Owner, Senior Editor
Michael is a Director of Cultural Intelligence at Simon & Schuster, and previously worked in Strategy & Analytics at Digitas Health. He previously served as an adjunct professor at Villanova University, on the editorial board for the Health Matrix: Journal of Law-Medicine, as a senior editor of the Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet, and has published a number of articles exploring the intersection between business, communications, and the law.
After serving as a staff writer at ARGNet for three years, Michael took over as owner and senior editor in 2009.
The Silent Hill Historical Society is a small organization dedicated to preserving the small town’s rich history. Which makes their decision to set up shop on the grounds of a prison whose inmates were wiped out by disease a little questionable. Still…lakefront property doesn’t come cheap, so the lapse in judgment can be forgiven. Covering up the murder of a former colleague? Slightly less forgivable.
The Silent Hill Historical Society is an alternate reality game connected to the Silent Hill franchise, created by Konami the team at Daiyonkyokai (“The Fourth Boundary”), the Japanese collective of ARG creators previously behind Project:;COLD. And while Project:;COLD is only available in Japanese, The Silent Hill Historical Society is structured to allow gameplay in English or Japanese, by selecting the preferred language in the upper right corner of the website.
A Deceptively Simple Structure, Obscuring Surprising Depth On the surface, interactivity with the website is limited: the site’s “Contact” page is down, and the only thing visitors can do is take the Ultimate Silent Hill Quiz: a series of 10 questions that can be answered by closely reading the website, paired with a little research into the Silent Hill games themselves. Fans capable of acing that test are encouraged to tackle the advanced level, an additional 20 questions that go even deeper into the Historical Society’s archives.
Curiously, while the staff pages feature six employees at the Silent Hill Historical Society, staff posts reference a seventh employee, erased from the site. That former employee’s story is told through a series of 36 hidden pages, scattered throughout the website. Some of those links are clickable links that can be found by closely investigating each page of the website, while others require a bit more creativity, finding the right keywords and entering them into the website’s URL, after the domain name.
Image from ThisIsNotAWebsiteDotCom.com, by Eduardo Valdés-Hevia
Starting in 2012, Disney started airing a new animated series called Gravity Falls following the adventures of twins Dipper and Mabel Pines as the twins spent the summer at their “Grunkle” Stan’s roadside attraction The Mystery Shack, nestled in a small town in Oregon. And while the show was targeted towards kids, the show also presented an increasingly complex series of mysteries for its audience to solve along, introducing a new generation to the world of alternate reality games through everything from cryptic messages hidden in the show itself to a global scavenger hunt.
The series’ primary antagonist, Bill Cipher, only appeared in a fraction of the series’ episodes…but the sentient triangle was at the epicenter of the show’s mysteries and many of its puzzles, with many of the puzzles of the last decade revolving around the question: “what happened to Bill, after his dramatic confrontation with the Pines family in the series finale?” Almost a decade later, The Book of Bill offers answers to that question with an epistolary look into Bill’s past, present, and future in a book packed to the brim with puzzles and ciphers to decode. The book also brought with it an alternate reality game that helps provide context and closure to the series.
The hidden title card from the show’s opening
“Solving” Gravity Falls, During the Show’s Initial Run At the tail end of the opening credits to Gravity Falls an aged page from a journal is shown, prominently featuring a one-eyed triangle that fans took to calling “Triangle Guy”. Before cutting to commercials, a voice whispered the only words in the now iconic theme song: “three letters back”. Applying that shift cipher to the message on the screen, “VWDQ LV QRW ZKDW KH VHHPV”, delivered the first of many messages from the show: “Stan is not what he seems”. The cipher also came in handy during the episode’s end credits. During an extended scene featuring a rainbow-puking gnome, a message in that same cipher greeted viewers with a hearty “Welcome to Gravity Falls”.
This pattern followed for every episode of the series: reversed audio messages in the opening credits might provide a hint at how to solve the episode’s cipher, and a secret message was inserted into the end credits, for those who cared to look. After a few episodes, the messages switched over to the Atbash cipher – but to make sure viewers were prepared, the prior episode’s secret message informed viewers, “Mr. Caesarian will be out next week. Mr Atbash will substitute.” To further reinforce that message, the opening theme song’s reversed audio was swapped out to say, “switch A and Z”. Over the course of the series, these ciphers grew increasingly complex, and viewers were introduced to A1Z26 ciphers, the Vigenère cipher, indexing, and even multiple custom cipher languages with in-universe origins.
A Rumble’s Revenge easter egg, spelling out “thEre are six hints i will give you”
Every now and then, the solving went beyond the bounds of the show itself. Part of the way through the first season, Disney released a Flash game called Rumble’s Revenge, putting fans into the role of Dipper and Mabel as they fought through cryptids the characters encountered. Interacting with 12 objects throughout the game pulled up messages from the Triangle Guy that, when decoded, revealed his name before he officially appeared in the show: “MY NAME IS BILL”.
This interplay between puzzle and theory continued as the show progressed, culminating in a puzzle-laden cliffhanger. During Stan Pines’ final confrontation with Bill Cipher, Bill’s final words are spoken through reversed audio: “A-X-O-L-O-T-L, my time has come to burn! I invoke the ancient power that I may return!” So, in a show when almost everything else wrapped up neatly, the question remains: what happened to Bill?
A teaser clip for Lore-Fi, featuring Taylor resting in front of her computer
“Hello. My name is Gregory Daniels. I’m twelve years old. I live at 3251 Spring Lake Drive, and I’ve been kidnapped!”
Not exactly what you’d expect to hear when loading up a lofi beats YouTube channel. Then again, MatPat’s newest alternate reality game LoreFi isn’t only focused on creating a playlist of over eight hours of chill beats that can provide a low-stress soundtrack for your life. It also plans on using that lofi beats channel to deliver a slow burn mystery set to play out over the span of months.
Taylor’s room, as featured in the LoreFi livestream
Meet Taylor: Lore Through Environmental Storytelling Gregory Daniels may be missing, but we don’t find out much about him through the initial launch of LoreFi. Instead, we’re introduced to Taylor, a teenaged girl chilling out to music in her apartment.
Her interests are laid bare in the objects she’s collected over the years: VHS tapes and a trophy from her time in ballet…a gaming console and toys to show she’s a gamer…a “sweet drawing” her friends found at school…and a binder full of CD mix-tapes she burned after downloading the files off the GrapeVyne, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the peer-to-peer downloading client LimeWire, which was a major source of pirated music back in the mid-2000s.
This particular element of gameplay is reminiscent of the indie game Unpacking, which tasks players with unpacking boxes as the main character moves in to a series of new places. It’s a story that packs a surprisingly powerful emotional punch as you experience the highs and lows of a character, as told through the objects they take with them in life.
And while those stories unfold best over time, LoreFi is already showing some hints of that emotional roller-coaster. Because while Taylor’s dad sends her a message “Hey kiddo, how are you” on the computer, she’s crudely erased him from a family photo with red pen, and added a drawing of an ominous figure opening the door in the same color. “Call Dad” has also been removed from her to do list.
Taylor nods at a shadowy figure in the doorway, just off camera
The stream also has a number of custom animations that add further depth to the story: every now and then, Taylor’s computer enters screensaver mode, scrolling through a series of art pieces likely drawn by her, before she clicks the mouse to return to GrapeVyne. Later on in the night, her door creaks open and the shadow of a figure enters the frame, causing Taylor to take off her headphones and give a silent nod of assent, a slightly less ominous version of the encounter pinned to her corkboard.
The stream is filled with subtler moments, as well. Every now and then, Taylor receives messages from friends and classmates. And at one pivotal point near the beginning of the stream, her computer gets infected with a virus.
A seemingly ordinary delivery truck used as part of Great Gotham Challenge’s 2024 puzzle hunt
“I…think one of us needs to crawl into the delivery truck?”
A few minutes earlier, the four of us received a message on our phones from GGC headquarters: go down a particular street, and be on the lookout for a delivery truck. Once there, we should be prepared to open up a cardboard box. The delivery truck was parked on the street corner as expected, packed floor to ceiling with packages. But there was no package waiting for us to grab. Instead, the bottom left corner of the truck featured what almost looked like a tunnel, just big enough to crawl through.
So, we sent a volunteer through the hole, into the unknown. When they emerged on the other side, a man handed over a UPS envelope, and told them the password to unlock the next set of instructions. It provided descriptions of a series of five individuals we’d need to encounter in order to proceed further. Assuming the UPS envelope might contain further instructions, we opened it up.
A rotating wheel of colorful characters that popped up out of our very special UPS delivery
Upon unsealing the envelope, a three-dimensional papercraft contraption popped out of the envelope thanks to the tension releasing on a series of cleverly concealed rubber bands inside the puzzle. This time, we had to solve a logic puzzle to figure out the code word to unlock the next step in our journey.
This sequence of events took place as part of GGC:MMXXIV, an outdoor puzzle hunt that serves as Great Gotham Challenge’s flagship event of the year. Over the course of 4-5 hours, the game leads teams of up to four players through a neighborhood in NYC in order to complete a series of puzzles that take full advantage of the city and its history. Great Gotham Challenge is somewhat unique in the puzzling landscape for its focus on creating a spectacle out of its puzzles while also making the solving process feel just a bit more transgressive than it actually is.
Because this type of adventure isn’t just about solving a papercraft logic puzzle: it’s about walking down the street and realizing that even that truck on the side of the road might be part of the game…and then receiving enough validation to feel safe crawling inside.
Over sixty years ago the filmmaker William Castle released Mr. Sardonicus in theaters, telling the tale of a horrid wretch of a man whose face was frozen in a rictus grin. Over the course of the movie, audiences learn about the macabre sins that led to his initial disfiguration, and the heartless experiments he inflicted on others in an attempt to cure himself.
As the film concludes, William Castle himself shows up on screen and cheerfully informs the audience that they have the opportunity to decide if Mr. Sardonicus has suffered enough, or if he deserves worse. Audience members are instructed to hold up glow-in-the-dark cards to vote, and Castle makes a show of tallying the votes, before the chosen ending plays. No audience ever voted to save Mr. Sardonicus. And while Castle insisted that two endings were filmed, the general assumption is that he didn’t bother since no audience would make that choice, after seeing the film. Because of this unique feature, Mr. Sardonicus was advertised as “the only picture with [a] ‘Punishment Poll'”.
Alternate reality games are in large part defined by the agency they grant to players, promising participants a collective role in the events to follow. Your decisions will shape what’s to come. However, that agency doesn’t always have to be real – the illusion of agency is often enough to leave audiences empowered enough to feel responsible for the game’s progress, and culpable for their missteps.
Last year, the Twitch streamer Ranboofilmed a three part interactive horror series called Generation Loss: The Social Experiments that delivered a particularly compelling exploration of the nature of agency. In the process, it might just have unseated Mr. Sardonicus‘ claim as “the only picture with [a] ‘Punishment Poll'”. And while asking you to watch overfourhours of livestreamed footage might be a bit much, Ranboo just released The Social Experiments: The Founders Cut as a slightly more condensed, cinematic retelling of events.
If you’d prefer to watch Generation Loss relatively unspoiled, now would be a good time to watch The Founders Cut, which provides the best streamlined entry point to the series currently available. However, a bit of context will likely help make the viewing process a bit easier, as the series takes some fairly dramatic tonal shifts that makes the first half hour in particular a misleading indicator of the full experience.
The author, visiting a secret puzzle piece for The Tortured Poets Department release in Brooklyn
Back in the late 1960s, rumors started to circulate among Beatles fans that Paul McCartney died in 1966, and was replaced by a lookalike. While official sources refuted the rumors, fans poring through the Beatles’ discography started picking up on clues that seemed to support those theories, ranging from backmasked audio hidden in songs to secret messages inserted into the album covers for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road.
Fans even managed to find a secret phone number written in the stars, if you held the Magical Mystery Tour album up in front of a mirror. According to some rumors, calling that number would trigger the cryptic message, “you’re getting closer…” The theory came to be known as Paul is Dead.
The Magical Mystery tour in its original form, and mirrored (with an emphasis on the “phone number”
Of course, Paul McCartney was (and still is, at the time of this article) very much alive. And there is minimal evidence to even support thePaul is Dead 2.0 theory, arguing that even though Paul was alive, the band intentionally sprinkled clues alluding to his death. The connections were likely a series of apophenic coincidence – with fans creating meaning out of nothing.
Paul is Dead may not have been a “solvable” game, but it still plays a formative role in the creation of alternate reality games. According to an interview with The Beast‘s lead writer Sean Stewart, The Beast‘s creative director Jordan Weisman was heavily influenced by Paul is Dead as he constructed what came to be credited as the first alternate reality game:
Jordan from the time he was very young had been obsessed with, among other things, the Beatles mystery…if you looked at the cover of Sgt Peppers there were clues on it that indicated that Paul McCartney was actually dead….Almost certainly none of that was true, but it was a very powerful urban myth and with the advent of the internet he was thinking, “I think we could do this now…but for real.”
Alternate reality games would return to musical themes a number of times over the years, most notably with the release of Nine Inch Nails’ concept album Year Zero, which started with “leaked” USB drives left in the bathrooms of concerts and culminating in a secret concert raided by a (fictional) SWAT team. But one of the more impressive answers to the question “what if Paul is Dead was real” comes from outside the alternate reality gaming arena. Instead, it comes from the musical career of Taylor Alison Swift.
Taylor Swift Learns to Play the Puzzling Long Game Taylor Swift’s lyrical puzzles started out relatively simple: for her first five albums, the song lyrics featured in her liner notes were all presented in lower case. The only exception to that rule? A handful of capitalized letters that spelled out secret messages. For instance, the message spelled out in the lyrics of Long Live spells out the phrase “for you”, drawing attention to the song’s role as a love letter to her fellow band-mates, and to her emerging fandom.
Speak Now liner notes, with capitalized letters (highlighted in red) for Long Live spelling out “FOR YOU”
Taylor Swift may have started with hidden messages in liner notes, but things quickly spiraled into deeper “easter eggs” hidden throughout her works. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Swift explains:
That’s when it started [with the liner notes]…but when it got out of control was when I started to realize that it wasn’t just me that had fun with it, that they had fun with it too, and I should never have learned that. Because then I couldn’t stop, and all I started thinking of was how do I hint at things? How far is too far in advance? Can I hint at something three years in advance? Can I even plan things that far…
…and look. I think that it is perfectly reasonable for people to be normal music fans and to have a normal relationship to music. But…if you want to go down a rabbit hole with us, come along.
The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon
Under that guidance, the puzzles started getting more considerably more varied and expansive. The music video for Me! wasn’t just filled with easter eggs when it dropped in April 2019…it also snuck in the title of her next studio album, which wouldn’t be formally announced until two months later.
Swift even started dabbling in more traditional puzzles through a series of “Vault Puzzles” in support of her album rereleases. Solve a puzzle, and unlock information about the coming release. For Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the vault puzzle was a relatively straightforward anagram. Red (Taylor’s Version) continued the tradition of anagrammed puzzles, but this time rewarded players to complete it with an image overlay to celebrate their accomplishment.
One of 90 Vault Puzzles leading up to the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version)
The Vault Puzzles for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) ramped up the complexity to a whole new level. Swift’s team partnered with Google to hide a series of 89 different anagrammed puzzles in various Google search results. Fans needed to collectively solve those puzzles 33 million times to unlock news about the new album.
But even the Vault Puzzles pale in comparison to the long road to the release of Reputation (Taylor’s Version), and the surprise announcement of The Tortured Poet’s Department. But to explain that, it’s first necessary to provide a brief primer to the Lover House.
subtext game
welcome home
postcurious
simulacra
infinite rabbit holes
book of bill