Category: Reviews (Page 9 of 13)

Seeing Red with Webishades: An Introduction to a Few Web Series

September 12, 2010 / Michael Andersen

Images courtesy of No Mimes Media

Last week, I got a phone call from Felicia Day . . . and you can too.

It all started with an interview with No Mimes Media by Jenni PowellÂ posted on Tubefilter, a news site dedicated to web television. While Tubefilter’s primary focus is web television, alternate reality games and transmedia tactics have been successfully utilized in the space since the early days of YouTube, when lonelygirl15 became one of the biggest breakaway hits for scripted web television.

In the article, Powell mentioned that she recently “had the pleasure to collaborate with No Mimes Media” on a project. And in response to Powell’s final interview question asking where someone could find an ARG to play, No Mimes Media cryptically replied that “you never know, a rabbithole might even be on this very page somewhere, if you look carefully enough!” Sure enough, below that comment was an advertisement for Webishades.

Webishades, it seems, are an amazing new form of sunglasses that let you watch web television on the go. The campy website behind the product fully embraces the aesthetic atrocity that typifies many infomercial pages, while featuring images of the cast and crew from popular web series donning the signature red sunglasses. By following a sequence of clues, players hop seamlessly across websites, email, Facebook, Twitter, and phone trees, punctuated by an automated call from Felicia Day herself.

This experience was highly reminiscent of another one of No Mimes Media’s projects, Mime Academy. Mime Academy was a comedic storytelling experience presented at ARGFest and South by Southwest that billed itself as a “10 Minute ARG” for its ability to tell a cohesive interactive story in a limited amount of time. Webishades succeeds admirably at replicating the condensed feeling of interactivity that made Mime Academy such a powerful exemplar for the potential of alternate reality games.

SCVNGR: Now Playing, Somewhere Near You!

August 17, 2010 / Jane Doh

A relative newcomer to smartphone location-based gaming, SCVNGR is taking the United States by storm and threatens to shake up the geo-location game market. Similar to games like Gowalla or Foursquare, players use their smartphones to check in at locations. Unlike anything else on the market, however, SCVNGR players are presented with location-specific “challenges” that they can complete to earn points.

SCVNGR tasks might be a riddle, a dare, a question, or more, and they are customized precisely for the location. For example, I checked in to my nearby police precinct (No, I was not in handcuffs), and, in addition to the usual “Say something here” functionality common to the other geo-location smartphone games, SCVNGR offered me a few tasks related to law enforcement. It asked me what my favorite constitutional amendment was (Duh, the Fifth!), and in “The Swords & Scales” challenge I was asked to pose as Lady Justice and upload the picture. (Hm, yes well, the zip ties were a problem.)

Originally SCVNGR focused on larger institutions, launching with games created by the US Army and Princeton University. Now, a year after launching, SCVNGR boasts an impressive partner list of over 600 institutions, including universities, museums, and retail stores. SCVNGR is not just a forward-facing game, it is also a development platform, allowing institutions to purchase a number of challenges to customize and then providing them with a web-based application to create challenges. This means that third-party adventure creators and team-building event consultants, likeÂ Scaventures, can also tie themselves into the incredibly accessible platform.

ARG Tools for iPhone: Pocket-Sized Power

June 7, 2010 / Jane Doh

ARGTools Netninja.com released the ARG Tools iPhone app this weekâ€”a well thought-out collection of tools, resources, and links for alternate reality gamers of all levels. Included in this free app are helpful interactive tools for solving substitution ciphers, base64 encoding, VignÃ¨re ciphers, and much more. The homegrown app also features cheat sheets for other reference materials, such as English word frequencies.

While this might seem intimidating, newcomers to ARGs can really benefit from the informative panels explaining many of the interactive tools. Puppetmasters may find many of the utilities, such as the countdown timer decoder, useful for creating and running ARGs.

According to developer Brian Enigma’s blog, ARG Tools is “a bit of a niche utility, aimed mainly toward puzzle solvers and ARG players, specifically with an eye toward live events”â€”the native iPhone app can be run offline once installed, except for the Google search bar and pre-built links leading to key ARG community and news resources.

Download ARG Tools in the iTunes Store. No iPhone? Check outÂ netninja.com for some great low-fi gaming resources, like a one-page wiki markup language cheat sheet and anÂ Emergency ARG Pocket Reference.Â Â Some of these tools are printouts that fit in your pocket. (You have those, right?)

Sentient Silicon: A Nanovor Primer

April 6, 2010 / Michael Andersen

lab-rats-group Inside your electronic devices, pre-historic silicon-based monsters are locked in a constant cycle of battle and resurrection. Hanover High School student Lucas Nelson discovered these “Nanovors” using a microscope he cobbled together using his cell phone, some 9V batteries and a laptop computer, and realized the Nanovor could be controlled by zapping them with tiny microvolts. With the help of his eccentric science teacher “Doc Zap” Sapphire, Lucas designed special Nanoscopes that allow his classmates to fight each other with their Nanovor swarms. Thanks to transmedia game designers Smith and Tinker, you can experience Nanovor along with the adventures of Lucas and his friends, the Lab Rats, through a video game, online webseries, novels, comic books, or through your very own Nanoscope that lets you battle against your friends or play solo missions.

Although it is possible to enter Nanovor’s transmedia universe through any of the aforementioned media, I would suggest getting your feet wet by watching the Nanovor webseries, located on both the game’s main page and its YouTube channel. The series follows Lucas and his friends as they discover the Nanovors through two seasons of short, 2-3 minute long videos. The videos provide a thorough explanation of the world and its rules, and is set to fast-paced animation and punctuated by snarky dedications at the end of each video. Viewers quickly discover that Nanovor are more than merely pets after discovering Taslos, a “sensei” nanovor capable of communicating with Nanoscope users. Meanwhile, disgraced nanotechnologist Dr. Richard Diamondback hopes to subvert the Nanovor to exact revenge on his former employer, SKY Labs.

After this introduction, players can choose to delve further into the story through the Nanovor novels and comics, or to jump straight into battling Nanovor with the free online game.Â For those looking to delve further into the game’s backstory, the innocuous-looking Hanover High website contains a number of mini-ARGs requiring players to hack into voicemail accounts and solve puzzles. The first of these challenges can be found at the Hanover High Beekeper Society, an homage to Jordan Weisman’s earlier work on the I Love Bees ARG for Halo 2. Completing the challenges unlocks Nanovor badges that helps with the game’s evolution system, and reveals background on “Doc Zap” and Dr. Diamondback.

After Purity Towers: Confessions of a Double-Crosser

September 30, 2009 / Jane Doh

Purity Towers Logo Sometimes, the most interesting games are also the most controversial. They push the limits of expectations and possibilities, presenting new challenges and opportunities for participatory play. Purity Towers, the latest campaign from Funnel Productions, operated on two levels of controversy. First, the producers created a competitive game environment between two divergent camps: the hegemonic Proscript Party, and the representatives of the underclass, the Grotian Underground. Secondly, the gameâ€™s content, while often presented in a light and humorous way, touched upon real social and political issues, including illegal detention and torture, revolutionary change, and political oppression.

The Grotians and the Proscripts were once two antagonistic kingdoms forced to cooperate because of frequent dragon attacks. When the dragons were finally defeated by Edward Jameson, a mythical hero and ancestor of the last Proscript President, the Grotians were in worse shape than the Proscripts. According to the mythos, the Grotians agreed to become the servant underclass of the Proscripts, and for several generations the Peopleâ€™s Proscript Party (PPP) ruled over the â€œProscription Zone.â€

One day, the Grotian Underground (GU) started recruiting players. A luxurious Party-owned residence, Purity Towers, was about to open its doors, becoming a landmark in â€œThe Proscription Zone.” The GU defaced the Purity Towers website, and a high-ranking Party member encouraged players to create their own GU cadre, resulting in a ning network, an underground newspaper, and the blogs of two symbolic leaders, Levi Waltershield and Rosa Wells. To complicate matters, two recurring Funnel Productions characters, Earl de Rosa and Randy Porknut got a contract to sell Sticky Itchers Shower Scrub to Purity Towers. Randy recently recovered from a bout of undeath from a previous game while Earl, in his drunken grief, got married in Las Vegas and misplaced his new bride. Inspired by this, a GU player starred as Earlâ€™s lost wife, Bertha Marie Effenberger. Making some heartfelt videos, Berthaâ€™s mission was to get Earl to sympathize with the Grotian side and infiltrate Purity Towers while delivering Sticky Itchers Shower Scrub.

A Second Chance With Maddison Atkins

August 25, 2009 / Michael Andersen

maddisonatkins Second chances are hard to come by. But Jeromy Barber’s media design company 12th Street House decided to give his audience a second chance to saveÂ the characters Maddison Atkins and Adam Wilmott fromÂ their grisly deaths with theÂ launch of Maddison Atkins 2.0, a reboot of the alternate reality game Maddison Atkins 1.0. Barber explained at ARGFest that he “tried to recreate the plot [of Maddison Atkins 1.0] so there are a lot of things that the players didn’t know but there are a lot of overarching story [elements] that are very similar.”

In April 2007, Maddison Atkins and Adam Wilmott were brutally murdered in the small town of Nacogdoches, Texas. Fifteen days prior to their grisly murders, Maddison received a pigeon with a note tied to its leg at her doorstep. Over two years later, many of the same players who watched Maddison and Adam die returned with equal parts anticipation and trepidation to witness five pigeons delivered to the house of one Ms. Maddison Atkins. The story, which played out over forty-nine YouTube videos and nearly as many video responses, focused on Maddison and Adam’s efforts to trust a community of players attempting to help them while chasing down letters scattered across the globe, from Tucson, Arizona to Sydney, Australia. Indeed, one of the main “puzzles” of the gameplay was winning over its two main characters. As Barber unapologetically explains, “My two main characters are really stupid, and don’t know anything. But they’re very attractive…part of the game is cracking Maddison, getting to know this girl.”