Month: January 2008 (Page 3 of 4)

Catching Up with Jan Libby

January 13, 2008 / Brandie Minchew

When we last spoke with Jan Libby in episode 35 of the ARG Netcast, she gave us exclusive news about two projects: a television show that she successfully pitched to a production company, and a new game of her own that she planned to launch sometime this winter. Fans of her last two games, “Sammeeeees” and its sequel, “The Wrath of Johnson“, have been watching and waiting for the first sign of Jan’s latest work.

Curious about the effect of the Writer’s Guild of America strike on Jan’s television project, I emailed her to ask about the strike and how things were going. Her cheerful reply gave me some information that I’m thrilled to be able to pass along. The television show has been put on hold due to the strike. However, just before the strike, Jan also pitched her alternate reality idea to the same production company, and, “â€¦they loved it,” Jan said. “And because the web is not yet under the rule of the WGA, I can still launch this project without crossing any picket lines.” With the backing of the production company, Jan also notes that the project and its story world can expand beyond the plans she originally laid out.

Describing her next alternate reality project as “more experimental” and set in a different world from Sammeeeees, Jan revealed that the story “deals with time, space, and memory.”

“It is very interactive but designed so that you don’t have to interact to enjoy the ride,” she says.

We can expect to see the launch sometime in early spring of 2008, so keep your eyes open for whatever surprises Jan has in store for us because spring is just around the corner!

Image courtesy of the LGPedia.

How committed are you?

January 13, 2008 / Sean C. Stacey

The name Deus City should be familiar to some, as we have reported on it numerous times over the past year-plus. This Alternate Reality Game launched in November of 2006 and wrapped up almost exactly a year later, developed by a team led as part of Adam Brackin’s doctoral project at the University of Texas in Dallas.

ARGNet can reveal that a doctoral dissertation is not the only likely result from this team, however. In post-game contact, the puppetmaster team from Deus City hinted at an upcoming project with a teasing few letters of a domain name, “www.conspi….” The complete URL may be found by watching this video, “Conspiracy Asylum File Zero,” which was recently uploaded to YouTube (or it could also be found by clever parsing of this paragraph).

Our sources tell us that the above video is something of a beta-test but that we can expect a public launch around the first of February. Fans of Deus City who are aching for more contact with the universe may be pleased by the setting of the upcoming game in the same universe as the prior, although our sources also tell us that this story will not be directly related nor a sequel to DC, so players unfamiliar with Deus City need not be deterred from joining in. Here’s another one to look forward to in 2008!

Tachyon Me – EniTech Backs Look Into the Future

January 12, 2008 / Marie Lamb

If EniTech Research Labs is to be believed, they have a camera that is recording images from the future—1193 (originally 1191) days into the future, to be precise. Espousing an “Open Source Research” philosophy, employees are documenting their findings on the company blog, and asking for feedback and suggestions for future experiments. The latest experiment seems to have captured a disturbing future look at a devastated San Francisco.

Also of note is researcher Frank Bentley’s former employer, CyberDyne Systems. You may recognize this name as the company behind SkyNet in the Terminator series of movies. Frank has started a Facebook group for former CyberDyne employees, asking them to post what they’ve been up to in the last sixteen years since the “tragic attack”.

Another site called to our attention is Take Back the Future, which has a countdown clock for, yep, 1193 days. TBTF currently has an animated graphic that shows human vs. cyborg world populations, with an alarming shift in numbers after what looks like targeted nuclear or other tactical strikes.

Details like these have lead Unfiction players to connect these sites to the new FOX TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which premieres this Sunday night. (Check your local listings.) What is not known, however, is how EniTech and TBTF will change once the show starts, but we think it will be fun to find out.

Join the Unfiction discussion for more details.

Nowheremen – It’s Dangerous to Run a Wiki

January 12, 2008 / Michael Andersen

Back in August when I wrote about 401WTF, the extended experience for Ashton Kutcher’s new reality television show “Room 401”, I predicted the rather simplistic game might expand into something more. It turns out my prediction was correct, as the Wonderland blog reports the impending launch of Nowheremen.net, “a new community-based social entertainment experience that utilizes the full Web 2.0 medium of platforms to reveal the story behind the mysterious disappearance of a brilliant computer science student, Derek Border.” Apparently, the final clue from the Room 401 experience led players to itkeepsgoing.com. The first 300 players to send their contact information to the website received the next clue in the mail which led to the Nowheremen website, an article about Derek Francis Border’s disappearance.

One of the complaints I had with the game was its general lack of purpose, as the puzzle trail lacked a cohesive plot to tie the various puzzles together. It looks like I’ll have to eat those words, as Derek Francis Border (derekfb) was the creator of the wiki and responsible for posting the show’s episodes on YouTube. Both the ARG and web series revolve around tracking him down.

The timing of this game is rather fortuitous, as an extended experience designed to compliment and coexist with a cable reality televison show guides participants directly to an online web series with relatively high production values, premiering during the WGA strike. It remains to be seen whether this is one of the first of many collaborative efforts by workers displaced in the industry shakeup, or a network-based effort to expand into new media. Whatever the case, the first episode goes live January 22nd, so catch up on the plot and keep your eyes peeled.

Click Here for the discussion at UnFiction
Click Here for the wiki

Image courtesy of CSchmitt7166

The Hills are alive… No, really, they’re alive!

January 11, 2008 / Marie Lamb

From intrepid Unfiction denizen and player, Rowan, comes this interesting news, which we’ve condensed from her excellent forum post:

During my long hours of watching college football bowl games, I kept noticing weird TV ads. There was a blinking alert with a voice over stating that despite rumors online, the Winter X Games would still be taking place. The ad also linked to a website: http://www.winterxrumoralert.com/

The Winter X Rumor site has some tantalizing information. A earth moving machine went missing. An X Games competitor would not be attending. A video clip of someone almost being eaten by the mountain. The most interesting bit is that it links to another website ( http://www.buttermilkisalive.com/ ) run by a geology professor who is convinced that the Buttermilk mountain is undergoing extreme seismological events and is unsafe.

Buttermilk Is Alive has a bunch of background information detailing how Dr. Jim Vaile is upset that people aren’t taking him more seriously. The site has also been ‘newly redesigned’ so that only some of his older entries are now on the site. He has a bunch of links, most to what I take as real world websites, although at least one link is to a nonexistent website. There’s also some commented out ‘entries’ that you can see in the source that look to be pre-written blurbs that are ready to be updated to the sight. Oh, and there’s a commented out ‘Blogroll’ with a list of names – none of which I had much luck in Googling. He also links to a blog, which he calls a forum, where you can leave comments: http://buttermilkisalive.wordpress.com/

The Buttermilk Blog has been quietly updating ever since I first found it. Beyond calling for people to help prove that Buttermilk is dangerous (but due to natural phenomenon – not aliens or magical stuff) there really wasn’t much of a catch. Today the website updated with a new entry talking about an email from a disgruntled reader by the name of Rusty. The email links to Rusty’s blog (http://www.rustytruth.com/ )which is, well, one of those whacked out conspiracy websites you come across on the web every now and then.

edit: Google has now indexed a Flicker page of Benji “Ben” Beale (one of the commented out blog roll names.)

Early on, Rusty’s blog appeared to be the victim of a hack that left a trojan in one of the comments. That blog has now been cleaned, so feel free to surf on.

Rowan also has started a guide for the game.

Programming Alert

January 11, 2008 / Marie Lamb

Tonight on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”, Neda Ulaby talks about Cloverfield–the movie, the promotion and the community. Tune in to your local NPR radio station at 7:00 p.m. EST to hear the show, which we were told will be the second to last segment of the broadcast. The show will also be archived on the NPR website after 8:00 p.m. EST. Unfiction owner and ARGNet staff writer Sean C. Stacey, and Dennis Acevedo of cloverfieldclues.com, were both interviewed for this story.