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Sunday Comics: Dead Island I fall for puzzles and mysteries. Put a code in front of me, or a series of entirely unrelated clues, and I will sit there for hours if I have to, attempting to solve it. Even if I end up completely uninterested in the product a puzzle is promoting, I generally leap at the chance to make sense out of vague patterns.
Wired’s Frank Rose takes an interesting look at the world of alternate reality games, tracking Trent Reznor’s Year Zero ARG, in which he creates a future world ruled by Christian dictatorship, besieged by terrorists and wracked by climate change. The article explores the work that goes into creating a successful ARG and tracks the Nine Inch Nails game from start to finish. He speaks to 42 Entertainment’s Jordan Weisman, who neatly sums up the appeal of games that go beyond the consoles and computers into the real world. “Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet,” he says, sipping coffee in his guesthouse, “which is other people.”
How much fun is it to pull off a good April Fools prank? Now imagine doing that to thousands of people at once. Seems pretty damn entertaining to me.
Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games [Wired Magazine]
Kotakuite A.W. sends word that a Mass Effect Experience site has gone live on the Xbox website. Upon reaching the site, you are presented with a keycode lock which asks you to fill in a date, presumably to access the site. I tried the obvious route and entered the release date of the game, but to no avail. My guess is that the date is something to significant to the game’s story, but not being fortunate enough to have made it to the right K-mart last weekend or received a review copy, I’m not sure what this date could be. perhaps someone who has been playing the game for a week now could enlighten us?
Update: Well, now that you’ve all had a hilarious laugh at my expense, I will at least defend myself by saying I didn’t see anything that said enter birth date since I opened the site in another tab and immediately went back to other work while it was loading. I guess I was hoping there was something more interesting to it than an age gate. I suppose that’s what one gets for over thinking.
Alice at Wonderland reports on some weird mail she got recently. Yesterday, I received a package at work, addressed to me. My assistant opened it – a standard brown-paper photographs envelope – and looked worried. The contents were weird and scary-looking: a photocopied military report of some sort with a small brown envelope stapled to it. She looked at me: “ugh! What’s in the envelope!? Anthrax?” … I’m not going to find out: it’s going straight in the bin. Nearly gave poor Carys a heart attack, and we both felt compelled to wash our hands after handling this stupid thing.
Having heard from another colleague who got a similar package, she suspects it might be parts of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) — and one of the comments on Wonderland suggests it might be an ARG for the forthcoming EA title Crysis. As a still-fledgling genre of “big game” with only a few examples that are not promotions (mostly for other videogames!), is this the best way to spread interest in the form?
A strange thing in the post… [Wonderland]
And by non-pirate I mean it’s chock full of pirates, but completely free of their colorful sound-offs. Instead this ARG is all about alternate reality gaming—that is, to say, a fancy ad campaign.
If you head over to Sullivan’s Stories you will find the ramblings of one of the upcoming PlayStation 3 game’s main characters and, more importantly, a link to a Craigslist post showing an old Spanish map.
That’s all I know for now, other than the fact that this is supposed to be—supposed to be—one of the hardest ARGs to come down the pipe to date. I just hope there’s some sort of pay off at the end. So get to cracking and feel free to use the comments here to discuss your progress… or lack thereof.
