Category: Features (Page 30 of 37)

The Brooke Thompson 2007 Conference Tour, Part One

March 25, 2007 / Brooke Thompson

Editor’s note: Brooke Thompson is back after a whirlwind tour of some of the biggest festivals so far this year. She attended the Game Developer’s Conference and was a speaker at the South By Southwest (SXSW) and ARGFest-o-Con conferences. This article is the first in a series about her experiences.

What happens when you spend 15 days on the road traveling from conference to conference? You get just about nothing done, including writing reports from the road for one of the greatest websites on the internet (that’d be ARGNet, of course). At first this distressed me, but then I realized that most of the conference sessions that I had attended were well documented on blogs and news sites â€“ some nearly word for word! â€“ and that waiting allowed the experiences that I had to sink in and meld together into a bigger picture. It’s that picture that I hope to paint for you over the next few articles.

The thing that I realized as I traveled from ARGfest to GDC to SXSW is that Alternate Reality Gaming is leading the future of entertainment.

We’ve been saying that for a long time. So, what’s different? What’s changed?

The word is out. People hear “Alternate Reality Game” or “ARG” and they understand what you are talking about. I don’t mean to say that everyone that I met understood it, but if I walked into a crowd at least one or two people did and they were able to get the rest of the crowd excited and curious. And explaining it to those that have never heard of ARGs is easier today than it’s ever been. People might not know that Lonelygirl15 has an alternate reality game component, but they’ve heard of it and when you talk about how the story is out there and it’s fiction outside of a book or TV show and, in fact, might send you an email or call you on the phone â€“ they get it. It doesn’t seem strange, it seems cool.

The Darker ARGs: This ARG is Not Yet Rated

March 16, 2007 / Michael Andersen

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a planned series of editorials exploring horror- and dark-themed ARGs from a number of different perspectives.

The saccharine lyrics and cheerful smiles of the popular Japanese pop group “Dessart” hide a dark secret: coded messages hidden within stage performances, websites, and promotional posters for the band lead concerned individuals to a cult inciting mass suicides among Japan’s disaffected youth. This is not a game. No, really — this time it really isn’t a game. Rather, it’s Japanese director Sion Sono’s award-winning film Jisatsu Circle. The movie paints a dark picture of what could happen within the alternate reality gaming industry.

Viewers never find out what drove Dessart to embed messages encouraging suicide within their seemingly upbeat music, but with song titles like Mail Me, it’s not too improbable to assume it was a viral marketing ploy gone awry.

This raises a question relevant outside the realm of fiction: what level of responsibility do PMs have over actions their players take?

Fest Quest ’07

March 14, 2007 / Will Bagby

OH NOES!! Gupfee’s been kidnapped! Even as the last words of keynote speakers Sean Stewart and Elan Lee echoed around the conference room, ARGFest attendees were quickly rounded up into groups, based on the color of the square on the back of their lanyards (so that’s what those were for!), and each group was given an envelope. The person or persons responsible demanded payment in the form of items (including a ciphered cake) that had to be collected from various locations in San Francisco. Save the ARG Ghoddess Gupfee!!

The first puzzle was to figure out where to go first. Some double letters in a piece of poetry, plus a “decoder ring” image, led to the place – MUSEE MECHANIQUE – and an item – COPPER SAL. Copper Sal?! What the heck is a sal? Was it decoded wrong? Did the kidnappers make a mistake? Already, the Questers were filled with doubt. No matter, Gupfee must be saved. {cue dramatic music} Off to the MusÃ©e Mechanique!!

The FestQuesters quickly collected their wits and headed over to Fisherman’s Wharf and the MusÃ©e (which is fancypants talk for “museum”). Fortunately for our intrepid Questers (and Gupfee), there was a labeled map enclosed with the directions, and the first team was there in no time. Upon entering the museum, the first thing they saw was Laughing Sal. Hey, it’s a Sal! And right next to Laughing Sal was a penny squisher (for lack of the technical term) that made — you guessed it — copper sals. The next puzzle used the plaque in the Laughing Sal machine, and led us to another San Francisco landmark, the world-famous Ghirardelli Square.

ARGFest 2007: Cruel 2B Kind

March 11, 2007 / Jessica Price

Welcome to beautiful downtown San Francisco!
Did you see that amazing cable car?
You’re looking gorgeous tonight!

You’re too kind.

I should know, of course, since teammate Elan Lee and I are the Cruel 2 B Kind World Champions. We achieved this renown by carefully plotting our strategy weeks in advance: we monitored traffic patterns in the play area from a helicopter, had minions who quietly attached GPS tracking devices to ARGFest participants so we could locate them easily during the Friday night game, and brought in an industrial psych firm to do detailed profiles on our competitors so we’d be able to out-think them.

There’s a vicious rumor going around that we ended up partners by accident, hadn’t read the instructions in advance, and won only through sheer dumb luck, but I will of course categorically deny the truth of said rumor. And you should believe me. After all, I’m the world champion in a game of sneaky assassination, so you know you can trust me.

Cruel 2 B Kind is a game of “benevolent assassination” in which you slay other players with compliments and other kind phrases. You don’t know who else may be playing, so you have to be kind to random strangers as well, often with entertaining results. The three phrases listed above were our weapons, which we deployed against other teams in a sort of verbal rock-paper-scissors encounter to determine who was victorious and who was dead of an overdose of kindness. At ARGfest, we played the “Booty Variant” in which each player carried a piece of booty to award to the assassin who killed them most impressively. The booty ranged from the bizarre (a length of rubber tubing) to the edible (cookies and gourmet chocolate) to the truly entertaining (the “It’s Just A Flesh Wound” shirt Elan acquired from one of our first victims). Each time you kill another player, they are absorbed into your team.

“I’m a WHATmaster?” The Lonelygirl15 Creators Appear at ARGfest-o-Con to Tell Us Why They Love Their Fans in Spite of Themselves

March 7, 2007 / Marie Lamb

A week before a much publicized appearance at SXSW, Lonelygirl15 creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, and Glenn Rubenstein, the Puppetmaster for the official Lonelygirl15 ARG, OpAphid, appeared at ARGfest-o-Con to talk about the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon and their introduction to the alternate reality of fame, fans, and the internet community’s dogged pursuit of information.

The Creators (as they label their forum posts on the Lonelygirl15 website) never intended to get into ARGs at all. Miles said they just wanted to “tell an interesting story on YouTube.” There were no puzzles at first, just the mystery about whether Bree was real, and if not, who was behind it all. They didn’t count on the fan community’s voracious appetite for information–“Is this a game, and if so, what are we supposed to solve?” Since there weren’t really any clues in the story itself, the community focused on finding the people behind the story, trying to figure out who they were.

In Greg’s case, this meant a surprising amount of information about his personal life was dug up and posted online. The first thing found was the registered trademark Greg’s father had applied for as the team’s lawyer. Then within a few weeks, it was his father’s name, his mother’s name, his sister (who superficially has a lot in common with the character of Bree), and eventually even his wedding pictures became the stuff of internet posts. “It became frightening,” he admitted. “I’d wake up wondering what was going to be on the website next.” His wife, who was the person answering Bree’s email, was caught in an online trap and revealed to be an employee of Creative Artists Agency.

Games That Alter Reality

March 6, 2007 / Brooke Thompson

If you’ve ever played a game through to the end, you know that strange mix of excitement and depression that hits as you realize that the characters that you’ve loved for the last few weeks or months have completed their story leaving you with no more websites to obsessively check or forums to read or fellow players to talk with. It’s bittersweet and it’s what I call the ARG Hangover. I woke up with a doozy of one on Monday morning. ARGfest was over and here I was still in San Francisco.

I suppose that I shouldn’t complain. I’m here for the Game Developers Conference (GDC). It’s a huge and amazing conference that’s the highlight of the year for many game folk. But it is no ARGfest and after such an amazing weekend, I wasn’t expecting much. Boy, was I surprised.

It’s something to sit in a conference room filled with ARG folk – everyone there knows about the magic of Alternate Reality Gaming. We can get excited and discuss or debate the nuances in a way that only those familiar can. It’s filled with our own experiences and, even, biases. It’s something completely different to sit in a conference room filled with folks with a passing awareness, with experiences completely different. And, when the panelist in the front of the room is discussing the power of Alternate Reality Games to alter our own reality for better, it’s absolutely inspiring as you look over the crowd and see their eyes get bigger, their curiosity aroused.