Author: Steve Peters (Page 6 of 25)

Original Owner, Godfather of ARG
Steve was the creator and original owner of argn.com. After three years of authoring articles, Steve moved on to bigger and better things at No Mimes Media. During his time here, Steve was also one of the puppetmasters for the popular ARG Project MU. He is affectionately known as the Godfather of ARG.

Virtuquest Announces ARG Corporate Edition 5.0

April 22, 2005 / Steve Peters

Northwest internet design company VirtuQuest has announced their latest Alternate Reality Game, Corporate Edition 5.0: “Banque Suisse.” The rabbithole seems to consist solely of a barcode (pictured at left) and some French text.

VirtuQuest is a media company that specializes in tailor made Internet Adventures. They develop mid-size Alternate Reality Games as corporate team building activities, ad campaigns, or public games just for fun. Periodically, a corporate client will allow their game to be accessible and playable by the general public, and Corporate Edition 5.0 is just such a case. Outsiders are not privy to some information that is given to the client as part of the Corporate Edition package, but outside players have been known to be very resourceful in games past.

VirtuCube (a Virtuquest non-ARG game) remains unsolved after many months. Aimed at the serious puzzle solver, VirtuCube offers an as-yet-unclaimed $500 prize to the first to solve it.

Corporate 5.0 discussion at Unfiction
VirtuCube discussion at Unfiction

Feed Me!! RSS and Alternate Reality Games

April 20, 2005 / Steve Peters

Alternate Reality Gamers are always looking for the best way to keep informed of what’s going on in their favorite game. Not everyone can surf the boards reading each and every post all day long (yes, some people actually have to work at work), so players are always looking for ways to stay as current as possible without having to sacrifice huge amounts of time. Historically, moderated lists or blogs that would email updates to players’ in-boxes were pretty much the standard vehicle for letting players know about game updates in a timely way.

Recently however, ARGs and their corresponding player-authored resources have begun taking advantage of RSS syndication, which is a way of pushing new content out to players, but surprisingly, this great vehicle is often going underutilized. So, we thought we’d offer a little primer for those of you who have always wondered what those little RSS buttons that show up on various websites are for.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and is a standard format for publishing and distributing regular updates around the web. Using this standard, website publishers can provide updates like the latest news headlines or blog postings to consumers who use RSS reader applications (or one of a growing number of online services) to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one place (RSS content viewed in one of these readers, is often called a “feed”).

Major news websites such as Wired and news-oriented community sites such as Slashdot and Fark offer RSS feeds, but it’s not just for news. Almost anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the “recent changes” page of a wiki, new items for sale on Amazon.com, even recent postings or new topics in a forum. Once information about each item is in RSS format, a feedreader program can check the feed for changes and notify you when they occur.

IGDA San Francisco Presents: I Love Bees, 4orty2wo

April 15, 2005 / Steve Peters

On April 26th, the International Game Developers Association will present “THINKING OUTSIDE THE (x)BOX (or “HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE BEES”) at 7:00 PM at the Metreon’s Action Theater in San Francisco (101 4th Street @ Mission).

Featured speakers will be Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart and Jim Stewartson of 4orty2wo Entertainment, the team behind the Alternate Reality Game “I Love Bees.”

4orty2wo’s Alternate Reality Game became a phenomenon last year, sending thousands of players running to payphones around the world. The innovative Halo 2 prequel involving a seemingly innocent website of a Napa Valley beekeeper and a shipwrecked AI from the future received a Game Developers Choice Award for Innovation, was featured at GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and became the latest and most successful example of the nascent Alternate Reality Games (ARG) genre.

But what place do ARGs have in the world (and future) of video games? What is their relation to one another? Are there lessons to be learned from ARG production that can impact the way video games are made?

Join Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart, and Jim Stewartson of 4orty2wo Entertainment as they examine I Love Bees to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of ARGs, their intersection with traditional video games, and the future of this exciting new form of digital play.

This event is free and open to the public. For more info: www.igda.org/sf

April ARG Announcements

April 14, 2005 / Steve Peters

ARGN has been receiving an increasing amount of cryptic emails and/or packages, most likely as a result of the increased attention Alternate Reality Gaming has been getting lately. Most of the time, they’re simply spam or perhaps a hint that leads to someone’s stab at a work of interactive fiction, but every so often something will lead to a very worthwhile Alternate Reality Game. The trick is being able to sift through things (especially some of the emails…hmm, a Nigerian ARG??) to figure out what’s worth mentioning. So, without further adieu, submitted for your approval, as they say:

Yesterday morning, ARGN received a zip file (1.26 mb) of what looked like 7 colorful desktop wallpapers from someone calling themselves Your Friend (historyneverdies at gmail.com). Along with coded info along the top and bottom, they all seem to be pointing at a game that will start up in Winter 2005. Subsequent emails to the above address have yielded an additional image. Players have made progress in decoding things, and it seems the lower right characters all decode to the names of characters that were featured in Project Gateway, an ARG we reported on last September. So, it looks like we’re in for a sequel coming this winter. Of course, is that winter in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere??

As if that wasn’t enough fun for one week, ARGN received a package just this morning. It was simply a To Do list, dated April 7, that listing such errands as going to the grocer, dry cleaner, and submitting an ad to the NY Post (see a larger version of the note by clicking the image at right). Apprently, the NY Post advertisement led to a rather extensive blog by an Alesha Periwinkle, whose fiancee has disappeared. If you look closely, you’ll see that all of the photos on the blog have been “deleted for reasons of national security.”

Quite notably, players have already received in-game phonecalls and text messages. Looks like a pretty promising (indie?) ARG is shaping up with this one.

desktops discussion at unfiction
ne1seenjames discussion at unfiction

Alternate Reality Gaming was the subject of a feature article in the May 2005 edition of PC Gamer Magazine in the UK. For those of you without access to the magazine, you can find some scans of the article (along with more comments by the author) over at the unfiction forums.

“I Love Bees” Nominated for Webby Award

April 12, 2005 / Steve Peters

The biggest Alternate Reality Game of the past year, “I Love Bees,” continues to gain major recognition with its just-announced nomination for a Webby Award! Time magazine and the New York Times call the Webbys â€œthe Academy Awards of the Internet.â€

“I Love Bees” is eligible to win two different awards in the â€œGames-relatedâ€ category â€” the official games-related award, and the â€œPeopleâ€™s Voiceâ€ awardâ€¦ which YOU can vote for!

Obviously, we here at ARGN would love to see ILB win this, but to be honest, we’d actually like to see it win the Peopleâ€™s Voice award even more than the official award. We think it’d be really great to show the world that the ARG communityâ€™s voice is loud and strong and bigger and badder than anyone elseâ€™sâ€¦ of course, we already know that because we heard you all singing over those payphones!! So letâ€™s show the rest of the web what we can do.

Voting in the 2005 Peopleâ€™s Voice Awards runs TODAY through April 29. VOTE NOW! Hereâ€™s how:

Go to http://pv.webbyawards.com/ and click on the â€œRegister nowâ€ button.
To ensure integrity of the vote, all voters must register. The process takes about 30 seconds (fill out the form). Then youâ€™ll receive a voting link and password via email.

Note: Voters can choose to vote in just one, or some of, or all of the categories. Itâ€™s fine, for instance, to just vote in the â€œGames-relatedâ€ category, which is the “I Love Bees” category.

Extra fun: There is an â€œinstant pollâ€ in voting that gives you the current standings for each site after you vote. We really need to get OUR votes in ASAP so that ILB looks like a contender, and so that other voters are more likely to spread the word. (Right now, ilovebees is in 3rd place out of 5â€¦ how long will it take ILB players to push it to #1? Hmmmâ€¦ letâ€™s find out!)

So what are you waiting for? Go vote!

“Our Colony” An ARG-ish Viral for the Next-Gen Xbox?

April 7, 2005 / Steve Peters

Rumors are flying this morning that the team-based puzzling site Our Colony is in fact a stealth campaign for the upcoming Xbox 2. Some are even going so far as to speculate that 4orty2wo Entertainment of I Love Bees fame is behind it all.

So far, Our Colony has been flying below the radar to a point. A cryptic email was received by an Unfiction member almost a month ago, and a small cadre of folks from there have been playing along in a team-based puzzly mission-style game. Some of the “rewards” have come in the form of screenshots of what can only be described as a sneak peek at new Xbox hardware.

The very first mission involved sending in pictures of the OurColony ant symbol in various locales. In addition, there’s a countdown timer on the site that will reach zero at 8pm PDT on Thursday, May 12. We’ll keep you posted on this, as it may not be too late to jump in and catch up.

Discussion at Unfiction
Lounge at OurColony (link fixed)
Chat in #ourcolony (irc.chat-solutions.org)

[ED. NOTE – 4:30pm PDT]: Despite the rampant speculation to the contrary, ARGN has confirmed that 4orty2wo Entertainment is not behind “Our Colony.”