Category: Features (Page 12 of 37)

“Real Escape Game” Locks Players in for Mystery

March 19, 2012 / Michael Andersen

Over the last five years, Takao Kato has locked over 100,000 people in bars, clubs, cathedrals, and baseball stadiums with a deceptively simple challenge: solve the puzzles within the time limit, and escape. And between March 23rd and March 25th, Kato is taking his narrative puzzle experience, Real Escape Game: The Escape from the Werewolf Village to San Francisco’s Japantown for a locked room mystery that is quickly selling out.

The premise, inspired by the popular social game Werewolf, is simple. There are sixteen villagers, three of whom are werewolves. Players have 90 minutes to work together in groups to navigate a series of increasingly difficult puzzles that will help them identify the werewolves, save the villagers, and escape. The game is designed to provide a challenge, and Kato explains that players have direct control over the unfolding narrative, noting

[t]he story unravels with each mystery completed by the players and their teammates. If you do nothing, nothing moves forward. And there are no guarantees that you’re even going to finish everything. So you’re going to have to give it your all if you want to put all the pieces together and finish the final puzzle in time.

Past iterations of Real Escape Game prove that Kato is true to his word: as the Real Escape Game‘s explanatory video states, only 9.6% of participants completed The Escape from the Werewolf Village when it was first conducted at Tokyo Culture Culture, with similar success rates for the game when it played out in Taiwan. After failing to complete a Real Escape Game murder mystery in Tokyo,Â Japan Times writer Edan Corkill explains “the most difficult part of a Real Escape Game is not answering questions but identifying them in the first place.”

Telegraphs to an Alternate World with Tap Joint

March 7, 2012 / Michael Andersen

A man sits at a Chinese restaurant, sitting in front of a telegraph machine enclosed in a wooden box. Carefully placing a pair of battered headphones over his ears, the unknown man uses a cipher key to decipher the message, “Welcome to the city.” This is the scene that greets visitors to Tap Joint, a curious, new narrative experience that plays out almost entirely over the game’s virtual device. As the man’s conversation with his unidentified correspondent continues, visitors learn more about an unfolding narrative that places its participants directly into the story’s distinctive universe.

Through a series of telegraph messages and video clips, site visitors learn that the unidentified correspondent on the other end of the telegraph is a member of an underground movement committed to resisting their city’s government, the Allied Municipal Patrol. The resistance is hard at work assembling Wave Unitsâ€”single-channel, one-way broadcasting devices. The group’s goal is to assemble 1,000 of Wave Units in time for Illumination Day, an annual holiday taking place on March 9th. The game’s world evokes a distinctly antiquated feel, with old-fashioned technologies like telegraphs and pneumatic tubes carefully housed in wooden assemblies. Visitors see the world from the unknown restaurant-goer’s perspective, operating the man like a puppet, using their computer’s mouse to pull his strings.

Take A Walk On The Wired Wild Side with “Bear 71”

February 17, 2012 / Celina Beach

A bear walks through the Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies and is ensnared in a trap where she is tranquilized, tagged, and collared with a GPS device. She has now become Bear 71, and joins a group of wired wildlife who document the interactions between nature and their increasingly encroaching human neighbors.Â Bear 71Â is a new interactive project produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s digital studio, and includes an interactive web documentary site, a social media microsite, and a live installation piece that launched in conjunction with the Sundance Film Festival.

The main part of the project consists of an interactive web documentary created by NFB’s Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison, which introduces viewers to Bear 71 and then drops them into an interactive map of the Park, where they encounter other wired creatures that live in Bear 71’s home range: golden eagles, Big Horn sheep, wolves, and deer mice, all similarly tagged and under surveillance. The animals’ movements can be seen as they move about the park, and clicking on their markers reveals a video feed and information about the animal. Viewers can click on their own marker as well, which launches a group of surveillance feeds including their own (the site requests access to the viewer’s webcam and microphone, which can be denied) and any other viewers who happen to be browsing the site at the same time, tagged and tracked like the animals. Landmarks such as the freeway and railroad that run through the park can be seen, cars and trains moving on them as the animal’s markers cross back and forth, highlighting one of the project’s main points: when technology and the wild intersect, it is often to the detriment of the wildlife. There are also video feeds and observation points marked on the map, showing actual pictures and videos from their real-life counterparts in the Park.

Mark of the Spider-Man Lets Fans Walk a Mile in Parker’s Shoes

February 11, 2012 / Michael Andersen

Images by Phoebe S.

When Sony released the official trailer for Marvel’s franchise reboot,Â The Amazing Spider-Man, on February 4th, fans tapped into their inner spidey sense, barely perceptable letters spelling out “MARK OF THE SPIDER-MAN” at the 2:28 mark. This message led to a viral website displaying six static video feeds and a Twitter account.

On February 10th, the @MarkofSpiderman Twitter account started posting lost and found notices, broadcasting GPS coordinates to eleven different locations in six cities: Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, and Seattle. Fleet-footed fans found Peter Parker’s backpack, containing everything you’d expect the film’s nerdy protagonist to have: Physics and Chemistry textbooks, safety goggles, keys and a MetroCard, and a notebook loaded with class notes. Parker’s photography gear also found its way into the backpack, with the occasional film canister, photograph, or film negative scattered throughout. Parker even left his running shoes in the bag, leaving the recipients of each backpack with the singular opportunity to step inside Parker’s size 11 shoes.
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2011 Year in Review: The Final Chapter

January 11, 2012 / Michael Andersen

In 2011, I tried an experiment: rather than write a single article attempting to sum up the year in alternate reality games, I’d split the daunting task up into four parts and pen my thoughts as the year progressed. This is the final installment in that series, covering the final quarter of the year: if you’d rather begin at the beginning, feel free to do so.

Looking back at the year as a whole, 2011 was defined by the experimentation that took place in the realm of alternate reality games. While the puzzle-ridden romps through conspiracy theories that Ian Bogost so cleverly lambasted in his Cow ClickARG are still a staple of the industry, game developers are experimenting with new models of storytelling, gameplay, and revenue generation to create sustainable projects and business models alike.

Greater Definition in the Industry
Until recently, meetups for people involved in alternate reality games and transmedia storytelling centered around conferences, with gatherings at events like ARGFest, Power to the Pixel, DIY Days, Futures of Entertainment, and SXSW. This year, StoryWorld joined the list with a strong first conference that included its own alternate reality game, Zoetrap, that used a custom-built app for the conference to guide conference attendees through an occult mystery as seen through the cellphone of a missing person. While these events continue to bring fans and creators together, an alternate method of discussion has grown in prominence in recent months. Local meetup groups are increasingly springing up around the world to provide more frequent opportunities to discuss the state of the industry.

The New York and Los Angeles meetups in particular have transformed from informal get-togethers to entities in their own right, boasting hundreds of members: the New York meetup has incorporated as StoryCode, while the LA group launched a website aiming to provide resources and news for the community. However, groups have formed in cities including Toronto, Austin, Vancouver, Paris, and SÃ£o Paulo.

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Reality: Transforming USC Film Studentsâ€™ Freshman Year Into an Addictive Game

December 29, 2011 / Nathan Maton

Image courtesy of Ben Chance

By Nathan Maton and Rebecca Thomas

School changed this year for the majority of freshman at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Driven, talented future media makers normally waited until their sophomore year to produce any major media through the program, but this year USC partnered with Ph.D. candidate Jeff Watson to produce Reality, an alternate reality game focused on media creation.

Reality, which just completed its first season, is one part trading card game, one part media creation tool, and one part web portal. Three hundred unique cards, color-coded by type and designed to fit together, were handed out to students who unraveled a series of clues leading to the gameâ€™s secret campus headquarters or tucked away for discovery as the game progressed. As students discovered other students who were playing, they made “deals” by trading or pooling cards that led to collaborative projects and then published their work to Realityâ€™s web portal so other students could rate and review the projects. Winning projects earned interesting rewards, like meeting industry professionals, for the creators.

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