I’ve been keeping an eye on the ARG Art of the Heist and really enjoyed the player events (eg: players meeting in-game characters and stealing a card from a car in a dealership). I’ve been working on the emails– they are listed out of order and so I think there is some message there. Oh, and here are the Top Ten Reasons to Play Art of the Heist
But I’ve also checked out Perplex City and had a freak event happen for me. I went to look at the
Project Sysygy page, I then clicked and entered the Perplex City page. Then, without any idea what happened, suddenly a page from the Sydney Morning Herald (a paper in my country) was opening up. It asked me to register, which I did, and then took me to an article on Perplex City. That was really freaky. I then checked out a video (which was released the beginning with clues of newspapers around the world to check on particular days for more clues). The article I saw was not on the video — the article is too recent. So I went back to the Perplex City page to figure out what happened and noticed that there are alot of hyperlinks that are hidden (not indicated on the page). Then I read through the forums and found a post saying that players should refresh their page because more links have been added. So, they all know about it.
But gee that was exciting. There were 2 things I really enjoyed about the experience: 1) I thought I may have discovered something that would help the game; 2) I enjoyed the idea that the news site opened up because of my presence at the webpage (popup). I felt like there was an intelligent design out there taking me somewhere important. The adult equivalent of having a person sit behind you acting as your hands.
But anyway, here is an in-game site for Perplex City which is very funny: Whipsmart. And here some others:
in-game media:
‘Blurring the line between games and life’, news.com, 28th Feb
in-game sites:
Perplex City Academy
video
Abbey Road Studios
Mind Candy
Perplex City Newspaper
Scarlette Kite blog
Quirky Acuity blog
Firebox
Open Design Agency