Page 55 of 198

Tim Kring and The Company P Team Up to Form a Conspiracy for Good

June 14, 2010 / Michael Andersen

In the summer of 2008, Tim Kring and Christopher Sandberg were discussing the future of transmedia and community-based entertainment, standing on top of Isaac Mendez’ iconic post-apocalyptic tableau painted on the floor of the Heroes soundstage. As a result of that conversation, The Company P signed on to help produceÂ Conspiracy for Good, a large-scale movement with alternate reality gaming elements. Â Kring had previously pitched the concept forÂ Conspiracy for Good to Nokia.Â The movement will play out “across both traditional media and new media platforms including smart mobile devices, game consoles, tablets, and PCs.”Â Â At the heart of the experience is a locative event that will play out over the course of three weeks in London starting in mid-July and running until August 7th.Â Â According to Kring, this isÂ a greatÂ week to join in with the action, as “the narrative aspect really gets cooking as far as meeting key characters and key figures.Â A lot of the smoke that’s surrounding it will start to lift in the next few days.”

Conspiracy for Good firstÂ launched in May with a series of videos featuring celebrities ranging from JJ Abrams to Ringo Starr declaring “I am not a member.” Later in the month, the site hosting the videos redirected to the game’s main portal at Conspiracy for Good. Savvy players discovered a puzzle-locked allegory about Lord Magpie and his efforts to silence the songbirds. One of the puzzles introduced Blackwell Briggs, a global company seeking to increase surveillance by supercharging existing CCTV networks and introducing legislation to subvert mobile networks to track citizens. The Conspiracy for Good leaked the footage to The Pirate Bay, and spokeswoman Ann Marie Calhoun posted a re-edit of the video, revealing a different side to the company. Shortly after posting the video, Calhoun went missing and The Pirate Bay received a notice from Blackwell Briggs requesting that the tracker be removed. Further hints at the overarching story emerged by playing Exclusion, a free game for Nokia phonesÂ that includes unlockableÂ codes that lead to additional pieces of information on Babbage, a website discovered through Exclusion. Nokia partnered with Kring and The Company P to launch the project, and will release a series of games expanding on Exclusion to advance the narrative.

Breathe Revived as Recurring Event

June 8, 2010 / Lewis Murphy

Yomi Ayeni’s Breathe was an interactive experience taking place over 3 weeks in October 2009, resulting in the creation of a movie released in 3 parts. At its height, it included immersive live events such as a club night following an initiation ceremony for a secretive, clandestine society. The game attracted a dedicated core following as well as a more general audience attending events such as the club night. Now,Â Expanding Universe has plans to transform the experience into a recurring event either later in 2010 or in early 2011.

The events should hover in between the full experience and a normal movie screening. While the film will still be shown in its original three parts, attendees will be encouraged to visit websites and explore the story in various ways between showings of the filmed episodes. Participants will have access to a portal specifically created for the event, where various sections of the wider story will be unlocked in a calendar format as the movie progresses. These may include websites, phone numbers, extra video content and more, some of which will be exclusive to the events. The live events of Breathe’s initial run were fully filmed in anticipation of such redistribution, and with the permission from those involved, may also be used as part of the storytelling platform.

Attendees will be encouraged to discuss their findings in groups; Yomi believes that this will further understanding of the story as a whole, as individuals can bring their different perspectives and findings to the discussion. Much as participants of the original experience were able to act as “beacons” to bring the experiential parts of the story to the wider audience, it is hoped that people discovering different story areas and content can come together to discuss these as a whole. These exploration and discussion sessions will help to preserve the wider and richer experience of the story to supplement the absence of real-time events. At the end of the full screening, there will be a wider talk and Q&A session with the audience to cement understanding of the story.

Local Summer Reading ARG: The Mystery Guest

June 8, 2010 / Jane Doh

Last month, the Finksburg Library in Carroll County, Maryland, started its second alternate reality game tied to its summer reading program. The Mystery Guest is a strange, out-of-place fellow who has fallen out from the pages of a book, and local teens in Finksburg are trying to find a way to put him back. They tried using an iron (ouch!) and stuffing him in, but nothing is working.

Will young Finskburg readers be able to uncover the Mystery Guest’s identity and return him to wherever he came from? You can follow the adventure at The Mystery Guest blog shared by tweeners Kitty, Alyson, and Caroline and the “voice of reason”â€”the Librarian.

Last year, the Finksburg Library hosted its first alternate reality game, Find Chesia, which centered on a 14-year-old girl whose parents had gone missing on an archaeological dig. The game itself was created by small teams of young local teenagers.

In The Mystery Guest, local players can win limited edition gold Library Bucks and other prizes for answering the Librarian’s challenges. The overall story is linked with Carroll County Public Library System’sÂ summer reading program. Teens can use Library Bucks to buy things at the Auction Wrap-Up Party on August 21st to be held at the Westminster Branch Library. The Mystery Guest adventure ends August 14th.

For more information about the Finksburg Library’s outreach programs, check out its Facebook fan page and its Twitter profile.

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?)

A Call to Action for Alternate Reality Game Developers: Play ARGs

June 7, 2010 / Michael Andersen

In recent weeks, a number of alternate reality game developers have called for some changes. Brooke Thompson, the chair of the International Game Developer’s Association ARG special interest group, asked developers to make postmortems of completed games publicly available to foster an environment for constructive criticism. No Mimes Media co-founder and ARG Netcast host Steve Peters asked developers to concentrate on creating compelling player experiences as opposed to relying on free giveaways to generate buzz. And now, I’m throwing my hat into the ring.

Play alternate reality games.

Whether you’re an aspiring developers or one with a number of successful campaigns under your belt, you should be playing ARGs as often as you can. Take the time to go through the experience of discovery, and remind yourself what excited you about transmedia and alternate reality games by experiencing the communities that develop firsthand. People enmeshed in the television industry will still go home and watch television: after all, Joss Whedon is a self-professed GLEEk, and George Broussard and Scott Miller (formerly of 3D Realms)Â love World of Warcraft. What makes alternate reality games so different?

The answer I hear most frequently when I pose that question is “time.” There’s a perception that playing alternate reality games demands extensive time commitments that developers don’t have. And since ARGs have indefinite lengths, it can be even harder to commit to a game. However, if you find yourself unable to drop in and interact with an ongoing game, I would argue that’s a design flaw that you should internalize. Assuming that all ARG players have large blocks of time to dedicate to your game is a dangerous assumption that limits your audience to players dedicated to your game to the exclusion of almost everything else. Â And making that assumption feeds the stereotype that gamers are people with shallow pockets and lots of time on their hands. Based on anecdotal evidence, that is far from the truth. However, if game designers continue to operate on that assumption by creating games that are largely inaccessible without absolute dedication to a single game, it may become an unfortunate reality.

The Secret Is Out There: Coca Cola Creator Doc Pemberton Stars in “Secret Formula” Campaign

June 4, 2010 / Michael Andersen

The Coca Cola Company has enlisted the aid of Wieden+Kennedy, Portland to create an integrated marketing campaign exploring the history and mythology behind Doctor John Stith Pemberton, the inventor of Coca Cola. The Secret Formula campaign launched with the above video bears many of the trappings of an alternate reality game, with links leading to artifacts across the web, with the promise of expansion out into the real world in the near future. And while it is relatively easy to draw parallels between this campaign and Wieden+Kennedy’s previous Go Forth campaign for Levi’s, on first impression it appears as though Secret Formula will be a more passive experience.

According to the campaign’s The Secret Is Out There video, someone is trying to steal Coca Cola’s secret formula: and based on past experience, Pepsi can be ruled out as the culprit. In order to figure out who is after the formula, players will have to learn more about the two people who know the formula as well as the drink’s inventor, Doctor Pemberton, who has recently discovered twitter, although it seems as though the good doctorÂ had some trouble adjusting to the application at first.