Tag: live event (Page 4 of 8)

Find Friends to Foil Fake Fforde: A “Thursday Next” ARG

June 24, 2007 / Michael Andersen

Amy Greenford is a mild-mannered bookstore employee working in the Classic books section of Foyles on Charing Cross road, and the books in her store have been behaving oddly. Books get mysteriously misfiled in the wrong section, pages of text simply vanish. Oh, and a bride and groom have materialized from a book and fled the store. Literature is in danger, and only we can save it, with the help of Spec-Ops 27 and the literary detectives.

Most specifically, Jasper Fforde’s upcoming Thursday Next novel First Among Sequels, scheduled to be released on Thursday July 5th, is in danger. Slight errors and suspicious emails to fans of Jasper Fforde who entered an online quiz competition led them to June Haversham’s blog, a publicity and marketing employee for UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton. It appears an impostor is trying to supplant the real Jasper and release a different version of the book. Both plots appear to be converging with Jasper Fforde’s scheduled book signings at Swindon Waterstones on July 7th and Foyles on July 9th.

This alternate reality game appears to offer a “novel” exploration of the line between the real world and the fictional including a woman dressed as a bride singing opera in the streets of London and numerous dead-drops inside misfiled books at Foyles. If you have a deep and abiding love of the classics, this may be the game for you. It might also be worth checking out Jasper Fforde’s books, as they include many elements that would be appealing to avid alternate reality gamers.

Click Here for the trailhead.
Click Here for the UnFiction discussion.
Click Here to learn more about Jasper Fforde and the “Thursday Next” series.

Paul Denchfield + Violet Kiteway = Fun

May 26, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

Three weeks ago, we reported on the Frozen Indigo Angel game promoting BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend music festival. On the same day, we also found out about a season two preview for Perplex City. As it turns out, the two were fated to be reported together, as they were officially connected on May 12th in a blog post on Violet Underground, with a puzzle found in one of Paul Denchfield’s videos leading to a new PXC game web site.

Within a day of finding the puzzle, players of the Frozen Indigo Angel (FIA) game had solved it (see this thread at unofficialmills.co.uk) and discovered the tie-in with Perplex City. On the 14th, Denchfield posted on his blog about the recent activity and the new PXC web site, and Violet blogged about receiving emails which put her in touch with Denchfield himself. At this point, the story revolved around Cyrus Quinton, a member of the myserious Third Power who had set up a secret web page at the newly discoverd Silburn-Griggs Mining web site. Cyrus, according to Violet, is a “sound-engineer-slash-mass-murdering-psychopath,” and Denchfield warns about a “subliminal messaging scheme” Cyrus has planned for the Big Weekend concert — just as Cyrus warns his agents about Denchfield.

From the 15th to the 18th, Cyrus created “ticket challenges” for people to take part in during real world events. These challenges were noted by both Violet and Denchfield in separate blog entries, and players quick to solve the puzzles were awarded with tickets for the concert event. However, not everything is as it seemed, as a timetable was discovered at the same time, revealing that Cyrus was planning on using Perplex City technology during the weekend to send subliminal commands to listeners of Radio 1 who attended the Big Weekend concert. Alas, even as players, led by Denchfield, were told to do whatever they could to stop Cyrus from broadcasting a “primer” over the airwaves, the signal ended up going out on the 17th, “drowning out Beyonce and Shakira.”

Come Out And Play…In London!

May 10, 2007 / Jessica Price

For all those UK residents who wished they could have attended New York’s Come Out And Play Festival, now is your chance to have your own weekend of public gaming fun.

Sponsored by a mysterious benefactor named Gideon Reeling (see here if you want a peek behind the curtain), the Hide and Seek festival promises both new games, such as the London Poetry game, and soon-to-be classics such as Cruel 2 B Kind. There’s even a game done in conjunction with the folks from SFZero and a seminar discussion on why pervasive games are “the new punk rock.” (Full schedule here.)

Alex Fleetwood, one of the festival’s organizers, describes the New York festival as one of the inspirations for the event:

“I attended the Come Out and Play festival in New York and came back inspired. I love ARGs but I’m very attracted to the more user-friendly aspects of pervasive games – you can pick them up for an afternoon and really get something out of them. I wanted to run a game that got people talking to strangers as that was my favourite element of the games at COAP. I’m also hopeful that the open-source translation that the players and the people of London collectively create will be a beautiful thing in itself.”

As for the mysterious Mr. Reeling, Alex can’t tell us much:

“Little is known about Mr Reeling. He describes himself as an adventure capitalist and only communicates via email. We have asked that he tell us more about himself and that he attend the festival in person; watch this space for more news…”

The festival runs Friday through Sunday evening, and all games will begin at the Delegates Centre, BFI South Bank Centre. Readers, if you’re able to attend, please send us your thoughts afterwards!

Game Alert: Frozen Indigo Angel

May 2, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

There’s a new alternate reality game in the wild, and it goes by the name of “Frozen Indigo Angel.” It’s a promotion put on by BBC Radio 1, and is promoting Radio 1’s Big Weekend music festival. The event is the largest free music festival in Europe, and the game has a number of tie-ins to real world entities — the BBC web site, radio, podcasts and many popular web sites are where you can find information leading to the game.

The trailhead for the game can be found at www.pauldenchfield.com, which details the life of Paul Denchfield, who obviously loves the conveniences of Web 2.0, as he uses Twitter, Flickr, Imeem and YouTube to tell his story. Recently, there was a live event involving Paul as he protested at the BBC, and our sources tell us that there are more live events in the near future.

The blogosphere has taken interest in the game, as Matt Deegan, Wonderland and The Guardian Blog have all featured the game in recent posts. This is yet another example of how the BBC has embraced alternate reality gaming as a content delivery model and buzzmaker, as previous ARGs Jamie Kane and Wannabes have come out of the BBC camp.

One last thing, for you faithful ARGNet readers — watch this game carefully, as we have an inside track on a very interesting development to come very, very soon.

Vanishing Point Game Does Not Go Gently Into That Good Night

January 31, 2007 / Sean C. Stacey

On Saturday, January 27, 2007, at 5:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, a sizable crowd of two to three hundred people had gathered on the hill at Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington, across from the brilliantly lit gas works. An enormous projection screen had been erected on the flat ground between the structure and Lake Union, where colored lights strobed atop police boats that formed a cordon around a darkened barge floating in the lake. As the clock ticked over to the top of the hour, hundreds of eyes aimed themselves at the video now winking into existence on the screen.

This was Loki’s final message to those few of the hundreds of thousands of players of the Vanishing Point Game – a promotion for Microsoft’s upcoming release of the next version of its Windows operating system, Vista – who had managed to be present for the final live event of the game…and to witness the final clues to the identity of “Loki” and her secret to winning, among other things, the grand prize trip into space.

In the video, Loki recounted her mission and praised the progress of the players so far. Photographs from previous live events flashed across the screen, along with screen shots of web sites and message boards that had been involved in the campaign. As the video ended, a single white flare shot out over the lake from behind the screen, music swelled from strategically placed loudspeakers, and the crowd was bathed in bright hues as broad brush strokes of flame painted the sky, synchronized to the wicked techno beats tumbling their way up the hill.

The volume of the fireworks display was only briefly rivaled upon the finale, as the crowd burst into cheers and applause.

Ravenchase Chicago: Treasure Hunting in the Windy City

January 30, 2007 / Jessica Price

Ravenchase Adventures bills itself as a “real adventure” using “riddles, anagrams, puzzles, actors, the far reaches of imagination and more,” and warns that it “may be more fun than you can handle.” They hold events around the country (upcoming locations include Honolulu, Chicago again next month, Baltimore, Manhattan, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and others) and will be putting on a national treasure hunt in July.

Since I really enjoyed playing Tombstone Hold ‘Em and have always been envious of those who’ve gotten to participate in events like the Go Game or Jane McGonigal’s oeuvre, a Ravenchase race to a final location determined via clues at downtown Chicago landmarks seemed like a perfect opportunity to get my puzzle hunt fix. I headed to Chicago to meet up with fellow ARGNet writer Krystyn Wells and two other crewmembers from my beekeeping days.