After over four months of completing puzzles via the Postal Service, participants in the innovative ARG The Committee of the Sedulous Amalgamation (tCotSA) received cryptic notes that eventually decoded to reveal the history and purpose of the organization behind the mailings – the same organization that funded the creation of Deus City’s Time Communication Project.
According to the information revealed through the cryptic mailings, the Committee for Sedulous Amalgamation was established five hundred years ago to protect fragments of Nostradamus’ folio. They then funded Adam Brackin’s Time Communication project and charged its members to join the agents of Deus City and collect the missing pieces of the Nostradamus’ work.
Further investigation reveals additional parallels between the two games. An arithmetic symbol used by the Deus City PM, known as “Hank Eggrem,” appears on many tCotSA messages, including its trailhead. tCotSA also makes reference to the death of one of its members, which parallels Alexis Wright Sr’s plane crash in Alabama from the Deus City story.
The impact of this merging of games remains to be seen, as both ARGs have employed very different gameplay styles, with Deus City relying heavily on character interaction while tCoSA utilized “snail mail” to great effect. A similar merger of ongoing games happened in the past with Wildfire Industries and Synagoga. Watching these two communities interact will be an interesting study in merging gaming cultures, whether the games merge completely or continue running concurrent plotlines.
DeusCity resources:
Click Here for the Deus City website
Click Here for the unfiction forum thread
Click Here for the Deus City wiki
The Committee of the Sedulous Amalgamation
Click Here for the tCotSA unfiction forum thread
Click Here for the tCotSA story so far
In a world where technology allows immediate communication between people on opposite sides of the planet, and the internet provides instant access to new entertainment and information generated daily by multitudes of contributors of both the professional and the amateur varieties, it’s easy to forget the value of older, slower forms of communication such as snailmail. Perhaps this is the reason for the growing popularity of the slow foods movement, which offers a sumptuous alternative to the culinary portion of our increasingly-fast paced lives in which the time invested is itself part of the reward, and for which handmade quality trumps convenience.
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