ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network

One of the Best Larps I Ever Played Was at a Theme Park

June 14, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

A moment from Ghost Town Alive 2024, which saw a shaky bandit alliance formed

Every summer, Knott’s Berry Farms transforms its cobbled together collection of historic buildings into the thriving mining town of Calico, California in Ghost Town Alive. For the price of a day pass to the park guests can live out a day in the twilight of the nineteenth century, helping shape events in the town. And while the event isn’t explicitly billed as a live action role playing game it nonetheless serves as one of the best introductions to the space I’ve seen, for children and adults alike.

What sets Ghost Town Alive apart is how permissive it is in letting guests’ imaginations run wild. When I went in 2024, our group finished the day off having successfully convinced the town to switch their currency to a button-based economy, rigged an election for bandit leadership, cycled multiple members through the coveted role of mayor-for-the-hour, and also had a few members spend some less coveted time behind bars.

A Bit of Ghost Town History to Set the Stage

Ghost Town Alive started in 2016 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the park’s iconic ghost town. Knott’s Berry Farm started out as a farm stand, and expanded into a restaurant known for its fried chicken dinner. Once the wait times for the chicken dinner started to stretch into hours, Walter Knott started displaying Wild West memorabilia and transplanting actual historical buildings from nearby farms and mining towns to create the ghost town that became the focal point of the amusement park that would eventually emerge.

So, for 2016, Ghost Town Alive did just that – it populated the town of Calico with a series of colorful characters, and played out a drama that played out across the historic buildings. And the event was enough of a rousing success that it was brought back every year since, save for two years during the pandemic. Notably, every summer Ghost Town Alive plays out a different story set in the town, centered around a different day in the fictionalized town’s history.

Kid Friday welcomes Ghost Town Alive guests from the hotel balcony, in long underwear

Early Introductions to the Mechanics of Ghost Town Alive

While the exact events of Ghost Town Alive vary from year to year, the core structure remains the same: guests are welcomed to the town for Founders Day at a ribbon cutting, followed by an introduction to the various factions that make up the town. Individual characters might enlist guests to help them with anything from planning bank robberies to helping collect news for the town’s paper. The newspaper itself is released multiple times a day, serving as both periodic record of the day’s events and as a source of quests.

My particular adventure started off with a visit to Town Hall, where I was sworn in as an honorary citizen of Calico and asked to sign the town register. After doing that, our small group of newly minted citizens were shown a scale model of the town to help us get our bearings, with a stray button resting on it. Our guide helpfully explained that this was left by Willow “Buttons” McKitrick, whose clothes are adorned with all sorts of buttons and keeps dropping them around town. We were told she’d be happy if we returned any buttons we found to her, but also encouraged to consider using them as leverage: if we wanted to, we could demand rewards for their return, threaten to blackmail her with the buttons…practically anything we could imagine.

Shortly after, another member of our group proved how flexibly the buttons were used, as they discovered a stray button in the Calico bank and the teller insisted that Buttons should pay a fee for leaving the buttons there, leading our group to conspire to get buttons introduced as legal tender so the bank would owe interest for the button-based deposit. The townsfolk of Calico entertained this ludicrous idea, but didn’t make it easy to accomplish. In order to enact our plans of establishing a “Button Standard”, we needed to get signoff from one of the town’s lawyers Herbert Bird, convince the bank it was in their best interest to corner the market on the new alternative currency before it was formalized, and elect one of our cohort as mayor-for-the-hour.

Issues of the Calico Gazette, along with calls to action on how to get involved

While our particular situation was unique, much of Ghost Town Alive acts under similar models of escalation. Guests start out ingratiating themselves with townsfolk through small acts: an ad in the town paper might recommend checking out the Post Office to help with deliveries, joining the Calico Gazette to help report on all the news that’s fit to print in town, or joining the bank. And the initial requests are straightforward: pass a note to another townsperson (but don’t read it!), deliver a package, or find out if a character might be interested in sharing a dance at the hoe-down. But soon enough, things spiral until you’re trusted with bigger tasks to advance the day’s events like helping figure out how to safely crack a bank vault, or figuring out how to weaponize electricity to turn potato batteries into impromptu explosives.

Close Enough: Welcome Back, Game Changer ARG

June 2, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

One of many steps in the Game Changer Hotline puzzle

The new Game Changer ARG just launched, but it’s not tied to the newly released season of the show. Instead, it’s a community challenge for backers of the Game Changer Home Edition Kickstarter campaign, which is itself playing out as a play-at-home edition of Game Changer, where the points actually do matter because they unlock additional upgrades to the game.

The current challenge: figure out how to leave a voicemail on the Game Changer Hotline. Sounds simple enough…but the challenge is actually a multi-layered puzzle adventure that asks players to do everything from escaping a virtual greenroom to identifying randomized clips from past episodes, on the fly.

…and yes, if you’re looking for answers, scroll to the bottom of the article and you’ll find a few.

Wait, “Welcome Back?” This Isn’t Game Changer’s First ARG?

Dropout’s hit variety show Game Changer is structured so that its players are presented with a completely different game show every episode, so it’s no surprise that this isn’t Game Changer‘s first puzzle rodeo. For the show’s fifth season, the show’s host Sam Reich (or rather, his evil magician counterpart Sam Dalton) locked three contestants in the show’s greenroom, forcing them to complete an escape room to free the real Sam Reich and escape with their lives intact.

Over the next few seasons, fans picked up on suspicious details and thought the show was running an alternate reality game on multiple occasions…a trend that continued until near the end of season 7, when the show finally did run an ARG by hiding a series of puzzles in playable minigames featured in prior episodes.

As players progressed through the game, they learned that frequent guest Brennan Lee Mulligan conspired with the video game developers to hide secret easter eggs in each of the games, culminating in the discovery of a secret phrase that would unlock a secret final episode after it was entered 100,000 times on a website. The result: the episode Samalamadingdong, where Sam Reich was subjected to an escape room of his own, riddled with references to past shows.

Game Changer Home Edition and the Game Within a Campaign

Shortly before Game Changer launched its eighth season, the Dropout team presented fans with yet another surprise: a crowdfunding campaign for a “home edition” of the game, featuring playable versions of three particularly beloved episodes of the show:

Bingo (s06 e05), where players are trying to guess how other people will respond to prompts;
Name a Number (s05 e04), where players bid on challenges before knowing what the numbered bids actually mean; and
Sam Says (s04 e01, s05 e01, and s06 e03), a modified game of Simon Says designed to catch players in all sorts of clever loopholes.

Smosh and Parlor Room ran playthroughs of the home edition games to give fans a chance to see the home edition versions in action, and the campaign has already raised over $5.5M from over 38,000 backers as the campaign nears its June 6th cutoff date.

What makes this campaign particularly notable is that it acts as its own version of Game Changer, with daily prompts providing backers with multiple opportunities to play along at home. One early prompt, for example, asked something fairly simple: at least 300 players needed to give their name and phone number, no questions asked. Players who responded to that prompt were given a follow-up task yesterday, informing them that they would be getting phone calls from a number ending in -GAME within the next 24 hours. In order to score points, at least half of those called would need to answer the phone by saying, “Hello Game Changer, I’ve been here the whole time.” Over the past month fans have created edible arrangements of the Game Changer logo, submitted fake bird calls, written Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, and even replayed some of the minigames used for the original alternate reality game.

I was proud enough of the bird call I submitted, I uploaded a backup copy of it.

One of the key challenges with Kickstarter campaigns for projects with built-in audiences is the vast majority of the project’s most die-hard fans are going to back on day one…and while stretch goals offering new perks can help incentivize sharing the campaign, the most ardent supporters are left on the sidelines with nothing left to do.

Luckily, a number of crowdfunding campaigns solved this problem, by turning the campaign itself into a spectacle. Machine of Death did it by offering comedic backer tiers like the “Goat Stare” level (where goats would stare at your copy of the game before it’s mailed), while campaigns like Exploding Kittens gave fans lighthearted achievements to unlock. Many of the puzzle Kickstarter campaigns featured on ARGNet have used puzzles to keep early backers engaged, with Maze of Games hiding puzzles in interviews, and PostCurious added secret puzzle perks rewarding solvers with free pins or even a chance to get written into the game as a minor character.

The Game Changer Home Edition campaign has dabbled in a little of everything: to date, three backers have supported the campaign at the “Cuck” tier of support, where for $2,500 they get absolutely nothing from Dropout. At the same time, a number of challenges have tasked players with writing game prompts for Kickstarter Community expansions to the game. And then, there’s the puzzles. Which brings us to the Game Changer: Home Edition Challenge Hotline ARG itself.

The Backrooms Viral Marketing Noclips Into An Earlier Era

May 27, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

An early in-universe ad for The Backrooms focusing on Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire

Last month, people started noticing a an advertisement for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire popping up across the internet, advertising amazing deals on furniture. The only indication this wasn’t a low-budget, grainy commercial for a local furniture store is an A24 logo that pops up in the lower right corner of the spot towards the tail end of its run. This video kicked off the viral marketing campaign for the studio’s upcoming film The Backrooms, which releases this coming Friday. And over the past few weeks, the campaign has offered a number of chances for fans to “noclip” into the film’s world.

A scene from Kane Pixels’ Backrooms, where Async researchers find a missing person

The Quick Backstory For The Backrooms

The Backrooms started its life as a creepy internet photograph of unknown provenance. The image depicts a seemingly abandoned retail space with yellowed wallpaper and carpeted flooring lit by the harsh fluorescent glare of the overhead lights. And for years, the photograph was passed around message boards without context as shorthand for “creepy liminal spaces”.

Eventually, the image would be posted to 4chan with the accompanying text, creating a basic vocabulary for The Backrooms:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

A number of creators would return to this concept, but Kane Parsons (posting under Kane Pixels) in particular went on to create a series of videos expanding on the concept that would help define the aesthetic and rules of the world for fans. In this interpretation, The Backrooms is a parallel dimension filled with a seemingly endless maze of hallways and corridors, dotted with “Null Zones” that serve as semi-permeable barriers to clip in and out of the real world. The rules of time and space don’t behave the same in the Backrooms, and objects flowing through the Backrooms might reappear in our world at incongruous times.

According to Parsons’ interpretation, an organization known as the Async Research Institute discovered how to access The Backrooms decades ago. Over the years, the company sent employees in hazmat suits to explore the spaces, in much the same way the SCP Foundation uses Class-D personnel to research otherworldly dangers. Getting lost in the liminal spaces isn’t the only threat to these employees, as a number of dangerous lifeforms stalk the hallways of the Backrooms, including a bacterial entity often referred to as “The Lifeform”.

Left: the original Backrooms photo. Right: another shot of the location taken the same day

Finding the Backrooms, and the Move to the Silver Screen

While the original Backrooms photograph went unidentified for years, lost media fans gradually pieced together the photograph’s history, which appears to have been incorporated into the film itself. And that story starts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at 807 Oregon Street. Between 1958 – 1994, the address was home to Rohner’s Furniture, a small business that was a fixture in the town since as early as 1928. Rohner’s abandoned their furniture business in 1994 and the building was acquired by Hobbytown USA in 2003, when the company started blogging about their renovations efforts. One of those progress photos was the now iconic Backrooms photo. Recently, the Oshkosh Public Library created a video going through their own archives to help flesh out this story.

And so, when A24 partnered with Kane Parsons to turn his take on the Backrooms into a feature length film, he drew upon the photograph’s newly resurfaced provenance to place the film’s Null Zone bridge to the Backrooms inside Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture business. Transplanted from Oshkosh to San Jose California, the adaptation is nonetheless paying homage to the image’s history…a theme that comes up quite a bit, in the viral marketing campaign to follow.

This Boston Wedding Party Takes “Save the Date” Literally

May 11, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

Jack and Norah, the happy couple at the center of “The Wedding Party”

Jack Rogers and Norah Lane are getting married, and I was invited to attend their wedding reception! I don’t quite remember how I initially met them (it’s probably not important), but who can turn down a three-course dinner at Boston’s W Hotel to catch up with old friends. There’s even a few rumors going around that the bride might have designed a puzzle hunt for attendees, in lieu of a whirl around the dance floor.

Jack and Norah’s wedding reception is the central event for The Wedding Party, a dinner theater escape room initially created by Canadian Caper, as a popup event in 2015. The show has been running in Toronto since 2023 when Secret City Adventures adapted it into a more persistent experience, and recently expanded the show’s theatrical footprint to Vancouver and Boston. The show uses the structure of a wedding reception to deliver an experience that’s one part immersive theater, one part escape room with just a hint of live action roleplaying for attendees looking to lean into the experience.

From left to right: Derek (Best Man), Norah (the Bride), Jack (the Groom), and Rachel (Maid of Honor)

Meeting (and Exceeding) Expectations: Building Narrative Scaffolding Around A Wedding

Most people reading this article have been to a wedding reception before, so the narrative beats and expectations of a wedding reception should be familiar. The evening starts out with the key members of the wedding party greeting attendees at the door, graciously accepting well wishes and engaging in light banter before ushering them into the banquet hall, offering hints of their highly distinct personalities.

Guests are encouraged to grab a drink at the cash bar, or settle in for the appetizer course before the wedding party offers up impassionate (and informative) wedding speeches that cement their characters in attendees’ minds, before the main course is served. While attendees eat, the wedding party runs a circuit across the tables engaging in light banter, before the main event: a puzzle hunt designed by the bride, with the goal of finishing up an hour later for dessert and the traditional cake cutting. If teams found themselves stuck at any point, the wedding party was on hand to offer the occasional nudge.

The three-course meal at “The Wedding Party”, along with a Moscow Mule from the bar

The Wedding Party‘s structure did an exceptional job of easing attendees into the experience. Brief introductions to the wedding party set the stage for a show that encouraged interactions with the cast, while the wedding speeches set up a few clues for the central narrative without asking much of attendees beyond enjoying the show. And the tableside visits provided a purely optional low-stakes opportunity to test the cast’s improv skills before the puzzle event commences.

Rules for Norah’s Puzzle Hunt, the escape room in the middle of an immersive wedding party

Return of the King in Yellow Minecraft ARG

April 27, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

Avery enters a church and is confronted with the Yellow Sign, in Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist

Back in November, ARGNet covered Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist, a modern reinterpretation of Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow through the lens of a Minecraft Let’s Play video. This reframing of the classic horror story is particularly fitting, as the titular King in Yellow isn’t a typical eldritch horror. Instead, it’s a play capable of driving those exposed to it mad, serving as an early instance of cognitohazards.

Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist ended with the protagonist Derek (playing under the handle d3rlord3) encountering the King in Yellow offscreen, and offering one final warning to protect Avery (TheMostMayo) from repeating his mistakes. And for a few months, that was where the series creator Wifies left things. But earlier this month, Wifies released the second part of his duology, Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist.

As with the prior installation, Wifies’ two hour long video offered a summary of a considerably longer source material – this time, a fifteen hour long upload to Avery’s YouTube channel. But while the prior video was primarily told through Derek’s perspective, the first half of Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist is told from a considerably more naive perspective.

Avery’s Perspective: Following in D3rlord3’s Footsteps

The first installment of Wifies’ King in Yellow reimagining starts with the warning, “whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.” And as we finally begin to see Avery’s exploration of the world, he ignores these instructions and attempts to follow in D3rlord3’s footsteps. But when Avery crosses the threshold of the giant golden door, instead of being confronted with unseen horrors, he’s confronted by a single gold block…until turning around and finding himself in a room filled with doors.

Behind each door, Avery finds himself thrust into a different world, littered with signs of D3rlord3’s prior passage – items from his inventory appear like a trail of breadcrumbs, guiding Avery through puzzles he doesn’t quite understand. The first world he stumble across, for example, is a series of precarious mountain spires connected by wooden bridges. Upon crossing each bridge, mountains appear and disappear with no explanation. On one occasion, the only thing saving Avery from falling to his virtual death is a series of blocks previously placed by D3rlord3.

That is not to say that Avery isn’t engaging with his environment: in one world, he comes across a towering obelisk, with strange glyphs written on it, and recognizes the puzzle in place: “bro is speaking enchanting table”. And he’s right – the bricks spell out a message in Minecraft’s Galactic Alphabet, which often appears alongside the game’s enchantment table. The upper portion of the obelisk starts with – — – , the pattern used in the Galactic Alphabet for “end of sentence”. This provides a hint that the cigils need to be flipped upside down and reversed to be legible, resulting in the message “BELOW”.

Avery proceeds through many of these elaborately designed worlds and eventually finds the doorway leading to the next, guided by a trail of items. Sometimes, viewers can intuit the way forward themselves. In a world blanketed by a sea of red rolling hills, the landscape is broken up by a series of white houses. Avery focuses on the items inside the houses, missing the giant tiled arrows placed on the floor of each house, directing him where to go. Eventually it’s a crafting table in the distance that leads Avery to his next location. Only this table couldn’t have been placed by D3rlord3, since it appeared out of nowhere. There’s something else leaving a path of breadcrumbs for Avery to follow.

One particularly insidious world almost halts Avery’s journey entirely. Slightly over 2 hours into the raw footage, after navigating a series of underground canals, Avery stumbles across a cozy world occupied by a single church. A Yellow Sign often serving as harbinger of the King in Yellow hangs above the pew, and a book at the altar reassures Avery he’s safe here. And for the next twelve hours, Avery silently tends to the church. It’s only until he reads a sign left by D3rlord3 that he is broken from his reverie and proceeds onward.

A puzzle at the center of the lake can be solved one of two ways – through wits, or by brute force

That is not to say that Avery has no personal agency in progressing forward: one particularly intricate puzzle appears in the center of a lake in between six statues. Avery “solves” the puzzle by spending four minutes breaking through the netherite block that acts as the lock, before typing “stupid puzzle” into chat. Finally, around halfway through the video, Avery encounters D3rlord3. And during that conversation, he’s provided a link to the events leading up to their encounter, from Derek’s perspective, although the video has since been “deleted”.

Gotta Catch ‘Em All: The MIT Mystery Hunt as Puzzle-Based Spectacle

March 31, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 2 Comments

MIT Mystery Hunt 2026’s mascot “The Child”, an extra-dimensional Puzzle Monster (PuzzMon)

It’s January 16th, and I’m sitting in a classroom on the MIT campus. Hours earlier, I joined thousands of puzzlers attending a paranormal research conference called CRYPTIC, where an intrepid researcher named Burnham proved that cryptids do exist…but in the process, opened up a rift to another world that threatened our very existence. The only way to close the rift and save the world: befriend that world’s puzzle monsters (PuzzMon) to save the world. This is the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle event that attracted over 5,000 puzzlers to spend a long weekend tackling a series of wildly creative puzzles.

Shortly after the conference, the PuzzMon.world website went live. By the time the evening rolled around, our team had already solved a handful of puzzles. I had just come off working on a puzzle themed around fanfiction tropes and the Omegaverse, and took a break from puzzles to explore the world of PuzzMon through a fully playable 16-bit video game world to unlock more puzzles for our team.

All of a sudden, two teammates settle down at my table and dump a box of black jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table, and start slowly matching pieces. I ask them what they’re working on: they explain it’s a puzzle called Starry Night. This is more interesting than what I was working on, so I drop everything and join them. Curious, I ask: “our team was given a set of two blacklights in our team’s welcome kit…do you think there’s secretly UV ink on the puzzle?”

Starry Night, under a blacklight – the otherwise black jigsaw is easier to assemble under the right light

My suspicion was correct: there was secretly UV ink on the puzzle pieces, and under the right lighting the puzzle is much easier to complete. In under an hour we have a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle, covered in ultraviolet stars and astrological signs. But that’s only the first step of the puzzle, and for the next hour or so we would try and figure out how to connect the dots to transform those hidden symbols into a word or phrase that is the final solution to the puzzle.

Puzzles at the MIT Mystery Hunt can take just about any form, so over the event’s 45 year history the teams running the event have used it as a platform to push the limits of what a puzzle can be. And because the prize for a team winning the MIT Mystery Hunt is the responsibility for running the next year’s hunt, every team has a slightly different answer to what that spectacle entails. For 2026, the puzzles themselves served as center for the spectacle. But be warned, as this article will spoil puzzle mechanics of a number of puzzles for those looking to solve after the fact.