unforum

[Shadom]

Identification Tag on ALL of my ARG sites?

[Agent Lex]

The easiest way to ensure players know that a site is within your game is to link it from another site which is definitely in your game. For example, say site A is your trailhead, and site B is some rival faction's site that people are unsure about. You could post a link on site A saying "these people at site B don't know what they're talking about!" and confirming it's ingame. If site C comes along claiming to support site A, but it's actually a gamejack, just don't link to it and players tend to get the point.

Players (at least the players here) are fairly good at spotting gamejacks themselves.

The other option is to embrace gamejacks, and include them as part of your game, as player-created content. If the story allows for it, include what they're doing as part of the game, and make it more fun for everyone.

[Euchre]

You could always sign up for Google Analytics. Even if players block the cookies, they'll have a unique signature on every site to compare to. You would also be able to have Google take definitive action if a gamejack used your GA ID. Methinks big bad Google could probably put fear into almost any jacker's web hosting and/or registrar with a nice cease and desist.

[Shadom]

@Agent Lex:
The method would work for sure and I am going to use gamjacks as content if it is possible. The point for me is that this is far more easy in a grassroot game than in a professional game (even a small scale one like this) as the company wants to know as much as possible about the upcoming plot.
Also the story so far doesn't really support linking to each other as one objective of the game is to unify a fragmented group.

@Euchre:
This sounds cool. Can you elaborate this a bit more. I didn't use Google Analytics so far. How does this work?

[Euchre]

Google Analytics is free (at least to sign up for the account and get your tracker), and is primarily aimed at monetizing a website more effectively. It basically is a traffic analyzer. The main thing is that it uses that unique ID embedded in every one of your pages and sites to allow you to track traffic - but that also allows users of your site to see that they are all being created and monitored by the same entity. (This was one way Cloverfield gamejacks were being weeded out.) Since you are working on a commercially sponsored game, it would provide some numbers you could use to show your effectiveness to your sponsor. The sponsor might even support buying a keyword or two, which could help your game's effectiveness for both you and your sponsor. It'd be a bit less useful to a grassroots game.

The official Google info:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

[Shadom]

Thanks. That could be what I searched for. Not exactly the same but well... it could work.
I wanted dto register a few keywords anyway so it's perfect.

[temujin9]

You can do any number of tricks based on the HTTP-Referer (note mis-spelling) header to identify a 3rd party page as valid, via a link. Lots of fiddly details involved: how secure does this need to be, are you willing to hand-edit an allowed URLs list, what programming languages your website uses, etc.

[thebruce]

what you could do, is include a url in the http header pointing to a checker that would confirm if the source is in-game... eg, even just plain html files, where say www.thisismysite.com would be checked at perhaps myargchecker.blogspot.com/thisismysite.com which would then say "Yup, In-game" or something. Anything not ingame would be 404'd. you could take it a bit further and make a dynamic search if there are loads of pages on other sites, where only some might be in-game... *shrug*
it's also pretty meta since it -kind of- breaks that 4th wall. But the checker site doesn't have to give anything away, just give a confirmation or not.

[SpaceBass]

In Metacortechs, we had a fake hosting company (Underscore Hosting) server which hosted all in-game sites. Each site had a little graphical UH Logo badge in the corner, matched to the site's color scheme and linking back to the UH site's Terms of Service. Each badge was hosted on the UH server in an affiliates directory and named for the in-game site on which it was displayed (for instance, the badge displayed on pages at paranormaljournal.org was hosted as underscorehosting.com/affiliates/paranormaljournal_org.jpg and paintover.net had one at underscorehosting/affiliates/paintover_net.jpg). This way players could use the naming system to quickly investigate in-game status of newly-discovered sites by checking UH for a corresponding badge.

[Shadom]

A fake Server would be too much as we already know that a few sites will be on different servers. But the header checking... Why does this break the curtain?

I mean.. it isn't so difficult to make up a IG reason why the site is checked. It doesn't have to say "this is IG". If there is Gamejack it could just say something like "unknown source". With the right background this could work.

Okay.. I will go a bit more in detail. The players will be hired in some meaning and the site linked to would be a coaching site which teaches the necessary skills for a typical ARG in a IG manner. Such like "most secret Organisation use some kind on crypted messages. To decrypt them try first the most basic methods like ROT. Click here to learn more about this". It should be understandable why not everybody is allowed to link to such a (IG) sensible site.

[thebruce]

well Spacebass's metacortechs method is great game-safe implementation of a central site checker.
My (very rough) example was different in that it could verify in-game connections between sites/profiles/pages that have absolutely nothing to do with each other in-game. Say some new character is introduced in a game - the PM could opt to link to some bare/neutral location that would verify urls to be connected with each other. It's not so much an issue with the curtain as it is 'breaking the wall', per se, because now there's just a common connection between sites where in-game there shouldn't be, solely to make that "out of game" connection that they are in fact for the same game, and this new page can be trusted. It's only a very, very minor issue, and for the most part PMs are generally able to accomplish verifications like that without breaking walls... but if they notice a gamejacker is trying to get in on their game, it could be a quick fix.
It's just one brief, random idea out of many others here as a method of verifying multiple non-related/in-game locations.

[jono]

The first Lost ARG had a neutral helper. He was called the Speaker and players could E-mail him a site and get a resonse back if it was in-game or not. So may be some neutral observer who is in-Game yet has no part in the plot just to guide the players on which sites are real

[Nighthawk]

All my game sites are hosted on the same physical server, so no problem there.

In future, I may have to get more servers just to handle load and diversity, but if I do I will continue to ensure that any single game uses the same IP address for all content.

Of course, that means that other sites may be confused as being "in game" to my own, but I'd rather have that for my own sites than anything else.