Posts Tagged ‘ arg ’

Cloverfield

July 9, 2007
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Since this past weekend, there’s been a lot of buzz about a trailer for a movie codenamed Cloverfield (the real name is, as yet, unknown.)  The movie is being produced by J. J. Abrams, who is known for creating the TV series Lost, and the screenplay was written by Drew Goddard, who was a writer for Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Many sites are posting about this.  Here’s one that provides only the basic information, and here’s one that goes into a little bit more depth.  There appears to be an Alternate Reality Game in motion to build up hype around the movie.  Currently, the game involves two sites ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com and ethanhaaswasright.com.  The latter is where you’ll find the puzzles.  So, check it out and have some fun.

Alice is Lost — Puzzle ARG

June 21, 2007
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ARGNet is reporting a new alternate reality game called Alice is Lost.  The game is created as a side project by Eric Harshbarger, who is a puzzle designer at Mind Candy Design, and will be starting this fall.  As the article reports, the game will be heavily puzzle based.

Hiro’s Heroes Crossword

April 23, 2007
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There’s currently an alternate reality game going on around the NBC show Heroes called Heroes 360. One of the characters from the show, Hiro Nakamura, has a blog that often features puzzles and clues for the game. One of the most recent puzzles is a crossword puzzle that’s quite challenging.

Perplex City Season 2

February 28, 2007
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Tomorrow marks the start of Perplex City Season 2.  The Perplex City web site has already undergone some changes in preparation.  The new site is really nice and it’s definitely become a great site for puzzle lovers.  The most notable difference is that there’s now a large collection of puzzles that can be solved online without having to buy cards.  The plan is to allow site members to create puzzles to add to the collection, but that has yet to be implemented.

As of tomorrow, Season 2 puzzle cards will be available.  There will be 256 cards again, this time in three waves.  There will also be a couple puzzles written by me (though none in wave 1), so keep an eye out.

The alternate reality portion of the game is being called Perplex City Stories now, and that should be back in April.  Presumably with another big prize to be won.

Receda Cube Found

February 8, 2007
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On February 4th, the Receda Cube was found by Andy Darley.  The cube was found in Wakerly Great Wood in Northamptonshire, UK.  Andy Darley will collect $200,000 for his prize.  This marks the end of Perplex City Season 1.  See coverage here from the Perplex City website and BBC World News.

Don’t worry, there will be more to come on Perplex City in the near future.

2 ARGs Ending, 1 beginning again

January 29, 2007
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Mind Candy has released the final clue for Perplex City Season 1 and the Receda Cube could be found at any moment. The final live event for Vanishing Point will be taking place in less than an hour, and someone will soon be taking a trip to space (assuming they don’t have to pay taxes.) And a mysterious site calles ilovebees.com has just become reactive.

Vanishing Point

January 2, 2007
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I’ve come across two posts recently concerning something called Vanishing Point.  It appears to be a new Alternate Reality Game from 4orty 2wo Entertainment.  One post suggests that the game is being used to promote Windows Vista.  This wouldn’t surprise me since Microsoft has had a working relationship with 42 for quite a while.  Not long ago, 42 created the game “I Love Bees” to market Halo 2 for Microsoft’s XBOX.

If you’re looking to get into the game (or just follow what’s happening) the best place to start seems to be the Vanishing Point wiki where many have already gathered to crack the puzzle.

Mind Candy get $7 Million

October 25, 2006
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Mind Candy, makers of the Perplex City game, announced today that they received a $7 Million investment from Accel Partners, Index Ventures, and NewMedia Spark. What does this mean for puzzle lovers? It means plenty of new puzzle games, including one aimed at younger audiences. Mind Candy has already created a Perplex City boardgame, but there also seems to be plans for books, video games and more in the future.

Scroll Quest Treasure Hunts

May 11, 2006
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The idea of entertainment that requires players to interact with the real world seems to be catching on. Scroll Quest, a Washington, DC company, is taking a crack at it and offering $225,000 in treasure. Scroll Quest tells the story of Algernon Emmery Ambrose, a wealthy collector of artifacts. When Ambrose died, his will stipulated that his collection be left to “the best of humanity.”

And so, every month a scroll is released that contains a story and hidden clues to find a coin that can be redeemed for one of Ambrose’s artifacts.

Scroll Quest makes their money by selling the scrolls which go for about $5 each. Supposedly the coins are accessible to anyone, but I’m guessing it helps if the coin is hidden somewhere near where you live.

It will be interesting to see if these kinds of treasure hunts and alternate reality games will be successful in the long run.

Unsolved Perplex City Card

April 12, 2006
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Perplex City is a collectible card, alternate reality, puzzle game that I’ve mentioned here before.  To play the game, you buy packs of cards each of which has a puzzle on it.  Boingboing is reporting a collaboration of Perplex City players to solve one particularly difficult puzzle.  They’re not looking for collaboration between the best puzzle minds, however; they’re looking for collaboration between the computers of the best puzzle minds.  The puzzle contains RC5 encrypted text that would take a single computer years to crack.  They’ve set up a little distributed computing experiment to get the job done faster.  And apparently, they’re also offering prizes.

Perplex City quick start guide

March 24, 2006
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I blogged a while back about the alternative reality puzzle game Perplex City. Since alternative reality games can seem daunting to the uninitiated, I’m posting a link to this Perplex City Quick Start Guide that I came across though the blog Jarkolicious. Perplex City seems to have fairly low barriers for entry. And, of course, you can always just solve the puzzles and not get tied up in the alternate reality.

My clothes tell secrets

February 23, 2006
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Ready for the puzzle game you wear? Well, it’s coming.

I first read about EDOC laundry on joystiq, which called it a new alternate reality game that involves clothing. So I clicked over to the EDOC site and looked around a bit. It seemed like some of their shirts had some cleverly hidden messages on them. An interesting gimmick, but not necessarily something I would call an ARG. So I dug a little deeper.

I quickly turned up an interview with Dawne Weisman on the Alternate Reality Gaming Network site, wife of ARG pioneer Jordan Weisman. There was indeed more going on beneath the surface. EDOC has some people from people from 4orty2wo Entertainment working on the project–notably Elan Lee and Sean Stewart. These guys are writers, so we know that there is at least some kind of story with a plot.

An article over at Wired explains a little bit more. It also provides some clues on how to solve some of the puzzles on the shirts and, in the process, they raise more questions than they answer.

It remains to be seen how much people get into this game, but it’s definitely got some good minds behind it.

Perplex City – An alternate reality puzzle game

February 14, 2006
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I’ve been reading up about the puzzle game called Perplex City, which was blogged about on boingboing (here and here) and Shiny Shiny.
At its heart, the game involves solving puzzles but, in execution, it draws from the following genres:

  1. Collectible card games – of which Magic is the best example. To play Perplex City, you buy packs of 6 cards that have puzzles on them. Each card has an individual puzzle and the cards can be combined to form other puzzles. Some of the cards are harder to find than others and, presumably, you will have to collect all of the cards to win.
  2. Alternate reality games – like the ones used in the marketing for the movie A.I. or the game Halo 2. These games involve clues that are hidden in the real world. Characters that you can contact and that will contact you back. And fictitious web sites that look like they’re set up by real people.
  3. A treasure hunt – with an object hidden in the real world that you have to find.

The winner gets $200,000, which will certainly be incentive for many to play. Of course, you’re likely to sink a lot of time and money into the game in order to even have a shot at winning.