Month: December 2004 (Page 1 of 2)

ARG: The Traveler

December 28, 2004 / Steve Peters

An alert member of Unfiction has stumbled upon The Evergreen Foundation, an organization that is “united and driven, not just by civic responsibility, but also by a moral imperative to contribute to the peaceful continuance of a society that is free from fear,” by developing technologies to increase the effectiveness of information gathering and surveillance.

Sound a little nefarious? Well, it should. Seems that if you dig a little into the site’s extranet, you’ll discover that something has escaped from their Genetic Health Care Center in Palmdale, and it looks like it’s killing local animals. A little further digging around reveals immediate links to other websites, including Resurrection Auto Parts (Serving Travellers Everywhere), Hollis Martial Arts, and the personal webpage of an industrial designer and motivational speaker named Judith Strand. On her site, she mentions having made the recent aquaintance of a “man who travels great distances to find a larger truth.”

All of this seems to be related to an upcoming novel, “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks. Whether this turns out to be a little backstory to the novel or an actual Alternate Reality Game remains to be seen, but geez. An evil genetic research company, an escaped test subject, a world spanning multiple websites……it’s got all the classic pieces (although the direct links at the bottom of the Random House page are a little non-subtle). Let’s just watch and see how they are played.

Discussion at Unfiction

Neurocam: Australia’s Latest Mystery

December 20, 2004 / Steve Peters

If you’ve been driving around Melbourne Australia lately, you may have noticed billboards telling you to “get out of your mind,” and pointing to Neurocam.com. Apparently, those who sign up on the website have been given missions of varying degrees of complexity to complete, such as delivering a locked briefcase to a complete stranger. Failure to complete their mission will ostensibly result in serious consequences. Nobody seems to know who’s behind it, or what it’s promoting, if anything. Metafilter denizens are already comparing it with Fight Club, The Game, Mayday Mystery and The Beast.

A little poking around the Neurocam website reveals very little, but that in and of itself seems a little ARGish to us. Checking the site registration reveals that neurocam.com is the only site hosted on its server, and is registered to what appears to be a bogus address in Beverly Hills. In addition, an unprotected directory on the site reveals some rather interesting images. [EDIT: Seems someone’s been watching us. The images in question were removed soon after this article was published. You can now find them here.]

So, is it an ARG? Marketing tool? Cult recruitment technique? Drug running front? Hoax? We’ll keep an eye on this, but for now will file it under Undetermined.

Discussion at Unfiction

Halo 2’s “I Love Bees” Alternate Reality Game

December 19, 2004 / Jonathan Prendergast

The story of I Love Bees proved to be slightly confusing at times, but the gist of it is this: Beekeeper Dana had a site which was attacked by some sort of virus; a countdown was placed on the site which spawned endless hours of speculation as to what the hell “System Peril Distributed Reflex” represented. Besides looking at the odd snippet of information through corrupted pictures and jarbled text, all the players could do was wait on tenterhooks until July 27th, on which “Network Throttling would erodeâ€¦”

Sure enough, come noon July 27th, ilovebees.com is updated. Someone was mad at Dana and posted pictures of her all over the site; Dana freaked out and decided to flee the country.

The next major plot advancement came August 10th, when “the medium has metastasized”. A lot of information was posted on the site- the most important being GPS Coordinates. 220 were posted in total, all of which pointed to locations the length and breadth of the United States.

On August 17th, to the dismay of some, the coordinates changed- now there were 210 in total. However, there were now specific times telling people when to be at a particular coordinate- which proved to quell a lot of confusion. The importance of being at the “axons” was further emphasized when Dana added to the excitement by implying on her blog that we really should get to them! All players could do was kill time, and many found the night of August 23 to be a sleepless one.

So what happened when the axons (pre-determined payphones in large cities) went hot?

Perplex City Ramping Up

December 15, 2004 / Steve Peters

Perplex City has been reaching out and touching real world locations in the form of an intriguing postcard that has been found in airports, Starbucks, and on college campuses around the world (North Carolina, Cambridge UK and Balogna Italy, so far). A message on the back is yet another communique from someone calling themselves Sente, asking for help in finding a missing cube. The postcard includes references to the Perplex City Academy, Academy tours, a gift shop, and the game’s trailhead website at perplexcity.com. Upon closer scrutiny, the postcard has revealed some hidden messages as well, but we’ll leave that for your own discovery.

Word is that Perplex City will be launching in early 2005, so it seems this is their cool way of starting to get the word out. We’ll be watching this one carefully for developments.

Discussion at Unfiction
Chat in #syzygy
Primer
Netninja Reference Pages

ARG: PandoraNext

December 13, 2004 / Steve Peters

Deaddrop reports that PandoraNext will be launching on December 22nd. Word is that this will have some sort of multi-team player element to it, so it will be very interesting to see where it will go.

This will actually be a re-launch of the game, as it originally got started back in October, but was put on hold after just 2 1/2 weeks due to various timing and gameplay issues. These will have been addressed this time around, so it looks like everything will be more robust. Players have already gotten an initial response by emailing [email protected].

Discussion at Unfiction
Chat in #pandoranext

ARGN Chat Client Back On Line

December 10, 2004 / Steve Peters

As part of the ongoing server upgrades, etc. going on around here, we’ve gotten the ARGN IRC chat applet back on line. This is a browser-based IRC client that can be used in lieu of installing a dedicated IRC application on your computer, similar to the applet over at unfiction. This latest version enables connection to multiple channels at once, among other cool things.

So, if you’ve never stopped in to say hello, now’s a perfect time. Simply let the applet load, choose a channel and a nickname and hit the connect button. There’s usually something happening in #unfiction (the general ARG chat area), but there are also dedicated channels for the various games going on.