unforum

[kevrock]

[chaos]

[Zagaan]

I sent him a message that basically said "this game is screwed without tangible clues. Jaegar, the one who initially found your site, is beginning to lose interest. You have to give us something to go by or you will lose us." I think we should give it until the week is up on his twitter account. At most 2 weeks. If nothing by then, I'm out.

[Atropanocturna]

There are two things that could be happening here.

Thing the first: Another grassroots ARG has come to an end due to the PM's real life interfering, money issues, time..etc...

or

Thing the second: We are not getting something that we should.

Now, I am not one to talk, as I have not been able to devote myself as much as I have for past games. But taking the time to buckle down and take a close look at the site and the clues cannot hurt. Many games have a lull after the initial intense interaction! This is not a video game with constant gratification. And emailing HS asking to have things handed to us isn't going to work either. I think that everyone should continue to put effort in, because if they do not, well, then the game is dead and it's our fault. Just my 2 cents.

Kudos to kevrock! I've been thinking about doing that but had not found a moment to do so. It was quite a daunting task to undertake! Thats the kind of investigation that usually produces results.

[whitecross8]

I think we (collectively) are rushing to put this to an end. Maybe it's my noob-i-ness naiveté or the fact that the other game I am playing is Sunshine Mine which makes this game look like it's moving at light speed (I.Will.Apperantly.Know.When.It.Begins.) but Hatshoe both by email and as WOC has been saying for weeks we are waiting for something (payday maybe?).

I do think that the game has spread it's self out pretty far in many directions and that's what I find frustrating. I think the lack of a theme has led to a lot of spec and trouting. Some of the other games I am lurking have a particular theme or event and that makes it easier to fit the clues into the story. These are pretty far a field and we can't seem to put our finger on the theme/goal/motivation. The fact that the site is named after an Elder Scrolls "god", talks about time traveling through homemade mirror machines and now is discussing Russian subs is a wide swatch of topics (like the website, btw). I don't even have a firm grip on who we are trying to help. It's feels a lot like the old comedy routine "Who's on first?"

I am really trying to discover the main idea here and that I think will make it easier to solve the clues. To that end, I am going to continue to work on the code within in a code clue since I think that is the biggest unsolved clue we have. I am looking at the post that includes when the pages were uploaded since the first few batches were smokescreen. I want to see what's left after that. Another clue never solved (I'm pretty sure) is that we are to adopt the paradigm of pedagogue and enter it. I have tried educator, teacher, schoolteacher and a couple of others on the end of the url with no result, any other ideas?

[fezzik]

I think Hatshoe is kind of fascinating from a meta-perspective. As someone who wants to someday run my own ARG or at least ARG-like scavenger hunt experience, and also someone who has worked in game design, the tension between letting your players win and preserving a sense of challenge is always interesting. Here we seem to have a case where the players appear to be overmatched. That is, Hatshoe might be sitting there thinking "gosh! i left so many clues, why don't they get it?" But the fact is, we're not getting it. I'm assuming there is a secret message because a) at least one such message has been revealed, b) fairly direct hints have been given that other secrets exist, and c) certain idiomatic structures of the pages indicate that the words are achieving a dual purpose, i.e. odd turns of phrase such as "purple tits".

The question is what to do? What would you do, if you were Hatshoe? Does it ruin the game to give hints? Is there any sense in which it's fair to say that we as players have "let him down", or is that not a useful notion? And if we have "let him down", does he get better players? Motivate us somehow? Offer a cash prize?

I, myself, am intrigued by Hatshoe. In my opinion, what's missing is a set of easy clues for us to cut our teeth on. In other words, there's no Level 1 or Tutorial Zone. It's just a bunch of hard clues that we don't understand. In game design we learn that players need to be rewarded occasionally or the trail runs cold, and that seems to be what's happening here. I personally would get energized if I solved a clue, even if it was easy. It would solve the dual purpose of rewarding us, and also (if done correctly) would train us on how this particular game works. He did, of course, give us one such hint. Ideally, we would have been able to turn that hint into further success. The fact that we couldn't is a bad sign. That is to say, there should have been other parallel clues that we could have immediately discovered. Given that the first clue was a grammatical error on a page, kevrock's exhaustive analysis of other grammatical errors (which I have also done) *should*, by all rights, have turned up *something*. I say "should" in the sense of "if this was a well-designed game that encouraged player participation".

Anyway, I still hold out hope. I think we just need a little help.

[kevrock]

[jaeger138]

fezzik, you couldn't have out it better! I completely agree with your statement to the fullest. Games rely not only on challenging the player but rewarding the player. Personally, I feel there has been little reward. For me, I am not the best puzzle solver in the world but I love story and interaction. I feel that has been removed by my lack of contact and I feel less inclined to continue.

I am not expecting to move the game at a hugely fast pace, most games don't do that unless they have a team of professional designers and a heck of a lot of money to put into it. All I ask is that it moves. As far as I'm concerned, this is currently at a stand still, with no extra clues or story, and only very basic interaction. I'm happy to play for months, as long as there is something happening from week to week unless it is part of the story that there must be a long break, but I don't feel that we've been given that indication.

Just to clarify, I'm not leaving the game, I'm simply taking more of a back seat. Like I said, I'm not the best puzzle solver in the world and so I don't feel I can help much at this stage of the preceedings, but I wish you all luck in finding a new clue and solving it. When this happens, I'll jump right back in, full force to discuss the story and try to re-open lines of contact with our dear friend Hatshoe.

This game is far from over, otherwise there would be no new tweets and no contact, I simply feel I have no reason to post much when I have nothing to say.

I also agree with Whitecross' sentiment that this game is spread too far in multiple directions. It's confusing, frustrating and sometimes annoying, but somehow I feel that this is exactly what it's meant to be. It's frustrating when you ask Hatshoe a question and get back a cryptic reply, it's frustrating when we have a clue that we can't make heads or tails of, it's frustrating when we don't see something that later is seen as obvious but the whole thing has been frustrating from the word go. Friends, keep playing, keep feeling frustrated and you'll get somewhere eventually. Just think outside the box, inside the russian sub and next to the purple tits and one of you will have a breakthrough.

As for me, I'll be around, watching you solve stuff and wishing you luck while I wait for an email from Hatshoe or a ne piece of story to unveil itself so that I can feel like I'll enjoy playing again.

[fezzik]

Now I'm writing just to hear myself..uh..write , but I've been doing interview training at work and I think there's an interesting parallel. Sometimes you'll have a quality candidate, and you'll ask them a pretty easy question, and they just don't get it. You really need to let that question go and move on or you can't get to the meat of the interview. Note it, but let it go. Right now, I get the sinking sensation that there's only one (or a very limited set) of actual secrets to find. That is, we're looking for the "magic answer". Magic answers are bad in games for the same reason they're bad in interviews: if the person doesn't find them, you're both stuck, and you haven't really learned much (and it isn't much fun). Think of one of your favorite games where some level in the middle required finding a secret door. If you find it, great, but if you don't, now what? Cheat? Quit? Look it up on the internet?

Ideally, there would be a number of clues to find, at least 10 or so given how much text we have to work with. But it's hard to believe that with that many secrets we wouldn't have found one by now.

On a more practical note, I did something similar to kevrock earlier in this thread; it would be great if someone could combine the two.

Also, as interesting as the grammatical errors are, I'm even more interested in the cases where the choice of words Hatshoe uses is so odd that it begs for there to be a hidden meaning. The most obvious example is the aforementioned "purple tits", but there are others:

Reds has many, because of its link to "Rock Lobster"
Natural: "Evasion" is an odd word choice, plus it's capitalized
Sleeping Pill has many, such as "classmate session on my air purifier" and "urgen continental drift resist"
Tan has Cartoon Face Syndrome and purple tits
Door Unlock has 10:50 and Venomous Welp

I'm sure there are others. These are points where you say to yourself "that means something", but you just have no idea what

[kevrock]

[fezzik]

This is true; without context it's much, much harder (and arguably less fun). But the one clue we did get - the "twowithout" - didn't need any context (I'm tempted to say that Communism was a Red Herring). It was more along the lines of finding a needle in a haystack. There could be other combinations of weird typos and things that he's waiting for us to hit on randomly. And who knows, if we get enough monkeys on enough keyboards, we might. I've seriously considered trying to write a script to probe for webpages by trying thousands of combinations of URLs. But that seems kinda silly and pointless at some level.

It's possible I'm also grumpy because he never responded to my last email, even though I wrote it on notebook paper and everything!!

[chaos]

[msheadwound]

Correspondence with Hatshoe:

[PerdíElJuego]

[msheadwound]