Author: Jonathan Waite (Page 23 of 37)

Jonathan Waite was an innocent lurker when The Beast hit the Internet in 2001. From his temporary residence in Jeon Ju, South Korea, he was immediately captivated by the lush environment that had been laid out before his feet. Moving back to his hometown (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) in July of the same year, Jonathan continued to be involved in the burdgeoning genre of Alternate Reality Gaming, getting into Plexata and finding a voice on the forums dedicated to the game. Once Lockjaw hit in 2002, there was no looking back. Jonathan adopted the alias 'jamesi', started a fansite called GuysGuise, and the rest is history.
Jonathan can currently be found as an administrator on Unfiction's forums, as well as co-hosting the ARG Netcast audio show. In the past, he has been involved with Smirkbox, a humor site that focuses on the realm of ARGs, as well as actively creating and maintaining JMX, a puzzle trail website that is currently working (yes, still) on a second run.

As a freelance developer and consultant, Jonathan has worked on such games as Ocular Effect (for Fallen on ABC family), Reach the Future (aka Holomove, for Microsoft), Enitech Labs (for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX) and Monster Hunter Club (for The Host by Magnolia Films). He is happily married and has two wonderful daughters.

The Lost Experience and Catching The Wish Wrap Up, Three New Grassroots Games Launch

October 9, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

Wow, October already? Thankfully, not much has happened in the past couple of weeks that would be noteworthy for reporting here. I wonder what’s going on in the world of alternate reality gaming lately? Let me just check this… email inbox I have over here… and… oh. Wow. Really? All of that happened in the last 14 days? Huh. (Yes, I’m a little late on reporting a few recent developments, so let me jump right into it.)

The Lost Experience, the three (or five, depending on the source) stage ARG which began in early May with mysterious television advertisements, concluded on September 24th with a live radio transmission. In the weeks leading up to the end of the game, players were encouraged to visit real world locations for Apollo Bars, chocolate treats that held special codes on their wrappers which were supposed to lead players to the last section of the game, but instead, were simply, “attached to a time function, so the amount of codes entered were just a function of time until the end,” according to Ryan, a TLE player. Codes that did work, however, were found on various web sites, in magazines and through advertisements, and those codes led to video snippets when, reassembled in the correct order, gave players answers about the TV show’s mythology, including the importance of “the numbers” within the context of the show. Overall, the experience was appreciated by the majority of its participants, but some felt that the interactivity waned in the latter stages of the game, leading to a drop in interest. There are rumors about another TLE installment to begin later this year, when the TV show takes a short hiatus in the U.S. and Canada, so keep your eyes and ears open if you are Lost fan.

PICNIC ’06 Cross Media Week Is Here!

September 26, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

Well, it is finally here – PICNIC ’06 is mere days away, and we have three ARGN community members at the conference, ready to report on events as they unfold. Sean C. Stacey (SpaceBass) and Brooke Thompson (imbri), long-time ARG community members and contributing writers to ARGN, are on location in Amsterdam and are eagerly anticipating the opening of the event later today (or tomorrow, depending on what time zone you are in). Joining them as an interpreter and associate is DaniÃ«l van Gool (giskard) who we are very fortunate to have on board for this project. ARGN is once again proud to be an official network partner of PICNIC ’06 Cross Media Week and we hope that any of you who are in attendance are able to catch up with Sean, Brooke and DaniÃ«l in their travels over the next few days.

If you’d like to keep tabs on the crew and want to get in touch with them, they have set up a thread at the unFiction forums dedicated to social gatherings at PICNIC (click here). If you can’t make it to see them or the event, check back here in the next few days, as we should have updates soon.

Scheduled Maintenance = Down Time

September 11, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

Here’s a FYI: Our host has scheduled maintenance for tonight which will result in our site being down for the duration of the work, which they say will be between 30 and 45 minutes. The work will begin at 10pm PDT (1 am EDT).

I Left My… Cube? in San Francisco?

August 11, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

Another large-scale organized event for Perplex City is taking place tomorrow in San Francisco, California, hot on the heels of the almost-worldwide release of the fourth and final wave of Season One puzzle cards, which took place on July 31st. To help build up the hype machine for this event, the creative forces at Mind Candy Design have teamed up with buy.com and 1UP.com as official partners — there’s even a mini-game and Club at 1UP (http://von.1up.com and http://officialperplexcity-club.1up.com, respectively).

The event coincides with a plot development where the ‘Third Power’ has severed the link between our world and the world in which Perplex City exists, and players can expect this get-together to be a task-oriented affair. According to the Mind Candy Emergency website, “At 11am PDT on Saturday (7pm in the UK), (Mind Candy) be giving an emergency briefing both online at this website and at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco, detailing what needs to be done.” Will the participants save the day and be victorious against the Third Power evil-doers? Probably. In any case, it sounds like a heck of a way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and we encourage those in attendance to write in with your reactions and summaries of the day’s events for a follow-up early next week!

Editor’s Note: We are not suggesting that the Receda Cube will be found in San Francisco. It’s just a funny title, people.

PICNIC ’06 Cross Media Week

August 5, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

As we announced earlier this week through our Announcement Email list, the Alternate Reality Gaming Network is proud to be named as a network partner for the PICNIC ’06 Cross Media Week event. PICNIC ’06 is Amsterdam’s new annual event focused on creativity in cross media content and technology, specifically in the fields of entertainment and communication. The event will take place from September 27 – 29 at the Westergasfabriek, a cultural facility located in a former gas factory in Amsterdam. PICNIC â€™06 will include a conference for paying delegates as well as a public program which includes lectures, an exhibition, art installations and parties. PICNIC â€™06 is being supported by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, the City of Amsterdam and a variety of corporate and service partners. For complete information about the event, visit www.crossmediaweek.org.

PICNIC â€™06 organisers are expecting approximately 1000 delegates from Europe, North America and Asia. Speakers will include top creatives and entrepreneurs such as Michael B. Johnson, Moving Picture Group Lead at Pixar Animation Studios, Simon Guild, President and Chief Executive of MTV Networks Europe, John de Mol, Co-Founder of Endemol and Founder of Talpa, Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist, Philip Rosedale, Founder of Linden Lab/Second Life, Jamie Kantrowitz, Senior VP Marketing Europe at MySpace, Lorraine Twohill, Marketing Director in Europe for Google, Marko Ahtisaari, Director of Design Strategy, Nokia, Reinier Evers, Founder of Trendwatching.com, Dan Gillmor, Founder and Director of the Center for Citizen Media, Marc Canter, Founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics, Joseph Jaffe, Author of â€œLife after the 30-Second Spotâ€, Matt Locke, Head of Innovation at BBC New Media & Technology, Emile Aarts, Vice President and Scientific Program Director at Philips Research Laboratories, and many more. You can read more about the network partners at the PICNIC ’06 web site.

If you want to attend the event, we have great news for you. As a network partner, we are able to pass on a discount to our subscribers for three-day passes as well as single-day passes. Simply register by clicking here, then when prompted, use the promotion code provided to you through the Announcement List (click here to subscribe, if you haven’t already). That will enable you to get a total conference pass for â‚¬ 500 plus VAT (normal rate: â‚¬ 750 plus VAT), or a day pass for â‚¬ 300 (good for either Thursday, September 28th or Friday, September 29th).

Eon8 Activate!

June 30, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

When something pops up on the radar with enough force to bog down an entire message forum, we generally sit up and take notice. Today, eon8 is the web site that is shaking the ARG world, and it has a familiar feeling to it. If you are lucky enough to be able to access the site (traffic jams are just as nasty on the Internet as in real life, I guess) you will notice the countdown (currently at 0d:01h:30m:37s) as well as a Project Status (currently X13600 Imminent, whatever that means). A link to deployment logs reveals a lot of alphanumeric strings, while the Deployment Tracker is a lovely little link… that I can’t seem to access, yet. Many of the links on the front page go to a password-protected subdomain as well, evidence that this may indeed turn into an ARG.

All of that aside, this is another occasion where it’s not entirely certain what this site has in store, but with the amount of attention it has received so far, we’ll keep an eye out and update when we find out what the X13600 is going on.

:: Discussion at Unfiction forums (connection may be slow due to high volume of traffic)

Update!
So, as it turns out, the entire thing was a social experiment. At 12:00 AM EST, the site reloaded. These are excerpts of the text from the eon8.com site, under a link called “Reveal The Truth”: