Slashdot Mirror

The specific location will be confirmed nearer the date. Honestly, it will. We're not going to make you hunt for it or anything. We jsut haven't finalised the party plan yet

Got that right. Fits in nicely with their promotion:
"The videos will be rated and watched by the public for two weeks. (Feel free to run your own promotional campaign to drum up interest.) The film with the most 'views' at 5pm BST on Thursday 8 June will be declared the ubervideo, king of all digital films, and winner of the top prize as described above." from; http://www.perplexcity.com/community/competitions/ video/index.qbuild
This /. post is purely for the gain of people involved and has no news merit

Other Alternate Reality Games have been a bit more successful. Home-grown games are numerous and plentiful. Corporate engines include I Love Bees, where people were asked to answer pay-phone calls all over the country to unravel a story, and the quite successful Perplex City, which employs collectible cards and a dozen websites to tell a story.

ARGs typically exist on the web primarily, so quite a bit different fFrom this interesting "escape" game. Really though, I hope they ask Jane McGonigal's input. She knows her stuff, yo.

It seems to me that a bigger problem with the ARG genre is that the creators are often hidden till game end. Given that the game experience depends to a large extent on the quality of the writing and game design, you'd only want to play the ones which are designed by competent teams unless you had a lot of free time.

For example, the parent says that only 4orty2wo creates decent games - but you don't know whether it's them when the game starts. By the time you know, you've missed some or all of the game.

I think sooner or later that game designers will realise this and start "branding" games so fans of a previous game will be attracted to their next effort. Mind Candy did this for Perplex City but as far as I know 4orty2wo hasn't (please correct me if I'm wrong).

as the author of the Joystiq article in question, I'd totally recommend Perplex City. Crazy, futuristic, with a real money prize and puzzle cards to collect.

Getting started with ARGs is always the hardest part both for players and designers. Most people fall down the rabbit-hole by accident :)

A couple of pieces of evidence to the contrary

www.perplexcity.com - Commercially viable ARG

www.4orty2wo.com - Company that makes ARG for a living (behind I Love Bees, The Beast, and Last Call Poker)
(they're doing just fine thank you.) :)

www.gmdstudios.com (another company that makes ARG for a living)

I could really enjoy a multiplayer cooperative puzzle solving game that didn't require every member of a group to be online at the same time. Imagine some of those simple puzzles they put in newspapers (crosswords, soduko, cryptoquotes, etc.) of massive size where a group of six or so friends could get online together and work cooperatively towards solving it, or any one of you could get back on at your liesure and put 30 minutes into solving a tiny part of it. Imagine massive puzzles of various types that are aggregates of smaller puzzles and as each smaller piece is solved, the larger puzzle inches closer towards the final solution.

You have just perfectly described an Alternate Reality Game. One that may interest you right now is Perplex City. I'm addicted, there are puzzle cards, online mysteries and live events to go to, no fees (the puzzle cards cost money, but this is unusual in an ARG) and my brain is getting one of the best workouts I've ever gotten from a "game".

Enjoy.