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UPDATE: Clowning Around Pays Off at Comic-Con

July 27, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

When Stephen Sondheim wrote Send in the Clowns, chances are good that he didn’t expect anyone to take him at his word. However, for 140 lucky participants, Friday morning at Comic-Con included a chance to become one of the Joker’s gang. If you haven’t met the Joker, perhaps it’d be best if you brushed up on your vigilante hero folklore. As it turns out, the Caped Crusader wasn’t around to stop the mob from taking over the streets of San Diego, moving effortlessly from location to location, many being aided by associates with Internet access, in an audition to fill one of the coveted slots in the Joker’s army. As it turns out, however, the luckiest of the lucky became real unlucky, real quick. Okay, not really — but it makes for a good comic book ending.

Now that I’ve thoroughly confused those of you that haven’t been following along with the happenings at whysoserious.com, let’s backtrack a bit. First, there were a number of uncommon dollar bills making the rounds at the Con last night, leading to the discovery of a creepy looking web site and a countdown. Next came the end of the countdown earlier today (10 am PDT) and a clue for the throngs of people ready for something big to happen. Once the game was on, it was a race that required a coordinated effort between those on the ground and people on the ‘net (unless you carried a Wifi-enabled device with you along the way) that took players to eight different checkpoints over 100 minutes of game play.

UPDATE: Comic-Con and whysoserious.com

July 27, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

A quick update, for those following along at home: The countdown on whysoserious.com has ended, and a large group of participants have begun to play along with what appears to be a treasure hunt/puzzle trail. Those active on the ground need to either have Internet access, or help from friends that are able to solve online clues. A toll-free number (1-800-395-9646) was given to players at the Con, which leads to the next step in the trail (audio can be heard here). You can watch progress and play along at the following web sites:

Trailhead (you need the code from the audio delivered through the 800 number)
Surveillance
Wannabes (not sure what this is for yet, although chances are it will be a leaderboard of some kind)

Stay tuned — there will be more to come, including a summary of the day’s events, later on ARGNet.

Subject 137 and The Experiments Of Doom

July 27, 2007 / Jessica Price

I’m dying. I was falling asleep last night, and I knew. All I had to do was just let go, you know? …And that would be it. I’d wake up a f*cking corpse, and you’d be in trouble. So why don’t you just let me go? Why don’t you just let me get out of here before everyone gets in trouble?

The plea is made with weary resignation by Subject 137, a man who appears to be in his twenties and who, the video’s poster tells us, has been the subject of mysterious medical testing.

It’s an eerie and surprisingly affecting response to the assertion, delivered from offscreen in an electronically disguised voice, that Subject 137 is special, but that he’d get lost “out there” in the real world. Is this the idealism of a fanatic scientist? Propaganda from an organization with sinister plans? Or is Subject 137 actually special? It’s impossible to tell from this first video, but Subject 137’s bleak response is delivered in a way that makes him seem grounded and easy to identify with.

The viewer allegiances established by the introductory video (Subject 137 sympathetic! Voice-disguised man scary!) are destabilized, however, by the notes attached to it by Maria Ail:

I beg viewers to be careful when watching this clip since it’s view out of context of everything that comes before it. Think of this clip as a test.

Why So Serious?

July 26, 2007 / Celina Beach

Hey everyone! I have BREAKING NEWS here from Comic-Com!

Purchasing some overpriced “Stargate Atlantis Collector Edition” bottled water, I received a VERY unusual dollar bill in change.

George’s face has been obscured and replaced with a… can it be… somewhat JOKER-like face, and the caption below reads “WHYSOSERIOUS”.

This, of course, leads us to www.whysoserious.com – could the Joker be looking for recruits?

Join the puzzly goodness at http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/ or online IRC in #unfiction!

Comic-Con 2007

July 25, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

Comic-Con 2007 has arrived, and our roving reporter Celina Beach is at the event, ready for the action to start. This year’s event includes attendees many alternate reality gaming fans will be keeping tabs on, including J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse of the hit TV show Lost. If you remember, it was this time last year when Rachel Blake, a character in The Lost Experience, confronted panel members about their involvement with the Hanso Foundation. We don’t expect the same sort of large-scale ARG event to take place with this year’s Lost, but you never know.

Abrams will be serving double duty at the Con, as he will also be discussing the upcoming movie Star Trek movie. However, there are rumblings across the blogosphere that he will shed a little light into the 1-18-08 mystery that began with a pre-roll movie trailer earlier this month.

With Celina blogging and Tweeting from the event, we will have up-to-the-minute coverage if any ARG-related news breaks through the course of the next few days, so bookmark ARGNet and check back regularly.

Be Good, Tanya, and You Might Just Discover Something Supernatural

July 25, 2007 / Jessica Price

Pity Tanya Mitchel: she’s just a nice girl with a LiveJournal, a job at a bank, and a wacky sister. The last of these happens to have disappeared, leaving a cipher-strewn trail and mysterious plea for her sister to save her by finding Dean Winchester (who appears to be the same Dean Winchester from CW’s Supernatural), and poor Tanya is utterly distraught about the whole thing. So, like any self-respecting character in an alternate reality game, she has turned to the wisdom of the internet to help her out.

A tip sent to Unfiction owner SpaceBass last Friday, containing a link to Tanya’s blog (Essentially Invisible), set players on the trail of what is beginning to look like a disjointed indulgence in ARG cliches. Between Tanya claiming that she found her own blog by accident and the appearance of ciphers with no plot-based justification for their placement, this looks likely to be the type of game that makes community veterans roll their eyes.

However, the game’s limited scope provides an easy opportunity for overview. During a discussion about the difficulty of finding regular coverage of the ARG world that is geared to people outside the community with game reviewer par excellence Chris Dahlen (one of the few journalists to tackle reviewing an ARG — Perplex City — in the context of mainstream gaming), Chris expressed a desire for regular sports-page-like coverage of running ARGs. He wanted to see an account of a game’s highs and lows that would be accessible to people who are internet literate but don’t regularly play ARGs.

I’m far too lazy to attempt such an ambitious project for a large-scale game, but Essentially Invisible provides an example of limited enough scope that I’m willing to give it a try. Please mentally read the following in your best sportscaster voice.