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Secret 0 – Through the Lens: Read the bolded letters. This will give you a hint or answer to the rest of the secrets
      • GO DOWN LEFT SIDE

Secret 1 – Claustrophobia: Left letters are DARK SCORE COM BOB
      • DARKSCORE.COM/BOB

Secret 2 – Haunted: Left letters are BITLY JGGVARF
      • BIT.LY/JGGVARF

Secret 3 – Reverberations: Left letters are NINETEEN AFTER B. Take the 19th letter after every B.

bratingwithinourmind
butitseffectcanalsoa
bolofthelatterkindfr
btfulthatheeventhink
blyheisunawareofthis
basicdiscussiontopic
backtotidwellhehasro
bluesrecordsoverther
beenusedinatidwellre
brandshemadehermusic
blishmentfeelslikemo
brokennecksstandmaim
blesamorgueformusico
beforethismodernityd
byfixatinguponlongde

      • DARKSCORE.COM/ODE

Secret 4 – Holy Ground: Left letters are A PRIMED PUMP. Count out primes.

ad
rea
rynor
thwindk
eepsthenois
eoftheprayerc
losebythesomberwo
maninblackrecitesgr
imlyagainandagainshespe
aksherincantationwithmethodic
alstridefrommonumenttomonumento
fferingpeacetothedeadeachhymnreaffirm
sherprovidingmoredevotiontohergrimtaskshe
refusestociteapurposeforhermonthlyritualson
lyanunflaggingdesiretohonorthesoulsunderthemoss
yearththeseareblamelessshesaysplacingherfingersonthen
earbysmallstonesheleavesaroseanotherchildsgravenomemorialsa
reinscribedwithcauseofdeathbutbrendameservesheartbrokenappear
ancesuggestsdarkbusinessindeedshesaysshesahousekeepershesaysmenmake
messesittakesalongtimetomopupwhatsbeenspilledsherecognizesmylackofunder
standingshetellsmetobegratefulidontunderstandshegoesbacktothestonesandros
esandhermantraaboutthelordsprotection

      • DARKSCORE.COM/ENSNARERS

Secret 5 – Another Man’s Treasure: Left letters are DOT DASH DASH. Read off morse code.

-… .. – .-.. -.– .- -… — — .. -. .- – .. — -. …

      • BIT.LY/ABOMINATIONS

Secret 6 – Fresh Meat: Left letters are DEAD SPACES. Find misspelled words and add letter.

lifeBlood
iconIc
scraTched
procLamations
daYs
cRuising
wAitress
counteR
coffeEs
responsiBilities
qUiet
stoRies
hunGer
lEave
muRmurs

      • BIT.LY/RAREBURGER

Secret 7 – Dark Farewell: Left letters are ET TU SQUARE. Looking closely at the text image, there are a number of letters that have a faint green tinge to them instead of being gray. Group them by fours and then read down (aka a Caesar Square):
DSEF
ACCU
ROOR
KRMY

      • DARKSCORE.COM/FURY

Thanks to amandel77 and mjandersen for helping out on this as well.

• Oliver Drew, an Occult Transmedia producer, arrives in San Francisco for the StoryWorld Conference.
  • His website http://zoetrap.com gives a brief biography and lists several inventions having to do with the paranormal.
  • His twitter name is @_zoetrap. Included among his tweets are a couple of seances that he has performed.
• In the early morning of October 31st, Oliver decided to hold yet another seance, this time using his zoetrope. It did not go well. Communication from Oliver is abruptly cut off.
• Come daybreak, it has become clear that Oliver is missing. His girlfriend @eva_lake asks people to check in on his at his room in the Parc 55 Hotel.
  • Visitors to Room 2413 would have found a chaotic crime scene, complete with a message written backwards in blood on the mirror. The zoetrope is found on a table surrounded by tarot cards.
  • They also find a QR code on Oliver’s pillow that unlocks a Phone Security message that gives you a hint as to how to unlock the hexed folder. The answer to the clue “How many Tarot cards in the major arcana?” is 22 – or XXII if you use Roman numerals like those on many Tarot card decks.
• The Paranormal Press has also heard about Oliver’s disappearance and wrote an article about it. Included in the article is a QR code that leads to an iTunes app that connects your phone with Oliver’s.
• Oliver’s phone contains a number of different things you can interact with.
  • Mail: Lots of different emails from a variety of people. Sadly, there is not an online archive of the email texts that I know about. Biggest item of note is the fact that Oliver was researching an Arthur Warburton Lytton who was an inmate in Alcatraz who was known simply by the name “Prisoner L” (based upon the cellblock where he was held). Along with his inquiries at Alcatraz, Oliver was also going to talk to a Marianne Lytton Miller, the great-granddauther of Arthur.
  • Phone: Takes you to all the voice mails that Oliver’s phone has received (which are archived at Audioboo). Several are from Eva wondering where Oli is. One is from a PC Dave Watts wanting to talk to Oliver about an incident involving Marianne Lytton Miller on August 12, 2011. There are also several paranormal calls that come through during your use of the phone that get saved to voicemail.
  • Docs: Protected by a 3 word phrase. The phrase needs to be successfully entered in order to break the hex on Oliver’s phone.
  • Calendar: Calendar of events leading up to and through the StoryWorld Conference.
  • Twitter: List of tweets with the #swc11 hashtag.
  • Scanner: QR Code scanner
• While StoryWorld participants visited Oliver’s room all day to look for clues, Oliver’s phone updated a number of times with new emails, voice mails and clues.
  • Prisoner L emails a video of himself obsessing over the zoetrope.
  • A paranormal call comes in from The Fool. He seems to be begging for his life and asking Lytton to spare him.
  • A paranormal call comes in from The Lover. She talks about her husband (presumably Lytton) and how he was charming in public but cruel in private. She showed him an immortality spell that he became obsessed with.
  • Another email from Prisoner L. Talks about how close he is to completing his great work and that he just needs a few more souls.
  • A email from an unexplained contact comes in with a video showing Oliver sitting near a spinning zoetrope with Prisoner L’s voice in the background goading him on.
• A black envelope starts circulating around SWC11. Inside is a couple of cards. One is of The Hanged Man Tarot card with a strange letter I in the corner. On the back is a QR code unlocks a Map that points to Union Square in San Francisco.
• At the location marked on the map, players found a sign with a bit.ly address that took them to an audio recording of a fight between Oliver and Eva. Eva mentions how Oliver has been shouting a strange word (Capti) in his sleep.
• New evidence is found in one of the elevators at SWC11. Scanning the code unlocks a phone call from Oliver who sounds as if he was trapped inside the elevator.
• Around the same time as the elevator evidence was being discovered, a new unknown paranormal email came. It’s a video of Oliver begging to be let out. He tells us that we need to remember the word that Eva said he shouted in his sleep. That word is “Capti”.
• During the evening of November 2nd, @LEldritch starts tweeting about how one of his cards from his Lytton Tarot deck has gone missing. It was The Hanged Man card and it had been last used in a Tarot reading for Oliver. Looking through his other cards, he discovers that some of them have unexplained writing on them. He then tweets a picture of the recreated Tarot reading as well as how to read a Celtic Cross pattern. Reading the letters in the order given by the pattern, you get:

  1. The Chariot A
  2. The Magician N
  3. The Tower A
  4. The Devil M
  5. The Hanged Man I
  6. Judgement S

  ANAMIS isn’t a known word, but anagramming leads to ANIMAS or MANIAS as possible words.

• Putting together the three main clues that we’ve been given, it is now possible (after trying several different combinations of words) to unlock the hexed documents folder:
  

  I: How many Tarot cards in the major arcana? XXII
  II: What is the word that Oliver said in his sleep? Capti
  III: What is the word spelled out by Oliver’s Tarot reading? Animas

  Inputting “XXII Capti Animas” into password prompts unlocks a Psychic Pass that tells of a jury of peers that will decide the fate of Oliver Drew. Soon afterwards, zoetrap.com updates with information on the Night of the Dead.

  FIND OUT WHAT’S HAPPENED TO OLIVER DREW AND DECIDE HIS FATE
  VENUE: CELLAR BAR, SAN FRANCISCO, 685 SUTTER STREET
  TIME: 7.30PM

  Happily, the website promises that what happens at the bar will be repeated online so those at home will be able to see what happens.

• Two new phone calls are received on November 2nd:
  • The first is from Marianne Lytton Miller. She talks about how her family was cursed by the zoetrope. She also tells how she was murdered by a man who wanted the zoetrope.
  • The second is Oliver pleading for help. It sounds like (and the attached photo seems to confirm) that he’s slowly being hung to death. He begs us to find him before he dies because then HE will come after us. [I actually never got this phone call so not sure if it was unlocked with a QR code or not.]
  • Both of these calls help to make sense of a tweet from Eva talking about Oliver’s seance activities. It seems several words came up: ‘Help me, hanged’ ‘Trapped Damned’ ‘Cursed Miller’ ‘Murders’ and 12 August 2011. [I'm willing to bet that Marianne was murdered on 12 August. But the question is: Who killed her? Oliver? An immortal Arthur Lytton? An insane Oliver possessed by Arthur Lytton?]
• Players at StoryWorld started finding pamphlets written by @LEldritch talking about Haunted San Francisco. On the back is another QR code that unlocks a new call from Marianne Lytton Miller. She says that we have a choice to make and that we shouldn’t make the wrong decision. She tell us to enter the three word code to find out what we’re needed for.
• I don’t have exact details as to what happened at the Cellar Bar, but around 8:30 PDT, zoetrap.com updated with a new video from Marianne. [I never got this video so I'm unsure if it was just released to the web or was supposed to be received by Oliver's phone.] She tells us we must decide the fate of Oliver. But there’s a catch – Oliver is the man that murdered her to get Prisoner L’s zoetrope.
  • Prisoner L, Arthur Warburton Lytton, was trying to kill 22 people and capture their souls according to the cards in the Major Arcana. He had killed 21 before he was captured and eventually died. When Oliver took the zoetrope, Prisoner L started coming after him since Oliver was the last soul – The Hanged Man. So now Oliver has become trapped in the zoetrope. Marianne tells us it is our choice to either leave Oliver trapped within the zoetrope (a place of pure pain and anguish) or to show him the mercy he did not show her and free him.
• The players in San Francisco voted to condemn Oliver. [I voted to free him because I wasn't completely convinced that he wasn't being controlled by Prisoner L/the zoetrope when he killed Marianne. I also wasn't convinced that giving Prisoner L his 22nd soul was a good idea. But I was overruled.]
  • After he was condemned, a new video from Oliver appeared on the website. [This video never appeared on my app also so no idea if it was supposed to or not.] It seems the players in San Francisco made the correct choice because Oliver is completely unrepentant about killing Marianne. She wasn’t using the zoetrope to its full potential and he was going to change that. Oliver shouts that he’s coming for our souls next, but Prisoner L starts spinning the zoetrope and Oliver screams for mercy. The video ends with Prisoner L reciting something in Latin – and @_zoetrap’s Twitter starts repeating that same phrase.
• And that’s where things end. Marianne is avenged, Oliver is condemned, and Prisoner L gathers his 22nd victim. Eva decides it’s all too much and heads back home. [I wonder if PC Dave Watts will question her about Oliver's whereabouts when she gets home.] No idea where the zoetrope is – but I’m hoping that it doesn’t fall into the hands of LEldtritch. I’m not sure he would be the best person to have it.

By the way, if you enjoyed the game and want special swag from the game (or even just to help financially support an indie game), there is still a little bit of time left on the Zoetrap IndieGoGo fundraising campaign. Who wouldn’t want a freaky tarot card or postcard from a homicidal spirit?

As it turns out, I apparently missed the window for these auto-responses. Despite being found less than 24 hours ago by players, 2 of the 3 reported no longer work. I’ve tried with two different email addresses and have gotten nothing. As a player who has been following this game for several days, but is yet not tied to the computer 24/7, I find it very odd that the PMs would take away one of the main avenues to advance further in the game with no real explanation. And this is the second time that an auto-response necessary for advancement has been removed. At least the first time the next step was given out directly by the main character, but so far a quick glance at the current main page of the game has nothing about it. Yes, there are other groups talking about it – but not everyone is playing with a group (or even wants to attempt to join a closed group).

So, being the type of out-spoken person that I am about these things, I sent off an email to idecidewhatthefuturebrings@yahoo.com and yourfriendsaremyfriends@gmail.com expressing my displeasure. Since I have no idea if those accounts are being monitored at all, I’m posting my email publicly so that I can point it to them over Facebook and Twitter. This is not the only problem that I’ve encountered with the game, but I think it’s one of the biggest since I believe it completely impacts outlying players of the game.

to: idecidewhatthefuturebrings@yahoo.com, yourfriendsaremyfriends@gmail.com
date: Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 9:19 PM
subject: Seriously.. if you are going to have an auto-reply…

to send out clues in – THEY SHOULD WORK FOR OVER 24 HOURS!

Otherwise, what’s the point in having them? Is it just to give the people who stay up all night something special to talk about with people who have to go to work in the morning? It’s bad enough trying to follow what’s going on through all the crap being thrown around on Facebook – but to not allow others to get a chance to get caught up on their own without wallowing through that pile of shit is ridiculous. I somewhat accepted the utterly crappy way you handed AcornWallpaper and that wild goose chase you sent us on (did you ask for permission to use those thumbnails or did you just steal them from DesignYourWall.com?) I can understand sort of how you could mistype McArthur for MacArthur (but still it’s sloppy. No beta testers on your team?) But you know, 3 times is not the charm for you. It’s no longer just simple mistakes. It’s becoming a pattern utter disdain for the people actually trying to follow this. And I’m here to tell that it’s not okay. It’s really not. It reflects badly on you as a PM team. It reflects badly on Intel and Toshiba. It reflects badly on the entire game. Stop leaving your players out of the dark for no good reason.

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I first started following the launch of Pandemic 1.0 at around 9:15am EST (unless otherwise noted, all future times will be EST) on Saturday, January 22nd when I was told in the #unfiction IRC chatroom that the countdown on HopeIsMissing.com would be ending in 45 minutes. As I had nothing better to do on a bitterly cold and snowy day, I decided to wait the countdown out. I had read several articles on Pandemic and was interested to see what would happen.

In order to kill some time before the countdown hit zero, I decided to start following the Pandemic Twitter story that was starting to play out. There were 20 different Twitter characters to follow and they were all using the #pandemic11 hashtag in their tweets. This is when I discovered the first two problems with this launch.

• All of the twitter accounts had (basically) the same generic avatar. There was some background color variation, but no avatar was unique. This made it much harder to follow the individual stories as you had to double check the name on each tweet instead of just relying on the visual avatar clues.
• The characters use of the #pandemic11 hashtag quickly overwhelmed the actual buzz of the game. While it was great to be introduced to the characters through the hashtag, pretty soon that’s all you were able to see. Any outside mention of #pandemic11 quickly became buried when another 5-10 tweets came through from the characters.

The non-unique Twitter avatars really bothered me. It might not have been so bad if there were only three or four characters, but with twenty different people tweeting rather rapidly, it quickly became a mess in my mind. As a result, I started focusing on just one group of characters (who I nicknamed the Purple People because of their purple avatar background) and that helped a bit, but I know I missed out on a lot of what was happening within the entire group.

I had better luck with a workaround for the #pandemic11 spam. I was able to set up my desktop Twitter client so that I could have one stream of just the characters (using a Twitter list I had set up) and one stream for #pandemic11 that had a filter set up to remove the character’s tweets. Luckily all of the character names had the same suffix (_HiM) so the filter was possible because otherwise the #pandemic11 search would have been practically useless.

Unfortunately, both of those issues were minor cosmetic flaws compared to what happened when the countdown was scheduled to hit zero at 10:00am.

• The countdown reset itself. Instead of being greeted with a new page and something to do, there was another countdown with 2 hours left on it.

Usually when I see countdowns in ARGs end, the biggest problem is that the site temporarily goes down with everyone pounding it with refreshes or because someone didn’t upload the next asset in time. Having the countdown reset was a new one but certainly not anything good.

But at this point, I was willing to wave it off as the game just needing a little more time to launch. Had I known at the time that the countdown was supposed to go off several hours before (12:00am MST, January 22nd), I’m not so sure I would been as willing to dismiss the countdown failure as something that just sometimes happens.

It was bad enough thinking that I would have to wait until 12:00pm to see the countdown end. At around 11:00am, I checked back, and the countdown had jumped up to 3 hours remaining and would now end at 2:00pm. This did not amuse me in the slightest.

With 3 hours now to waste, I decided to try to follow the Twitter story a little more closely, since that was the only thing that seemed to be working. Except the more I looked at it, the less it made sense. It was disconcerting enough to see that some characters appeared to be in school on a Saturday, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The next problem I noticed was that it looked like the Twitter stream of two characters (Blake and Deshawn) had gotten crossed. Blake was talking about using a fake id for no discernible reason, while Deshawn had earlier made comments about going clubbing and having a friend being carded and kicked out.

But the worst issue with the Twitter story is that the timeline was severely compressed. While I never did any in-depth analysis of the timelines, I developed the impression that each hour that passed for me was one complete day for the 20 Tweeters. It was the only reason I could come up with (beyond someone behind-the-scenes completely screwing up) why characters would refer to events that they tweeted about 15 minutes earlier as occurring “yesterday”. The whole thing was so bizarre that I had no idea if it was by design or just a giant error. But since the Twitter story kept progressing and people kept tweeting about it, I had to accept the idea that this might just be the way it was planned (which of course brought up more issues as to why anyone would give a compressed timeline story through a medium such as Twitter.) By 12:15pm, the combination of the crossed character streams and the out-of-whack timeline meant that I could no longer follow what was happening. I abandoned the only part of the game that was active and just decided to wait out the countdown.

The 2:00pm countdown came and went and this time 6 hours were added on so that it would end at 8:00pm. I am flabbergasted. I’m also livid that absolutely nothing happened other than more time being added. I have no idea if these delays are because something is severely wrong or if they are by design. Either way, the words “gross incompetence” keep running through my head. Especially when the only tweet (at this point) on @HopeIsMissing is “All systems are stable and online #pandemic11″.

Six hours to kill. I keep seeing tweets about how the Twitter story is going on. I wonder if anyone actually looked at it for more than 5 seconds since it’s otherwise incomprehensible. It gets worse at around 5:00pm when the characters start repeating the tweets that they sent out earlier in the day. At least one character (@Blake_HiM) deleted his previous tweets, but others (@Carmen_HiM) have both sets still visible in their timeline. No idea what to think anymore as it is still completely silent from the Powers-That-Be.

The 8:00pm countdown comes and goes and leaves another 60 minutes for us to wait. At this point, the only people using the #pandemic11 hashtag are myself and three other countdown watchers. We are not being particularly kind. I hear a theory that maybe the reason for the silence is because there is an issue with the internet access in Park City, but that’s a hard theory to believe since a: the countdown was being reset differently each time and b: someone was able to post photos of Day 1 onto the Facebook page at 8:08pm.

The 9:00pm countdown end was the worst of all. Either someone broke the server or they added in a new script, because everytime the page was refreshed, a different time would show on the countdown clock. My opinion now becomes one of that we’re just being trolled. The whole thing has gotten completely out of hand but no one seems to care other than those of us who are watching the server meltdown. I once again mention how much I would love to see someone official say “Sorry, we’re experiencing problems. Please excuse us.” Imagine my surprise when I got my wish.

With that one little tweet, the entire mood surrounding the #pandemic11 Twitter stream turned around. Although not the type of official confirmation of problems I was looking for, a message from Chuck Wendig was the next best thing since I knew he had worked on Pandemic 1.0 and thus probably had insider information. I then got word that one of my countdown buddies was talking to someone behind the scenes and that “It’s all coming together.” So just like that, the main drama of the past 11 hours was over despite the fact that the game still hadn’t launched.

The game did eventually launch a relatively short time later with very little fanfare. I could write another whole post about making the trailhead site easily accessible and understandable for audiences (especially for those people who probably have never played an ARG before) but that will have to wait for another day. But I will say that if the countdowns hadn’t turned me off of the game, the control panel definitely would have. Maybe the only redeeming feature of the game is that the Twitter story has finally stabilized and you can actual interact with the various characters, but unfortunately it came way too late for me to want to get involved.

So what do I want Puppetmasters to learn from all of this? Simply this one word idea:

TRANSPARENCY

There is nothing more maddening for a player than to see a game that they’ve been involved in (for however long or short a period) suddenly veer off the tracks and stop communicating. Imagine watching a play where suddenly all the actors stop in their tracks and do absolutely nothing. Is something wrong? Is it part of the play? At what point do you begin to feel uncomfortable that nothing is happening up on the stage? Unless you’re watching Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark (and thus have been warned that the show may have issues), I would imagine that it wouldn’t be very long before you started getting upset that no one is explaining what is happening (or not happening) up on stage.

And that is exactly what happens to players when Puppetmasters decide to remain silent when they start having severe issues behind the scenes. First they are confused. Then they become upset. And given enough time, they can start to act out against the very people they are supposed to be supporting.

Now I’m not saying that players need to be given every last detail about what has gone wrong in the game. In most cases a simple “I’m sorry. Please excuse the mess/wait/problems.” would suffice to keep players calm until the issues have been dealt with. If you really want to make them happy, bribe them to wait around. Just don’t let them sit around in the dark forever because not only is it disrespectful to your players, you may not have any players around when you do come back.

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When I first started looking at Help Us Escape (HUE), there wasn’t anything to do as the Savage County movie hadn’t aired yet. So instead I did some Google searches on Savage County to see if I could learn anything about it. That is led me to SavageCountyGazette.com and how I found out about the Where Is Dorothy Kramer? campaign.

Where Is Dorothy Kramer? (WIDK) was the prequel to Savage County and focused on the disappearance and search for Dorothy Kramer, a high school student in Savage County. I was quite impressed that the story for WIDK went back over a month. This made me quite excited about playing HUE, because I figured if what I thought was the pre-game was over a month long, the ARG proper would be long and expansive.

With this in mind, I figured an ARG with so much potential material might require a guide, so I started writing up the WIDK storyline while waiting for the HUE game to start. It had been a while since I had done any guide writing so I was a little out of practice. That meant that it was taking me longer than normal to get stuff written down, but I didn’t feel rushed since I thought there would be a long timeline ahead of me. I think it took about a week, writing a couple of hours a day, to get about 90% of the guide to both WIDK and HUE written. I had noticed that there were very few updates for WIDK on weekends, so I had planned to finish the guide over the weekend and get the whole thing posted by the time new updates came in on Monday.

Then Help Us Escape ended. Well, crap.

When I got the ending video, my first thought was “That’s it?!” I was completely floored that the game would end in just a week. Nothing had happened! Even the ARGN article on the game had me completely confused. While it mentions that HUE would only be running for 7 to 10 days, the article was posted less than a day before the game ended, making me wonder what was the point of alerting players to a new game that would be ending in a few short hours. It’s not like there was some massive live event for them to partake in that could be enjoyed without having played the rest of the game. So I was left completely bewildered (and more than a bit upset) by the turn of events, wondering if it was possible that the game would continue. The final video did have a bit of an open ending, so it was possible, but I was not hopeful.

Luckily, or unluckily as the case may be, my confusion about the game ending was soon laid to rest as @slackmistress confirmed that the game had ended. So now I was left to ponder just why I was so upset at the whole thing.

Obviously my own preconceptions about what the HUE would be came into play. I figured the ARG would be at least a month long and it would have a nice fleshed out story. What I got was a week of skimpy blog posts that barely moved the storyline from the Savage County movie. It was like expecting a steak dinner at a nice restaurant and being taken to McDonald’s instead. So that upset me more than a bit.

The problem stems from the fact that my preconceptions come directly from the entire transmedia campaign of Savage County itself. While I’m sure that some of the assumptions I made came from the bias I have towards particular types of games and my knowledge that Nina Bargiel had also worked on Valmont, I do believe that most of my ideas about what HUE would be came directly from what I saw in WIDK. WIDK ran for about a month but the earliest assets went back two months. It had a fairly decent storyline that included a lot of nice little touches that made the world seem real (the Historical Society pictures and the random Help Wanted ads). You could interact with the characters on Twitter and Facebook. And trying to figure out what happened to Dorothy required some keen observation in order to find the various pieces of evidence that were scattered over the websites.

It’s a tale of two ARGs. I know that Nina Bargiel said that WIDK “had ARG elements but [it] wasn’t a traditional ARG” but I can’t help to think she is wrong about that. To me, the fact that WIDK had not only a stronger storyline but more weight in terms of content makes it more of an ARG than HUE. In my opinion, HUE was really nothing more than a story driven puzzle trail. You were given a ‘puzzle’ (find Noah, figure out a name, discover a location) which when ‘solved’ would give you a password that would unlock the next puzzle. Repeat as necessary until the end of the game. And while I do enjoy participating in puzzle trails (ask anyone in #unfiction), I do not find them enjoyable when employed in ARGs, let alone becoming the entire basis for one.

The more I’ve thought about HUE and the way it played out, the sadder I become about it. Not because I tricked myself into thinking it was one type of game when it was another, but because of how widely it missed the mark of being a decent, if not really good, ARG. At the end of the ARGN article, Nina Bargiel is quoted as saying that she opted for “something incredibly casual, because I knew that there would be new people coming in post-movie and I didn’t want to scare anyone off.” Personally, I don’t see HUE as being a casual ARG. Simple, yes, but not at all casual. I know if you asked 10 different people what a casual ARG would be, you would get 10 different responses, but in my opinion, a casual ARG would be one that didn’t require a lot of commitment, of time and/or effort, to follow along with the majority of the game. Or, in other words, a lurker-friendly ARG, where one could actively participate if they wanted to, but if not, the game would allow them to carry on.

Does HUE fit my personal definition of what a casual ARG would be? Certainly there wasn’t a huge time commitment. Checking in for five minutes a day would be sufficient to catch up on what had happened. But what about the effort the average player had to put in? In order to have access to all of the blog posts and the final video (without utilizing a site like Unfiction), a player would have to send 3 emails, check 2 Twitter accounts (following one of them), place a phone call, and solve two puzzles. I know that it doesn’t sound that much effort to expect a player to do. I’m sure most people do more than that in their first 30 minutes at work. But it’s not the physical exertion that makes those tasks into a large effort. It’s the idea that the player has to complete each task in order to move on vs allowing the player to skip any individual task and catching them up on what they had missed. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal stories about how each time players encounter a gate in an ARG, X amount of them drop out. If any of those stories are true, it wouldn’t bode well for an ARG with nothing but a gate to pass at each stage. With that in mind, HUE would not be a casual ARG (under my definition), but WIDK would be since Caitlyn and Isabel walk players through everything on their blog.

Now here is the part I’m most sad about. We have an ARG that required players to care enough about the characters to continue to move themselves through the game and the reward they got was hardly worth it. A 17 second Youtube video that said ‘Thanks’ before the main character is possibly kidnapped again? What was the point? To advance the story of Savage County? In what way was it advanced beyond the movie? The end of the movie has Noah and Izzie escaped from the Hardells, although Izzie may be in trouble with the Sheriff’s Deputy riding in the ambulance with her. The end of this game has Noah and Izzie still escaped from the Hardells, although Izzie may be in trouble with the screaming at the end of the video. Okay, so the end of the game also has Holly escaped. But we barely knew who she was, let alone given the chance to care about her as a character. Her name appears on one page of the Gazette and she’s in three panels in the comic (one of which had me convinced that she had already been taken away from the Hardells unharmed) which makes her practically window dressing. So the HUE ARG was about rescuing window dressing. And for that I and other players had to email and call and tweet and various other things. So not worth it.

I think I would have been much happier about HUE had it rewarded the players with a proportional amount of content versus the amount of energy that they put into it. Send an email and get a photograph. Make a phone call and receive a video. Solve a puzzle and get a newspaper update. Work Harline Sue into a tizzy on Twitter and get her all mad at you. (Okay, so that one did happen). Successfully complete the game and get something, anything, more than what you started with. Because otherwise, what’s the point?

Way back towards the beginning of this tl;dr post, I stated that I wrote a guide for Where Is Dorothy Kramer? and Help Us Escape. I will be posting it over at WonderWeasels.org in the next couple of days. I need to run it through a spellchecker and fix a couple formatting issues. I will post the link here and at my Twitter account (@rowan72) when it is available to view.