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.
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.
Interdimensional Doors found in Salt Lake City UT, Phoenix AZ, and Charlotte NC.
Starting on March 27th, a series of “Interdimensional Doors” were erected in cities across North America. No two doors looked exactly the same: a door installed near Salt Lake City Utah’s Gallivan Center featured the kind of traditional wooden door with frosted glass that wouldn’t be out of place as the entry to a professor’s office, while a door along the Piestewa Peak Summit Trail in Phoenix Arizona featured a more minimalist frame painted to look like glimpsing into a nebula of swirling purples and pinks.
While each door was unique in appearance, there were still a few details inextricably linking them together. Along the top of each door, the text “Interdimensional Door” was paired with a seemingly nonsensical hashtag. And underneath that text, a QR code was present that, when scanned, sent curious onlookers to the website ProjectKuri.org.
Interdimensional Doors found in Toronto ON, Vancouver BC, San Francisco CA, and Tierra Del Mar, OR
The Key Unconsciousness Research Institute (KURI) Project The Project KURI website explains that it is an organization interested in studying how dreams can serve as doorways to alternate dimensions. In order to pursue that research, Project KURI is actively soliciting members of the public to share their dreams. As the organization explains in an Instagram post:
At KURI, we’re turning imagination into exploration. Our dedicated team of scientists, psychologists, and visionaries are pioneering research into the subconscious mind, decoding the messages hidden in our dreams. But this journey is not ours alone – we invite you, dreamers, thinkers, and seekers from all over the world to join us. Share your dreams. Become part of a global community by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Website visitors are encouraged to share their dreams through a form on the ProjectKuri.org website or to message audio submissions to the project’s Instagram account, with promises that “The Kuri Tapes” will be coming in the near future. Curiously, the site also features a block of ciphered text, with no other explanation for its presence.
Project KURI’s cryptographic message
Untangling this message in particular helps provide a few hints of things to come. And while it’s possible to solve this phrase as if it were an unclued CryptoQuote from the daily paper, there’s a more elegant solution hidden within the doors themselves.
Lone Shark Games’ name has come up more than a few times over the years here at ARGNet. Some of those projects, like 2008’s Citizens of Virtue, which created a fictional megachurch to create an interactive morality play, were explicitly designed as alternate reality games. More often than not, though, the company’s projects trend towards puzzle hunts that revel in spectacle in a way that crosses over into territory familiar to alternate reality gaming fans.
Cards Against Humanity’s Holiday Bullshit puzzle experience in 2014, for example, hid puzzles in a series of seasonal mailings that led players to a safe on an uninhabited island containing a quarter of a million custom “Sloth” cards. And then there was VANISH: The Hunt for Evan Ratliff, which sent WIRED journalist Evan Ratliff across the United States as the target of a month-long manhunt, with Lone Shark Games orchestrating a series of clues to help readers hone in on his location. The company has done its fair share of pen-and-paper puzzle hunts, more often than not those puzzles go beyond the page, and ask “what would it look like if we turned Jonathan Coulton’s annual cruise into a boat-wide escape room”. In short: the company excels at live experiences that are hard to reduce onto a single page.
So to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a company, Lone Shark Games is crowdfunding the production of The Hunting of the Shark: 20 Years of Lone Shark Puzzlehunts, which pulls together a highlight reel of nationwide manhunts, ARGs, convention activations, and other puzzle hunts, condensing that into a book of puzzles.
Sample puzzles featured in Hunting of the Shark
The Puzzles Come First (and Last, and Everywhere In Between) I had the chance to take a look at an early draft of The Hunting of the Shark, and it’s worth stressing that this is first and foremost a puzzle book. The book does provide something of a history of the company by presenting individual puzzles and sometimes even full puzzle hunts from events presented in chronological order, the book largely lets those puzzles speak for themselves, with brief introductions providing context surrounding how those puzzles were initially delivered.
This book is not an oral history of the company: rather, it’s a showcase of some of puzzles worth featuring, designed for events ranging from Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix tournaments to Renton River Days duckstravaganzas. Because of that, the featured puzzles are designed with a wide range of audiences in mind. Some puzzles may be fairly easy for the puzzle-inclined, while others might find one checking the solutions in the back of the book without a group of fellow solvers.
Last night, I received a package in the mail from the Field Studies Institute, containing a cassette tape that shouldn’t exist. Helpfully, the institute also provided a cassette player to help me listen to the tape that shouldn’t exist, along with instructions on how to use a cassette player to help me feel even older than I already do. But before we discuss the contents of the package, let’s talk a little about the Field Studies Institute, itself.
The Field Studies Institute: Finding a Narrative through Bureaucracy The Field Studies Institute was founded in 1970, slightly after an incident occurred involving an object retrieved during the Apollo 12 mission. Eight Department of Defense researchers were charged with investigating the object, but something happened in the early hours of January 1st, 1970 that led to three of the researchers disappearing. The remaining members went on to found the Field Studies Institute, dedicated to investigating “transient objects” resulting from “Spacetime Deviations”.
According to a corporate training video, these transient objects provide glimpses into alternate timelines, both past and present. And that brings us to the heart of The Field Studies Institute‘s storytelling: much of what can be gleaned about the alternate reality game is told through pseudo-governmental paperwork, spanning decades.
The Field Studies Institute website featuring internal emails, training manuals, and paperwork
And while poring over training manuals and research reports might sound a little dull, the documents are filled with personality. Take, for instance, the story of Filed Studies Institute staffer Casey Pennington (FC-081-A). Players are invited to peruse notes from his excursions tracking down anomalies, which takes careful notes of where he ate and how much he paid for the meal, for expensing purposes. After scrolling through his scrawled notes, an addendum to his file notes Mr. Pennington’s ultimate fate at the company:
After multiple complaints from the Archives Department, a thirty-day “Performance Improvement Plan” was created to help improve the legibility of Mr. Pennington’s hand-written notes in April of 1983. At the conclusion of the “Performance Improvement Plan”, no improvement was shown and Mr. Pennington was relieved of his duties.
Players didn’t just learn that the Field Studies Institute turned to Performance Improvement Plans to force employees out of the company for poor handwriting – they got to experience exactly what sort of bad handwriting would drive the Archives Department to force the institute’s hand.
While The Field Studies Institute is still relatively new, the records are littered with similar glimpses into the bureaucratic mess that powers the institute’s research. The employee handbook references the company’s generous policy of providing “five deviation-induced discomfort days” in addition to standard time off policies. Which sounds great, until a chat between two Archives Department employees notes that the head of their department up and vanished for a few months, only for him to return to work like he’d never been missing in the first place.
Documentation of the Surveyor 3’s discovery of the anomalous object, in 1969
The artifacts and records are meticulously designed, but it’s the personality that’s injected into them that makes poring through the files a genuine delight. While both organizations share a passion for paperwork, The Field Studies Institute is no SCP Foundation – they seem to at least care about maintaining the illusion of caring for their employees. They just need to make sure everything is documented with the proper forms, first.
subtext game
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