Category: Info (Page 4 of 16)

Strong Arm Your Way into the Ring of Dishonor: Q&A with Master Thief Mike Selinker

February 12, 2011 / Jane Doh

As previously reported on ARGNet, Wired magazine and Lone Shark Games have created a special “Underworld Exposed” issue to delight and confound puzzle-solvers and would-be thieves eager to join the nefarious Ring of Dishonor, a special place for the craftiest of puzzlers. Frustrated by the secret ciphers hidden in the magazine, available both in print and on the iPad, I cornered master puzzle-maker and president of Lone Shark Games, Mike Selinker.

Let’s see if he’ll crack under the interrogation lamp:
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Lone Shark Games and Wired Want You to Join Their Ring of Dishonor

February 3, 2011 / Jane Doh

In this month’s Wired, Lone Shark Games is presenting a unique challenge to puzzlers, techies, and . . . thugs? Promising “A Guided Tour of the Dark Side,” this special “Underworld Exposed” issue includes fascinating articles about real-world crime and other things hidden from plain sight. Along these lines, the magazine, available both in print and for the iPad, contains secret codes that, when deciphered, will provide an email address. When contacted at a certain time and date, Decode will confer upon you a most dubious honor and a place in the ultra-secret puzzling society, the Ring of Dishonor.

The Ring of Dishonor is a darker, scarier version of Decode’s regularly featured Ring of Honor puzzles. How do you get started on your criminal puzzle-solving career? Check out this trailhead puzzle, involving the now-extinct language used by Chinese women to communicate without being watched. Using this puzzle as a launching pad, nine other secret languages are being revealed in quiz form at Decode to supplement the print magazine (iPad readers have all the secret languages available already). Somehow, through the magazine, these secret languages will bring enthusiastic seekers “behind the door,” so to speak, if they’ve got the puzzle-solving chops to figure it all out.

ARG vs. MMORPG: More Real, and More Social

November 15, 2010 / Priscilla Haring

Editor’s Note: over the past year, Priscilla Haring conducted a series of interviews with players of alternate reality games (“ARGs”) and massively multiplayer online games (“MMORPGs”) to delve into the motivations that drive player involvement. Haring kindly agreed to share a summation of her findings, provided below. For her full thesis and other related papers, visit her site at http://www.priscillaharing.info/Academics.htm.

Several interviews and a blanket survey of gamers I conducted shows that alternate reality gaming environments are very real to its players. Not in the sense that players â€œconfuseâ€ the realm of make-believe with that of reality, but in the sense that is these environments constitute an important environment eliciting real emotions, real interactions and real results. ARG players experienced their game environment and the other players in them as being more real than MMORPG-players did. I found that an ARG creates stronger effects due to high perceived reality, this combined with several transference effects into â€œreal lifeâ€ makes it a good learning environment: one that would be very suitable as a social learning tool.

There are many similarities between ARGs and MMORPGs. The underlying worlds created for both ARGs and MMORPGs exist without the presence of individual players. So while players are necessary to populate the respective game worlds and drive the story forward, the worlds themselves exist independently. Similarities between ARG and MMORPG can also be found in the importance of the social aspect of gaming. For a MMORPG, the open social interaction is important, while for an ARG this interaction has a direction and a purpose. The social interactions in ARGs are not just any form of human-to-human contact but are specifically collaborative in nature. Naturally, collaboration is also possible in a MMORPG, but it is not a necessary component.

Elect Garrison Medill: The Next Mayor of Chicago

November 9, 2010 / Jane Doh

We’re just now recovering from the mid-term elections here in the United States, but Garrison Medill is making a fierce run to become Mayor of Chicago. This “outside the Beltway” candidate, a Pratt University graduate with an MFA in sculpture, calls himself a “forward-thinking mayor.” At his campaign kickoff party, Garrison Medill took a firm stand: “What Chicago needs is a strong push toward technologies of the future, so it can be a thought leader in this country and around the world.”

No, no, incumbent Mayor Daley (in office since 1989), did not suddenly throw up his hands and leave the top municipal seat of the Windy City. But don’t tell that to Garrison Medill â€” he’s the protagonist in an alternate reality game created by students in a Writing, Language, and Culture seminar focusing on alternate reality games at Columbia College in Chicago.

In this course, run by Dr. Brenden Riley (who has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education for his Zombies in Popular Media class),Â students are guided through a “collaborative approach to learning and work” as they design, build, and launch an ARG. Seventy percent of a student’s grade hinges on their participation in the development, implementation, and evaluation of their classroom-grown game.

Guided by the efforts of Riley’s class, Garrison Medill is reaching out to Chicago voters by making public appearances, including a live Mayoral Expo on campus where Medill squares off against an opponent. Medill has certainly made some waves among theÂ politicosÂ in Chicago. A number of community responses to Medill’s run for mayor can be found from the student community’s blog, Vote or Don’t, and the political blog, Not Another Daley. This is just a small sample of the online assets of this student-created game.

Cast your vote for the next Mayor of Chicago by checking out Garrison Medill’s campaign page or follow along atÂ the game thread on Unfiction.Â Will this plucky, dark horse candidate make it to the top of the municipal food chain? Doesn’t he just look like a natural-born Mayor?

PICNIC on Crowdsourcing Cars and Apple Stores

November 3, 2010 / DaniÃ«l van Gool

We return to ARGNetâ€™s coverage of PICNIC 2010 with more coverage from day one of the conference, themed “Redesigning Design.” The first speaker of the afternoon section, Tim Kobe, is founding partner of Eight Inc., referenced as “8_” throughout the presentation (and for the rest of this article).Â 8_ is a combination of many different things, all rolled into one company: design agency, architectural firm and “collaborative design innovation studio.”

Their output, so to speak, is design for both residential environments, products, and commercial buildings and spaces. One of 8_’s most famous projects was developing theÂ architectureÂ and design for the Apple Retail Stores. According to Kobe, 8_’s goal is to find strategies to design for brands to engage the consumer.

Kobe’s presentation was titled “Making Design Real,” but mainly served as a showcase for what 8_ does, starting off with a clip from Men in Black where several applicants for a position at the MiB need to fill out a questionnaire while sitting in egg-shaped chairs.Â Kobe followed the clip with a quote by Charles Eames: “The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem.”Â In Kobe’s own words, design is equal to serving a certain purpose as best as possible.

_8 works with clients like Apple, Citibank, Coach, Gap, HP, Nike, and Swatch and embrace the fact that they make things (even though they are not fabricators), preferably things that change the way people think, feel, and act. They pride themselves in building “irrational loyalty” as Kobe calls it. And why do they have that opportunity? Because, apparently, 80% of production companies think that their product is differentiated in its market, while only 8% of the consumers agree. Kobe notes that 50% of all purchases are done based on word of mouth, and 80% of word of mouth is generated by direct experience.

Pistolsniffer Industries: Head into the Woods with Earl and Randy

October 14, 2010 / Jane Doh

The two adorable hicks depicted in the above video sell Sticky Itchers Shower Scrub, a men’s shower scrub so manly it’s “like a hand grenade wrapped in bacon,” and in the past 2 years they’ve developed something of a cult following in the ARG community. Just recovering from a bout of undeath from a previous game called Purity Towers, Earl de Rosa and his best buddy Randy Porknut have been kicked out of a Civil War reenactment society for being too manly. So, the pair has joined an ultra-secret organization and are heading into the woods in search of adventure.

Earl and Randy’s latest adventure is the newest alternate reality game produced by Pistolsniffer Industries. Formerly known as Funnel Productions, the grassroots team has created several well-received independent alternate reality games in the past two years for embracing a light humorous style and implementing several recurring motifs. The Pistolsniffer “brand” revolves around the characters Earl and Randy, and their trials and tribulations span the entirety of the Pistolsniffer/Funnel “game-ography.”