Who Buried Paul?

Brian Moriarty, a former Infocom employee and author of some classic text adventures such as Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986) and Beyond Zork (1987 has done many excellent lectures at Game Development conferences including Who Buried Paul? a talk about the persistent rumor that Paul Mcartney died in a car crash in 1967 and how many Beatles fans found clues in the Beatles music and album art. Near the end of the talk he suggests mystery solving could be used in games, I believe this may have inspired the the creation of alternate reality games.

Video and transcript of the lecture

ARG. Alternate Reality Games

"Alternate Reality Games not only exist on the web - they call you up, invade your TV show and fly helicopters outside of your house. This talk will provide a quick introduction in ARGs, and focus on how we're using lessons learned from Perplex City Season 1 to make Season 2 a much more fun, more accessible and more immersive experience. Credits: Speaker:Adrian Hon"



I'm starting to think that ARGs are something I might like to get involved in as a job. I don't think I could do it on my own one reason being that I'm not into puzzle making, but doing websites, videos, and minigames for ARGs could be fun.

Digital Storytelling

I've been looking at Alternate reality games (ARG) recently and one of the things that has put me off them is there over complexity, sometimes requiring a high level of maths to solve the puzzles.

In this video from Google Tech Talks Adrian Hon from ARG developer Mind Candy talks about the projects his team worked on that took a different approach to telling stories on the web.




Telling stories in new and interactive ways is something I have been interested in for a while, my project for my first year in Interactive Media "Sparrow" was an experiment in telling a story with interactive elements, it wasn't as interactive as I would have like to make it as then I didn't have the flash skills I do now but its something I would like to revisit.

Click the image to play sparrow