestic even tried to make money on it but failed. I could tell you what it is, or you could figure it out for yourself. Try some search engines. Ask your friends. Form an online discussion group to trade information. You will know it when you see it.

It is Alternate Reality Gaming, a kind of online game in which clues and puzzles are supplied through Web sites, e-mail messages, phone calls, videos and faxes. Games can send the player to the Web sites of fake organizations or to real Web sites. Discussion groups that try to solve puzzles communally may be joined by people suspected of being the games' designers.

It all started with The Beast, the development team's internal designation for an online game promoting the 2001 movie "Artificial Intelligence: A.I." People who noticed clues in posters and trailers for the movie followed them into a vast network of Web sites revolving around the mysterious murder of Evan Chan in 2142. Throughout the game, Web sites would change or disappear as the story progressed in real time. The game was full of remarkably difficult puzzles, and players soon joined together on the Internet to form a discussion group called Cloudmakers (cloudmakers.org) to pool information.

No one knew the game was called The Beast, and because no one knew who had created it, the game's designers were referred to as the PuppetMasters.

Close on the heels of The Beast, which was solved by Cloudmakers in July 2001, was Majestic, a subscription-based game from Electronic Arts that had begun development long before The Beast. Players would receive threatening phone calls and chat with game characters through instant messaging, but the game was financially unsuccessful and soon folded.

I thought that was the end of the phenomenon.

Recently I discovered that it was only the beginning. These games inspired others, and there is now a thriving Alternate Reality Game scene documented at sites like unfiction.com, deaddrop.us and argn.com. Many games have come and gone since The Beast, including Lockjaw, created by some Cloudmakers members; Uncap the Ride, a promotion for BMW in which those who solved all the clues could win a car; and Push, NV, a game tied into the short-lived ABC television series "Push, Nevada'' in which clues on the TV show were supposed to lead players to Internet sites and in which one player won more than $1 million from the show's producers.

Alternate Reality Gaming continues to be a mix of promotional gimmicks and games created simply for the love of the genre. Among the former are a game designed to generate interest in the coming video game Tron (www.tron20.net) that I cannot make head or tail out of and a game for the ABC television series "Alias" in which a C.I.A. officer gives the player increasingly difficult research assignments.

The most interesting games currently running, Noahboddy and Search4E, are not pushing products.

Noahboddy (www.noahboddy.com) is said to be a sequel of sorts to the Push, NV game, although I have not seen a clear explanation of how the two are related. Clues to the game are posted every few days: many point to entries in the online diary of a minister who appears to have had a breakdown and believes that the Antichrist, whom he decides to designate as Noah Boddy, is living in California. Soon the minister has gained the help of a tabloid reporter and is on the run from mysterious forces. Noahboddy offers a prize to the game's winner, but the nature of the prize is not known.

While Noahboddy neatly puts its clues in one online location, Search4E (www.search4e.org), follows the methods of Te Beast, creating a multitude of Web sites with clues and puzzles hidden within them. Some puzzles exist in the real world; one player contacted a Web site and later received a package of books that were themselves clues in the search for a man named Ed Sobian or Emil Sobiak (or possibly something else).

Search4E began in October. Before joining in you will need to wade through a detailed guide describing its progress. It starts when a fictitious crime novelist, James Pitt, begins to investigate the disappearance of his neighbor Ed, but I still do not know the full story. I may never know it, which is why I am happy to be there at the start for two new games.

One, Chasing the Wish (www.chasingthewish.com), was for a long time nothing except a registration site most notable for inspiring a very funny parody site, Chasing the Fish (www.chasingthefish.com). But on Friday, an urgent e-mail message went out to those who had registered, and the chase was officially on.

While the other game, L3 (www.landau-luckman-lake.com), has not officially started, the fictitious law firm of Landau, Luckman & Lake has been sending puzzles by e-mail to Alternate Reality players, none of whom is quite sure how they were selected. These puzzles are classic Alternate Reality Game puzzles; to convey why these games must be solved by many people working together, I will describe one.

In the tradition of Alternate Reality Game discussion groups, I will mark this as a spoiler so it can be skipped by those who would rather try to solve the puzzle themselves.

****Spoiler Alert****

The main L3 site included an application to become an L3 PuppetMaster. Some of the people who filled out the form received an e-mail message with a link to an image of a map with compass directions at the bottom. As participants in the L3 forum discussed these maps, they realized that the link had only been sent to those who had filled in the form incompletely or fallaciously. This map was later replaced by another one, with different compass directions. Players began to think about the compass directions and found that these could used to form a phrase by thinking about the combination EENW. If N stands for 0, E stands for 1, S for 2 and W for 3, this yields 1,103.

Assume that this is in base 4 and convert it into base 10: this gives us 83, which happens to be the letter S in ASCII, the code that tells computers what letters to put on the screen when keys on a keyboard are pressed. Decoding the rest of the compass instructions revealed the message "Serious Inquiries Only."

****End Spoiler Alert****

I could never have solved this puzzle, nor even have contributed an idea that might have helped others solve it. But I love watching the communal deduction unfold, and I dream that one day I may be the first to post a brilliant insight on a game discussion board.

While the combination of interactive fiction, insane puzzles and community building make Alternate Reality Games fascinating, none of the games currently running come close to matching the brilliance of The Beast. Designed by a couple of game developers from Microsoft and written by an award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelist, Sean Stewart, TheT's intricate structure, story line and imaginative writing have not been matched. But in a world in which most game innovation involves little more than flashier graphics, Alternate Reality Games offer proof that there are still new ways to tell a story. And whereas other online games bring people together for a quick fight or a chat, Alternate Reality Games can create true online communities.

So what does this all have to do with Pink Floyd? I could tell you their place in Alternate Reality Gaming history, but all you need to solve this Enigma is contained within. Figure it out for yourself. This PuppetMaster has said enough.

-Danny D. (Thanks Dia for pointing it out)

_________________
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Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 2:11 am

watcher
Guest

CTW on Slashdot and MeFi today

Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/16/2253241&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=95

Metafilter
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/24344

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2003 10:28 pm

watcher
Guest

SmartMobs

Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs
http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/000801.html

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2003 1:25 pm

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