ARGNet Insider - Issue 3.3
Closing out the year with some big news: solving Perplex City's "Billion to One" card by finding Satoshi, playing around with proximity chat, and trying different models of remote puzzling
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While I wasn't planning to close out 2020 with a last minute newsletter, the news that Perplex City's notoriously unsolved "Billion to One" card finally got solved after 14 years warranted an update. As you might imagine from the list below, the past few months have been packed with puzzling opportunities, and early 2021 will be no different, as ✈️✈️✈️Galactic Trendsetters✈️✈️✈️ will be running what might be the first fully remote MIT Mystery Hunt in the hunt's 40 year history.
- Inside the Box with David Kwong - Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I convinced my parents to join me for Kwong's online puzzle show, done in conjunction with the Geffen Playhouse theater. Framed as a Zoom game show with print-and-play "homework" to complete, Kwong paired stories about the history of puzzling with actual challenges for audience members to complete, both separately and as a group. As is often the case with Kwong's projects, the show was a love letter to puzzling and wordplay, and the whole family really got into the fun.
- Post Haste with Great Gotham Challenge - While Great Gotham Challenge typically focuses on city-wide puzzle hunts through the streets of NYC (I attended one of their events with the No Proscenium crew last year), they've launched a few remote experiences in 2020, with an interesting twist: sign up your team of four, and everyone gets mailed puzzle packs.
I signed up for GGC's Post Haste experience earlier in December, done in partnership with PostCurious (you might remember them from our Emerald Flame coverage), and I'm definitely hanging onto a few of those puzzles as examples of brilliant physical puzzle design. For those of you who played along: the transparency, dollhouse, and finale puzzles will be sticking with me for quite some time.
- Club Drosselmeyer Goes Radio Play - As with the Great Gotham Challenge, Green Door Labs' Club Drosselmeyer is typically a live event, combining immersive theater, puzzles, and swing dance into a loose retelling of the Nutcracker. This year, they adapted that format and made it a dynamic radio play, where your actions across an automated phone tree (with the potential for live interactions during the scheduled showtimes) dictates how the radio show progresses. The game has one of seven endings, based on your team's actions.
I was working the phone lines for our team, who insist I attempted to flirt our way to victory with every phone interaction.
- The Age of the Tabletop Puzzle Game - ArsTechnica's Kate Cox wrote a brilliant article summarizing the rise of the "tabletop puzzle game".
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Last...Year at ARGNet: 2020 So Far
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Thickett Mixes Theater and Game with Fairy Tale Quests
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Cirque du Nuit's Thickett is a fortnightly immersive theater production that sends players into a fantasy world to "re-right" classic fables, using the proximity chat service Topia. While each of the show's six "Quests" operates as a standalone experience, clues and puzzles hidden within each episode form a broader meta-narrative for returning guests.
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Perplex City 100% Complete: Satoshi Found, 14 Years Later
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It's been over a decade since Perplex City released the puzzle card "Billion to One", asking players to track down a man based only on the picture to the left, and the name "Satoshi". Thanks to breakthroughs in facial recognition technology, Tom-Lucas Säger (th0may) managed to solve a long-standing test of the small world phenomenon, without actually relying on small world phenomenon tricks.
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ARGNet Insider: Final Thoughts
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As a side effect of running ARGNet, I'm more likely to lurk through games rather than actively play them. However, I've really gotten into Thickett over the past few months, and even put together a Player's Guide to summarize the meta-narrative, and explain how the various puzzles were solved.
While some alternate reality games work to build in-game summaries directly into the experience (True Blood's Blood Copy Reports that were aired on HBO is one of my favorite examples of that in action), all too often it's left to the fans to create the archives and narrative retellings that allow people to vicariously experience games, whether during the run or years after. And those narrative retellings can take quite a few forms.
Going as far back as Metacortex, players gathered together to produce the Project MU book, a physical artifact retelling events. Blog-style updates have also been common, like Rowan's WonderWeasels guides - most recently, she tackled Holovista's Mesmer and Braid ARG. Wikis have also been popular, with Geoff May's Wikibruce forming the backbone of broad swaths of ARGish history.
Most ARG archives, however, operate under the assumption that all puzzle solutions should be freely displayed, because everyone is working to advance the narrative together. As ARGs overlap with the more spoiler-averse immersive theater, escape room, and puzzle communities, norms have evolved. For games where puzzles were designed with single player or small group solving in mind, archives take on more of a hint structure. The MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle archives are a perfect example of that, archiving 26 years of puzzle hunts and giving visitors the chance to look at just the puzzle, or both puzzle and solution.
For the first round of Unknown 9's Leap Year Society ARG, I programmed a series of chatbots to guide players through the puzzles without giving the final solutions. For the current round of puzzles, players one-upped that by creating a multimedia guide using Dynalist. And for most (if not all) of the tabletop puzzle games and online hunts, hint structures are built directly into the tool.
I hope everyone has a wonderful 2021, and thanks for going the extra mile in making 2020 such a special one, in spite of everything else going on. It may have been a rough year in many senses, but it was also a year of truly inspired creativity from so many.
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