Perplex City: Alternative Reality Gaming
Now this sounds cool:
The first advertisement appeared in USA Today a week ago, right on schedule.
People from around the world had stayed up all night waiting for it, talking in chat rooms and online forums. It had to be a clue, they thought. Everything before it had been a clue.
“LOST. The Cube,” read the ad, posted at the top of the paper’s “Notices” section. “Reward Offered. Not only an object of great significance to the city but also a technological wonder.”
Until this morning, I had not heard of the new medium referred to “alternate-reality gaming.” The CNET article calls the medium “an obsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community . . . .” An “ARG” is apparently an “intensely complicated series of puzzles involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper advertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more.”
The ad referred to above is in reality (!) a clue in the new ARG known alternatively (appropriately enough) as Perplex City, Project Syzygy, or The Cube. One of the early puzzles reveals a clue pointing to the website www.perplexcity.com, which currently shows a letter from someone (or thing) named Sente, a citizen of Perplex City. There’s more at www.projectsyzygy.com.
This idea epitomizes, literally, the notion of thinking-outside-the-box: it expands role-playing games into the real world and the real world into role-playing games. I’ve never seen the movie, but it reminds me of the trailer of The Game, starring Michael Douglas. Or maybe it’s more like The DaVinci Code meets How to Host a Murder. (More on The DaVinci Code when I’ve finished reading the book.)
I haven’t had much time to read many of them, but there appear to be several primers for beginners and others who are jumping into the game late. Read through this, for some really crazy stuff. Alas, I’m afraid I won’t have time to participate, but I love the idea.
