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Thursday, 16 February 2006 |
I received an email earlier today about what appears to be a possible ARG...
Riddle Productions to Debut First Online Game Series: "Stranger Adventures"
launches February 19-25
February 14, 2006 - Santa Monica, CA -
While others are positioned at the starting line of what Variety recently called
"the race to bow the first big-budget event series for the Web," Internet
entrepreneur Chris Tyler and Larry Bridges, President of the international
editing and digital design boutique Red Car, are in the final stretch with
StrangerAdventures.com, an interactive espionage-like adventure-game show where
all viewers can compete for prize money.
"We've been in development for
over a year now and have executed five online trials of the show with over 1,500
players, and the results have been fantastic. Now we're ready to deliver a new
genre of exciting entertainment programming to compete for the prime time TV
audiences," says CEO Chris Tyler. "With reports that Steven Spielberg, Mark
Burnett and other leading Hollywood producers are developing similar programming
for Internet distribution, we're certain the market will develop very quickly
for all consumers to be able to participate and compete in a real game show
experience for millions of dollars in cash and prizes."
The pilot of
StrangerAdventures.com will debut February 19 through February 25 to qualify for
the new Emmy category for original programming created specifically for
non-traditional viewing platforms. Shortly thereafter, the "first season" of
ten episodes will begin, arriving every other week. Future seasons will offer
back-to-back episodes for a 20-week run. Advergaming, guerilla marketing and
branded entertainment legend Larry Bridges, the series' Creative Director, is
directing the pilot and premiere season.
The weeklong pilot, as well as
the following series, will unfold Sunday through Saturday. Each episode will
feature its own central character (the "Stranger") and clues to a 10-digit code
that the Stranger needs the players' help to identify. The clues will not
require any specialized expertise and will piece together like a puzzle. The
first player to crack the code will win the grand prize of $25,000; the second
prize of $10,000 will be divided among every viewer who breaks the code before
time runs out. The value of the prizes will progress weekly as the audience
grows.
The anthology series, which will span different genres, is
designed around first-person stories containing intricate plots in which
brain-teasing clues are embedded. The stories take shape through a series of
graphic-enhanced text-e-mails and live-action video communications the central
character sends viewers. The e-mails will contain several hidden clues or
"Easter eggs and treasure chests," along with "red herrings and head fakes" and
arrive throughout the day via the viewers' personal e-mail. These
communications are aimed at promoting active participation in the adventure
among viewers.
Chris Tyler, founder and creator of Riddle Productions,
LLC and Stranger Adventures, has filed the patent applications integral to
providing the series' cross-media method of storytelling. Tyler's past credits
include the creation and development of Telecom Xtra for Telecom New Zealand,
Access One (OzMail) and Solution 6. He also formerly served as the Internet
subject matter expert for Electronic Data Systems' (EDS) Management Consulting
Group. Tyler, along with Bridges, is working with WGA writers on crafting
upcoming stories. Jan Wieringa, formerly of Propaganda Films and Harmony
Pictures, and Anne-Marie Mackay, formerly of Propaganda Films and Palomar, are
set to executive produce.
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Tuesday, 30 August 2005 |
I was sitting at the picnic table surrounded by my family with my plate
of yummy BBQ goodness when I hear 'the question'. No, it's not
'the question' that most women who are approaching the 30-year-old mark
hear, "So when are you going to go through 42 more hours of labor to
produce another offspring so we can visit you three times over the next
year and ask you how you're planning on losing all the weight from the
pregnancy?". Nope, 'the question' is "So what are
these online game things you play? I heard you won a phone or
something. And you went all the way to New York to meet a bunch of people you met online?" Ugh.
The majority of my extended family has never even used the
internet.
My grandmother doesn't play online solitaire and most of my cousins
have email accounts that they check maybe once every 3 months, if they
check it at all. My dad just calls me on the phone if he wants to
look
up something because calling me is faster than figuring out to use that
stupid mouse thing. My mom will boot up her 56k to download some
spyware every once in a while so I can come over to clean up her
computer. So trying to explain ARGs to these people is not
an easy task.
When I first started playing ARGs, I gave them the full explanation, something like - ARGs
are online games that have characters who interact with you through
email, websites, phone calls and regular mail. There's usually a
series of difficult puzzles that require a group effort to solve so an
entire community will form around the playing of the game. The
game doesn't admit that it's a game, the game makers or PMs as we call
them strive to make the game seem as real as possible so that
players... Then I
watch as their eyes glaze over and their mind starts roaming off to
thoughts of ice fishing or Tuesday's big bingo win.
Over the years I've sort of streamlined my explanation for those I know
will never ever be interested enough to play an ARG. My first
question is usually - Have you seen The Game?
If they say
yes, the rest is pretty easy. I just explain that ARGs are like
The Game, but made for hundreds or thousands of people to play at the
same time. I can usually throw in a couple of stories about real
world
interactions that I've had here and they get a pretty basic grasp of
the genre. If they haven't seen the movie, I've come up with a
couple of other explanations that seem to work well enough that they
get an
idea of what I'm doing and don't think I've fallen into the grasps of
some psycho puzzle worshipping cult...
The Extended Online Murder Mystery Party - In a lot of
ways ARGs are sort of
like a murder mystery party. During both there is some sort of
mystery that
needs to be solved during the course of the game. A murder
mystery party has actors who mingle with party attendees and move the
story along when cued. The actors pretend that they were invited
to the party just like everyone else and never let on that they know
what the mystery is. In the same way, ARGs have characters that
interact with the players through email, phone conversations and chat
to move the story along. They never let on that they are just a
"character" in the ARG. Both murder mystery parties and ARGs
blend real life with fiction on some level.
The Online Scavenger Hunt - ARGs also have similarities with the
scavenger hunts I played as a child. I remember participating in
a puzzle scavenger hunt in middle school. We had to solve puzzles
and collect random items by visiting our neighbors. The trivia
puzzles were quite varied and required knowledge that you could only
acquire by asking many different people with different areas of
"expertise" (this was before the internet was easily accessible).
The random items were things that only some people would have in their
homes. In a way, we had to cooperate with the whole neighborhood
by pooling everyone's knowledge and collection of random worthless
items. There's the same sort of community treasure hunting with
ARGs. Players will scour websites, chats and emails together to
find clues to help solve the mystery of the story. Puzzle will
sometimes require knowledge that only some players will have. Also, ARG
players may have to actually go out into the real world to find clues.
I
drove from Sheboygan to Chicago to find a
wand for Chasing the Wish and down to Milwaukee to answer a
phone call from a character on a payphone for I Love Bees.
Of course, by telling someone an ARG is like an online murder mystery
party or a scavenger hunt doesn't give them a full appreciation of such
a complex genre. But sometimes people aren't looking for a
complex answer. Sometimes people want to know how you got
that Treo from that Audi thing. Or why you went to New York to
meet a bunch of people you've only met on the internet. I learned
quite quickly when I had a job dealing with the public that you can't
teach everything to everyone. Sometimes you have to give them a
little morsel to chew on and they'll figure out the rest themselves (or
return to ask more questions).
There have been numerous attempts to come
up with a concise formal definition of the term ARG. Although I
surely see the
benefits of having a formal definition, it won't really help to explain
ARGs during conversations at a family picnic. We can argue that
we shouldn't dumb down a formal definition for the average joe, but
rather we should educate the average joe to understand the formal
definition. I really don't believe that is the best way to let
the genre expand. ARGs are a new and
growing form of entertainment. We want more people to play.
We want more people to fall in love with the genre. We want our
friends and family to know what we are talking about when we say
'Alternate Reality Games'. We want people to feel that they
can join the community, no matter their familiarity with the internet
or puzzles or games. If I can give someone a rudimentary understanding of ARGs, the next
time they hear the term on the television, read about it in the
newspaper or overhear a conversation at a bus stop they may stop and
take notice. And that's really the first step down the rabbithole.
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