Alternate Reality Gaming V2.0

ItsIllak writes "Alternate Reality Games [ARGs] have been bubbling under for the past 10 years now. Usually completely homebrew or attached to big budget productions, they have been used to create buzz around a game, product or movie. Perplex City have bucked that trend. Their ARG is completely independent of anything else, its entirely self contained. With fresh ideas on income generation and a $200,000 top prize to whomever finds the real life buried treasure - is this the future of an entirely new form of entertainment?"

Perplexcity

[Anonymous Coward]

PerplexCity is a fun game with all sorts of treasure hunts and rabbit holes. There's currently over 15000 players signed up to help find the cube. They are running a video competition at the moment..view all the entries here: http://www.youtube.com/groups_videos?name=perplexc ity [youtube.com] and my entry is this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiMRE_uSPlQ [youtube.com]

Re:Treasure hunt

[SirBruce]

It was called Majestic. "The game that played you." Problem was, nobody really wanted to be called in the middle of the day to play a game when they were busy doing something else. Few people signed up to play it after the first free episode, and EA cancelled it not long thereafter.

The PerplexCity guys are really cool; met them at GDC this year and got some of their cards. But some of these puzzles and codes on them are really hard, and there are far better codebreakers and teams of puzzle solvers that will get to the cash long before I would, so I'm not really into the game. I guess that's their biggest barrier to acceptance -- puzzle freaks will probably love it, but the rest of us won't really feel rewarded for collecting a small number of points.

Bruce

Re:Grassroots ARG

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a password hunt. PxC differs from other ARG's because of all the different angles. The original article does not really highlight how good of an ARG this is. There has been live events in London and New York. We have had live chats with in game characters. In these chats, our words and actions determined where the story would go net. We've received mysterious leaked emails and recnetly started getting updates by text. Players have written a book to help an in game character gain access to an ancient book in a library. It's not your typical ARG, it's a whole other world. We even have out own wiki. There are multiple fans sites. I could go on forever. You cannot critcise or make comparisons until you have experienced Perplex City for yourself. www.perplexcity.com

Re:What makes this an 'alternate' reality game?

[SixSided]

Try this list of ingame sites for starters: http://perplexcitywiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=We bsites [perplexcitywiki.com] One of those is the newspaper site ( http://www.perplexcitysentinel.com/ [perplexcitysentinel.com] ) that has been updating for over a year now. Perplex City really does quite a job is creating it's own reality.

They say it so it must be true

[kronocide]

Another ad finds its way into /. article space. Even the link in the author's name is to a Perplex City movie.

The cycle repeats.

[Peganthyrus]

Perplex City has a treasure and prize at the end?

Why, it's Masquerade [bunnyears.net], the collectible card game! There were about a dozen of these treasure-hunt puzzle books back in the eighties. Now they're just coming in different media.

Also, I call slashvertisement on this post.

Re:Treasure hunt

[Anonymous Coward]

you're definetly right on that one. as someone who's currently playing the game, I can tell you that the makers of PXC have pretty much explicitly said on mutiple occasions that they were directly inspired by Masquerade.

- toolazytocreateanaccount

Re:What makes this an 'alternate' reality game?

[donaldGuy]

An ARG has to transcende multiple forms of media and blur the line between in-game and none in-game often to the point where it is hard to tell.

I think someone already posted it but a good definition can be found here

I have personaly been involved with ILoveBees/Haunted Apiary and Ourcolony (which is arguably not really an ARG) and I would like to say they are alot of fun, especially well created ones like those done by 4orty 2wo productions.

If you are really interested the place to get started is probably http://unfiction.com/ [unfiction.com] . It is a great resource and the forums are indespensible within the ARG community. There is also lot of information about what an ARG is and a good archive of history about previous ARGs (much of it is interesting, other parts of it is just ammusing, such as the tail of wheregif/whoregif [unfiction.com]