Category: News (Page 116 of 183)

Transformers: Truth in Disguise

April 6, 2007 / Geoff May

Imagine:

Little Timmy’s at home on a warm Saturday afternoon, playing away the time with his brand new Optimus Prime transformer and a few of his partners in crime, like Ironhide, Ratchet, and Bumblebee. Timmy’s got some Decepticons, too — Megatron, Barricade, and Starscream — and he has buckets of fun imitating the sepulchral voice of the villains while his toys battle it out for the fate of the galaxy! Hardly an uncommon scene, Unfiction member b_dann_b relates: “I am a loyal fan of the transformers – watched them since I was born and will always remember the day my dad brought me an optimus prime toy as my first transformer.”

But little does Timmy know how close to the truth he is. Those toys Timmy’s playing with, those cartoons he loves to watch, even that lunch pail he carries around daily with the lunch his mother prepared for him…all of it is a cover-up. Far from being mere fictional entertainment, it’s counter-information, with the sole purpose of distracting us from the truth by hiding it in front of our very eyes. And that live-action Transformers movie that you’ve certainly heard about, slated for a July release? That’s part of it too.

Perplex City Murder Becomes “Cold Case”? Perplex City Stories Faces Delay

April 1, 2007 / Michael Andersen

Earlier this week, Mind Candy announced that the launch of Perplex City Stories will be delayed until June, pushing back its original April release by two months. The delay will allow the Mind Candy team to build a gaming engine that allows for what Director of Play/Executive Producer Adrian Hon describes as “single-player replayable ARGs, and massively multiplayer ARGs simultaneously” in addition to allowing for extensive pre-launch testing. The video trailer on the Perplex City Stories site indicates the plot will involve a brutal murder in a Perplex City bar.

Although Perplex City Stories will be delayed, the first wave of Perplex City Season Two cards became available from Firebox at the beginning of March, and We Love Puzzles, a related website with a variety of games and puzzles is currently live.

Adrian Hon is scheduled to be a panelist on Episode 19 of the ARG Netcast series. Discussion topics will include Perplex City Season Two, among other topical ARG news.

ARGFest 2007: 42 Entertainment Roundtable Discussion — The Big Picture

March 31, 2007 / Jessica Price

After a number of panels featuring discussion between independent puppetmasters and members of different design companies, 42 Entertainment‘s Jim Stewartson (Chief Technology Officer), Elan Lee (Co-Founder, Vice President of Experience Design), Sean Stewart (Co-Founder, Creative Director), Steve Peters (Game Designer) and Michael Borys (Visual Design Director) sat down for a roundtable discussion, moderated by Kristen Rutherford, about how their team works together.

Stewart began the roundtable with a discussion of a chemistry puzzle in the Beast that was intended to look “cool and spooky” but be relatively easy to solve, and 42’s subsequent efforts to reproduce that effect in their other games. One of these attempts was Flea++, the “programming” language used in I Love Bees. In a similar vein, players would “teach” the character of the Sleeping Princess to speak as she cobbled together words and phrases from their emails and replied to them. Stewart’s favorite draft reply was “I want a cupcake.” Lee told him they couldn’t use it because it was too ambiguous — it could be a call to action for the players. According to Stewart, one of Lee’s main roles within the company is removing ambiguity from what the players see (Stewart’s summary: the creative process at 42 consists mainly of Lee saying, “That’s really good but can we have another draft?”).

Why We Eat Strangers’ Candy:Â A Reflection on the ARGFest 2007 Keynote by 42 Entertainment

March 30, 2007 / Nicko Demeter

“Delivering a keynote address to this audience is really difficult.Â What can we talk about?Â We can’t talk about anything we’ve done in the past because you were all there experiencing it. We can’t talk about anything we’re working on right now because that would ruin the fun and the mystery of the experience. We can’t talk about anything we have planned for the future because frankly, you are the competition. All that’s left is self-deprecation and the elephant in the room…trust.” — Elan Lee

Those words kicked off one of the most fulfilling experiences of the ARGFest weekend, according to many of the participants. The keynote address by Sean Stewart and Elan Lee not only educated the audience (composed of players, puppetmasters, aspiring puppetmasters and other interested parties) but it also provided memorable insights into the successful games that helped establish 42 Entertainment as one of alternate reality gaming’s lead design companies.

Early on, the speakers noted that alternate reality gaming has a unique cability to evolve at any given time in accordance with the audience’s wishes.Â That characteristic allows mistakes to be quickly assimilated into the game in a way that avoids the perception of failure (“Yeah, we meant to do that!”).

The discussion was split into three main sections:

— How is trust established?
— Why should puppetmasters care if the players trust them?
— Why do ARGs require trust?

Doom Skull’s Conclusion Takes CD Burning to a New Level

March 29, 2007 / Michael Andersen

The grassroots alternate reality game 13 Crystal Skulls came to a successful conclusion earlier this week thanks to the successful destruction of thirteen compressed files by players and characters alike. CDs were burnt, shredded, cut up, and even chewed by a dog to prevent their Gathering.

After the events documented in ARGNet’s previous article, the Thirteen Crystal Skulls arranged for Ted Allen’s untimely demise. Players enlisted the aid of The Four Chosen to put a stop to the ancient skulls, and thanks to Tyi Harper’s hacking skills were able to physically destroy the skulls imprisoned in compressed files. Despite a lone skull escaping the confines of its zip file, disaster was averted.

Thirteen Crystal Skull’s puppetmaster Aaron Sampson, who goes by DJSampson on the Unfiction forums, shared a few words with us regarding his project. He related that one of his goals was to aid future grassroots puppetmasters “by showing it is possible to create a good story, run it at no cost, and run it by yourself. Although I don’t recommend running an ARG alone, unless you have countless hours to invest every day and no girlfriend to piss off. But I do recommend preparing an ARG you are creating for such a thing to happen.”

The Thirteen Crystal Skulls homepage contains a game summary including an archive of the puzzles and their solutions. Aaron will also be posting alternative endings in the near future. The page should prove to be a good resource for players and PMs alike as it clearly demonstrates examples of gameplay, puzzles, and free resources frequently encountered in the genre.

The PM chat is scheduled for April 15th at 7PM EST on IRC in #13skullspm at irc.chat-solutions.org (which you can reach through our Java chat applet).

ARGFest 2007 Panel II: Running an ARG

March 28, 2007 / Jessica Price

The second panel discussion at ARGFest focused on Running An ARG, and it had a diverse selection of panelists. Sam LaVigne and Ian Kizu-Blair of SF0, voice actress Kristen Rutherford of I Love Bees fame, and Unfiction administrator Jackie Kerr delivered a multi-perspective approach to the subject which in turn provided a thorough look at player relations. It was moderated by Unfiction moderator Krystyn Wells.

Kerr began the panel by enumerating three design difficulties that can create problems with community relations: badly-defined game boundaries that confuse the players to the point of frustration, games that break down the community’s collective intelligence rather than supporting it, and design decisions that provoke so much meta discussion that it becomes difficult to interact with the game itself in a natural manner.