First a confession: Chris DiBona from Google (and formerly of Slashdot) came in to give a talk at the end of October. He spoke about SciFoo and search and books and lots of other stuff. But I spent the session wrestling with a projector that would only display in magenta, so I didn’t write any notes. Sorry.
Now on to the main feature: Last week we welcomed in Adrian Hon and Chris Thorpe from Mind Candy, creators of the amazing alternate reality game (ARG) Perplex City.
Their work defies categorisation. Perplex City is a fictional world, but one that spans the online and real worlds too. It has a storyline, but also forms a global treasure hunt. And although both story and puzzles can be enjoyed on your own, it’s also very much a shared and collaborative experience for the ‘players’. To my mind it’s also one of the most interesting new publishing ventures of recent years.
Take it away Adrian and Chris…
Adrian Hon
Adrian is in charge of the narrative in Perplex City. (Slides part 1: 9.3 MB PDF. Slides part 2: 5.3 MB PDF)
Perplex City is an alternate reality game (ARG). In the early days, computer games were simple — for example, Pong. Now the PS2 controller has 15 buttons and 2 joysticks, and you need to be trained to use it.
There are exceptions to this trend. For example, Singstar for PS2 is a singing competition, and there’s a guitar equivalent. Everyone knows intuitively how to play these types of games, which has helped to make them successful. The new Nintendo DS and Wii also have intuitive interfaces (a stylus and a ‘wand’, respectively). These allow the games to reach a very broad audience.
Like these games consoles, ARGs mimic reality and employ interfaces that we use every day — like Google, Hotmail and IM.
Perplex City uses puzzle cards. These are sold at bookshops and online. By solving the puzzles you get points. But you also get clues towards the ultimate prize of £100,000 ($200,000). For example, one card contains a number puzzle, the answer to which is a phone number. If you call the number you get further clues towards the main prize.
Perplex City has about three-dozen websites, all of which are updated in real time to help tell the story. For example, some of the fictional characters have blogs, and a fictional pharmaceutical company has a website about its drugs. There is also an online newspaper reporting events inside the (fictional) world.
In short, Perplex City is multimedia storytelling:
- Phone calls (users can receive as well as make calls)
- SMS
- Podcasts
- Music (there is an original CD of music made by a fictional character, and it includes a hidden clue)
- Live radio (fictional characters have been interviewed on real, live radio stations)
- Live events (either online or in the real world)
[Adrian shows a video of live event held in London last year. The players had to find a spy, who turned out to be an imposter within their own group. In the end he escaped by helicopter.]
This is a very different experience to most computer games.
A brief history of ARGs: The first ARG was called The Beast and was used to promote the film AI. Although the film wasn’t much good, the game was very popular. It involved a network of websites that told a story about a fictional character who had supposedly been involved in making the film. I Love Bees was linked to the computer game Halo 2. This attracted an equal mix of men and women. The Lost Experience (based on the TV show Lost). The ARG is used to explain the meaning of the famous numbers in the TV show. Cathy’s Book is a recent book aimed at teenage girls that has online components that link in with the book.
These games develop very strong communities with a shared sense of purpose. The Perplex City wiki has more than 1,000 editors, over 1,000 pages, 13,000 edits, and about 1m page views. Even the Mind Candy staff use this to keep track of what’s happened in Perplex City.
On the backs of the Perplex City puzzle cards are fragments of a map. Some players have recreated this online as a ‘mashable’ map and annotated it. This is all completely user-generated. One puzzle card contains a code that would take one PC about 10,000 years to compute. So the players created a distributed computing platform and devoted 3m computing hours to cracking it (before discovering a bug in the program!). Some players also collaborated to write a book because solving one of the puzzles required the fictional character involved to become a published author.
Demographics: The Average age is 26. There are lots of students and young professionals, but also some much older players. The gender split is 50/50. 50% UK, 41% US (but growing). Most of the rest are from English-speaking nations (Canada, Australia, etc.).
Live events have been held in London, NY, SF, and will probably be held in other countries.
50,000 users, 800,000 cards solved. 1m page views a month, 100,000 unique visitors, 13,000 emails sent to in-game characters.
Perplex City has been going for a year and ‘Season 2’ is in the pipeline. It is still small compared to World of Warcraft (which has 7m players). So Mind Candy want to broaden its appeal and make it easier to take part. One approach will be to provide more episodic content. There will also be more tie-ins and better ways of bringing people together, as well as even better ways of telling stories.
More info:
Chris Thorpe
Chris is Mind Candy’s CTO. He talked about future directions. (Slides: 5.9 MB PDF)
Perplex City was inspired by Kit Williams’ Masquerade. This developed a huge following, but it died out when the golden hare was found.
Perplex City puzzle cards: They are collector’s items. There is a big market for rarer cards on eBay. One card called ‘Billion to One’ inspired the website www.billion2one.org. Someone has created a 3D version of the map, which you can fly through. It makes the fictional world seem more real.
There is now a board game too. It also uses the map, hooking it into the central story, and has been very successful so far.
Mind Candy are now trying to make the puzzles more pervasive, including user-generated puzzles. Their ‘Create your own puzzle’ site has just launched in beta.
For more news, see: blogs.mindcandydesign.com.
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