Category: Rumors (Page 12 of 18)

More Than Meets the Eye? ARG in Disguise?

December 24, 2006 / Marie Lamb

Transformers fans are all atwitter about some mysterious goings-on in the trailer for the live-action Transformers movie, set to come out in July 2007. At a certain moment early in the trailer, the words “Sector Seven Org” and “takara83” appear at the top and bottom of the frame, respectively, leading the curious to www.sectorseven.org. Entering “takara83” in the submit box opens up a very stylish desktop, with a few goodies, including a live-action video and some image files. Also oddly present, a facsimile of a (fake?) legal agreement between “S7 Industries” and Takara, which is the real-life Japanese company that developed Transformers. Many of the desktop icons are locked, leading hopeful fans to believe that more is coming.

Is this a Transformers ARG? In my opinion, it’s too soon to tell, as right now it looks just like a standard movie viral site. But those Decepticons can be tricky creatures.

More details and discussion are at Unfiction.

The Human Pet: An Interactive Fictional Horror Story

November 8, 2006 / Brooke Thompson

Ed. Note: Since this article was first published, some of the links to the game have changed. We have updated the links so that they are current to November 21, 2006.

The scene opens with a man tied up and struggling. He’s lying in a white room with a mattress on the floor. A man in a white mask enters carrying a knife which he uses to free the bonds around the captive’s hands. As he leaves, he whispers something into the camera. All we know is he is here against his will

The captive, the Human Pet, has freed himself from his leg restraints and is pacing about the room screaming, asking if anyone can hear him. He finds the camera and, for the first time, we get a good look at his face. Suddenly the face turns into a mask and as he backs away, we see that he’s holding a baseball bat and the Human Pet is laying on the mattress in obvious pain. You will see everything.

This is how the interactive and fictional horror story began three weeks ago. There have been three videos since then, with a new one appearing on a regular weekly basis, allowing us to learn more about the man in the mask and his pet, which he’s named Sunny. The man in the mask has not only uploaded the videos, but has interacted with his audience, going as far as placing the life of his pet in the audience’s hands. There have been messages hidden in the film and in the YouTube tags attached to the short movies that have led the audience to Bible passages that provide more symbolic insight into this man and his motivations.

Since the success of Lonelygirl15, we’ve seen a number of stories told through episodic YouTube videos. While few are well told, intriguing or truly interactive, The Human Pet, directed by the fictional Sam Deercot (anagram of Codemaster) is one to check out. It is a very interesting (if not controversial) story and has provided the audience with some power over the story, albeit purely an illusion. Additionally, while the videos are short and filled with obvious and simple devices, they are quite effective and, considering the subject matter, beautiful. The allegorical shot of the Man, mask off and back to the camera, at the Seder table lit only by candles is a stunning picture ripe with visual delight. The latest video, The Stalker, makes effective use of a classic music cliche as the tension mounts and pulls you to the edge of your seat before letting you settle back down as it sinks in that Sunny is not the first.

Like all good art, The Human Pet invites discussion. The idea of the subject matter is horrid – a human, held captive with a number of other victims preceding him. Even more scary is the idea that this is really happening and that we are watching and participating as it unfolds. Is it possible that such a thing is real? How far should fiction go in blurring that line and, more philosophically, can we ever know what is real and what is fictional? It was brought to my own attention as I was writing this that while this may in fact be art, I have no actual evidence that it is fictional. To that, I reply: watch the movies and contact Sam Deercot yourself. The codes, the multiple interactions (both public and private) from Sam, and a number of shots in the film suggest that this is, just as it claims to be, an interactive, fictional horror story.

To watch the videos, visit The Human Pet on YouTube. And feel free to join in on The Human Pet discussion at Unfiction.

Update: The user account on YouTube has been suspended and the videos were removed as violating the Terms of Service.

Portals For Fun And Profit

September 12, 2006 / Larry Eisner

A viral promotion for the upcoming game Portal, released by Half-Life creators VALVE Software, Aperture Science is a short, but witty promotional site, with a full psychological test for those “employees” wishing to participate in the Aperture Science program.

The site remains little more than a diversion currently, but it’s definitely worth a look-see, if not just for the excellent sense of humor. However, interlaced with the simple comedy of the thing, are some basic code-cracking elements. And while not really a game, there is definitely a tongue-in-cheek Alternate Reality aspect to the site. Check it out! And as always, should something develop into an ARG or become more immersive than currently offered, we here at ARGN will keep you up to date as the news happens!

LonelyGirl15 – Is She or Isn’t She?

August 29, 2006 / Dee Cook

The white-hot spark of a YouTube user named LonelyGirl15 has set the dry timber of the summer Internet community ablaze. Ostensibly the video blog of a teenaged American girl named Bree, the 23 videos posted so far have chronicled a budding romance with a boy named Daniel, but there’s a twist: Bree’s family is very religious, she is home-schooled, and she has pledged a “purity bond” with her father. Even stranger is the fact that Bree’s religion is never named, and in fact on various comments on YouTube she has said that it is not mainstream – “We’re not Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or anything like that.” There’s also a mysterious picture of famous occultist Aleister Crowley on Bree’s bedroom wall, above a candelabra which she’s vehement that Daniel not light. And wait – that Crowley picture is new – it used to be something else (could that possibly bear a resemblance to Baphomet?) A dark twist, indeed.

Buzz has it that the videos are too pat, too scripted, and too professional looking to be anything but some sort of viral campaign. Indeed, the clues are there. Bree initially gained an audience by making engaging and humorous videos featuring popular YouTube users. She’s very cagey about revealing any personally revealing information about herself, often completely dodging uncomfortable questions. Perhaps more telling is the fact that a vanity website under her name was registered on May 12 – almost two weeks before she showed up on YouTube. Those following the saga wonder how she knew she would become an Internet sensation before posting a video (her excuse: Daniel did it to tease her).

Steorn: A Game or Not A Game, That Is The Question

August 24, 2006 / Brooke Thompson

Last Saturday, a small company in Ireland began getting some attention for promising the world free energy. Free! Can you imagine? The social, economic, and political ramifications are huge. Not to mention the scientific ones. For hundreds, thousands, of years people have lived by the law that energy is not free – it takes energy to create energy. Proving that this truth is actually false shakes up countless of theories long accepted as fact. So, who are these brilliant scientists and where is that proof?

Steorn. And they came out of nowhere. This huge, momentous, and guaranteed nobel prize winning discovery, was created by a former e-commerce and security firm that happened to stumble upon the technology while working on something completely unrelated. However, they say, when working on monitoring a new system they discovered that there was a net increase of energy when everything they (and the world) believed told them there should be a net loss. And, instead of tying this groundbreaking technology up in the world of academia, they wanted to make it public and to challenge scientists to prove that their technology works.

It sounds crazy and, whether or not this is true, it is.

It also sounds, based on the activity at Unfiction and the number of tips in our inbox, like the perfect premise for an Alternate Reality Game or a Hoax. Our ARG radar (ARGdar?) has been bouncing back and forth on this one and the debates in chat and on the forums have been great. So, let’s go through what we know.

A Tangled Sort of Web

August 2, 2006 / Yulia Mostovoy

Lo and behold, a strange website has been spotted! The site, Landalan.org, popped up on Digg.com, where it was described, in the space of two sentences, as “odd,” “strange,” and “weird.” Sound ARGy? You betcha.

The site has since offered up a mesh of exciting and varied puzzles, although it has provided only sparse hints by way of storyline. Here’s what we do know: the game seems to be centered around a plot to destroy the internet (no!). Also, somebody is trapped somewhere, and it all has to do with the United Nations and long-dead Tunisian sultans. References to the web abound – one puzzle focuses on internet service providers – and it’s all delightfully geeky, so if you enjoy that sort of thing, you might want to go peek in on this one. The Unfiction discussion thread is located hereabouts.