Here’s the tribute that Michelle Senderhauf and I did at this year’s ARGFest:

I wasn’t really surprised when it happened. After all, I’d been having the dreams for years. A slow drift up, a kicking off, and I was afloat. Like air was water. Like I was on the moon.

Most people, when they have flying dreams, imagine themselves zipping high through the air, looking down at the ant-like specks of people below. Zooming, like a jet. Targeted. Ballistic. Not me. I dream-fly in lazy, languid arcs, a casual flick off whatever stationary object is nearby used to change my trajectory. More a low-gravity leap than flight, really.

And so the day after the night of a week’s culmination of insomniac tossings and turnings in bed, my consciousness itself was drifting in one of those lazy arcs. I felt caught between the tasks of the day and the siren song of the snippet of dream from the night before (or was it two nights ago?) – I was arm in arm with a friend, and we were skipping in long, powerful leaps across the — oops?

As I daydreamed, I tripped. As I tripped, my dream memory took over and I instinctively leapt. As I leapt, I stayed afloat in the air, wide eyed, afraid to look down in fear that I would encounter Wile E. Coyote Syndrome and reality would come, literally, crashing around my ears.

I extended a leg. Pointed it earthwards. Came drifting gracefully, if a bit wobbly, down. Looked around. Nobody notices anything in this damned city. I’m undetected for now.

So now what? I can float through the air. What sort of heroic incredible power is that? What am I supposed to use it for? I mean, something like this, I should be wearing a cape and have a fancy pseudonym and join a consortium of similarly-enhanced individuals, right? Because to be honest, all I want to do is go out on a moonlit night to the park and jump, and jump, and jump.

What’s this all about? Visit My Super First Day to find out.

I came to the realization that there’s no way I can maintain a one page resume. I keep having to bump projects off, and it’s getting harder and harder to cut some of my babies off there. So I’ve reworked the thing to put the most salient stuff on the first page, and I guess I’ll just deal with the consequences if the two page format pisses anyone off. That being said, here she is in all her shining glory, freshly updated and gloriously resplendent.

Resume (pdf) and Resume (doc).

I spent the weekend in Pennsylvania at the memorials for Dave Szulborski. I’m still incapable of expressing all that he meant to me. He was a mentor and a friend and a big brother and an inspiration. It seems impossible to me that I won’t be exchanging chatty emails with him anymore and hearing about the amazing stuff he’s been working on lately.

Anyway, I looked through my backup drive and found this old treasure from Catching the Wish in 2006. Here’s the story: The mayor and other entities were fighting to tear down the library and digitize all the books. Dave’s character, Dale Sprague, and my character, Sarah Wyatt, were totally opposed to the idea. The players rallied to the cause, bombarding the fictional development company with email and setting up a petition site to save the library. This is the audio recording of a call-in City Council meeting where Aglaura opened the floor to let non-residents make statements about the issue. All those who called in were players, save the crazy singing lady, who was one of the puppetmasters – Haley Moore.  Mayor Dobbs was played by Paul Melamud, Sam was Michelle Senderhauf, Bruce was Nick Braccia, and Diana was Kassandra Standridge.

Enjoy!

Aglaura City Council Meeting, June 22, 2006 (MP3)

I don’t have the words to express my feelings right now. I may never have them. Dave Szulborski died last night. All I can do is make travel arrangements to his memorial service. Still in shock.

One of the things about being an ARG designer is that you don’t often have time to be an ARG player. It’s easy to fall out of touch with the rhythm of the player’s side, that feeling of groping in the dark for a light switch that just barely illuminates a tiny patch and then the trek onwards to find the next flash.

I receive a fair amount of trailhead packages in the mail and via email, but either they come at a time when I’m too busy to participate or they don’t pique my interest. The tape recorder for the “Charlotte Is Becoming Real” game (could I have dubbed it anything goofier, I wonder?) was a perfect storm. It came when I had time to play and it was mysterious enough to make me monkey around and figure out just what in the hell it all meant. Normally these things come with some sort of overt puzzle. This, not so much. In fact, it took nearly two weeks to realize there was a puzzle there at all.

This led us down a twisting, snarled pathway of Facebook updates, websites, telephone calls from game characters, both authoritative and confused, frantic searches in Central Park for hidden objects, and finally a paid trip for two players to Berlin, where they had a finale in the Sacrow woods involving a mad psychiatrist, a wobbly rowboat, a bloodstained bathroom, and the grinning author of Therapy, Sebastian Fitzek.

Granted, there were some bugs in the game, at least from my perspective. First, the pacing was uneven – at times glacially slow and at times very quick. Second, the events of the finale were geared almost exclusively towards the two people who traveled to Berlin, and left the people at home no way to participate (or even watch live, because cell signal was weak and the phone battery ran out). Last, the players are left with more questions at the end than they started the game with, which runs contrary to how we expect ARGs to be. However, I’m reserving judgment on the last, because we do have a scheduled PM chat for next Wednesday and it’s possible that there is a reason for these questions to be left. I’m all for telling stories in new ways.

Now, those criticisms aside, I have a lot of praise for the game. First of all, I think that it’s important that an ARG be built around a solid product, and Fitzek’s Therapy is a rollicking good read (although perhaps a bit heavy-handed on the foreshadowing). I just finished reading it again for the second time, going back and noticing subtle clues that I wouldn’t have known to look for in the first reading. My mind is still on stormy Parkum Island, with my ears and toes chilled. But besides the book, the game was intriguing. It was fearlessly gung ho in ways that corporate American games are not: there were no waivers to sign, players were supposed to explore the return address the packages came from, someone needed to go to San Diego and dig up a tape recorder from a random place in a park, and so on. This was not a carefully-cultured, bubblewrapped entertainment experience. It felt more like a gritty, personalized, grassroots game, the kind you can sink your teeth into. A real, old-fashioned ARG, in other words, the kind your Mama used to play.

So to the game designers at VM-People and to Sebastian Fitzek I would like to say thank you for lighting a fresh spark of wonder in my cynical puppermastery heart. I had such a good time playing your game. I hope you do many more here in the U.S. and they’re met with great success. Kudos!

A month after receiving the mysterious tape recorder of mystery from P.Martin in San Diego, the game still plays on. Here are my impressions, sprinkled with some search terms in case there are others receiving items in the mail or phone calls and trying to figure out why. If you want a real guide, check out Rowan’s site as she’s done an excellent job at it.

By the way, this game is based on Therapy by German author Sebastian Fitzek, a diabolical man. I ordered and read the book almost immediately after the whole tape recorder incident and enjoyed it very much. Extremely twisted tale. It’s a fast read of a dark psychological thriller. I’m looking forward to his next English release.

Quite honestly, we still don’t have very many answers at all as to why P.Martin sent out those tapes, or why he wanted to point us to Ivan Krotzler’s website. We had some contact with his somewhat ditzy and disturbed assistant, Penny Farmer, who was apparently hired due to the fact that she shared the name of Krotzler’s favorite author, Penelope Farmer (who penned a children’s book called Charlotte Sometimes, which The Cure used as inspiration for their single of the same name).

Penny, although she worked for Krotzler for some time, really had no idea about the man’s personal life or habits and was fairly unhelpful in that regard. One fateful evening she went over to check his garden for evidence of a dog at a player’s request and apparently found something awful and dog-related there that sent her straight into the loony bin for a few days.

At that point we started talking to Jimmy the IT Guy, who was even less helpful, but at least he was able to operate a scanner and sent us clearer pictures of some documents that dippy Penny had attempted to send earlier. Jimmy also helpfully doctored the documents. Weird.

A player in San Diego recognized some locations in Krotzler’s Facebook photos and spent a couple of days searching around there, eventually to be rewarded with a new tape player and recording describing the brutal murder of a dog. Only the dog was imaginary. Weird.

Those of us who had signed up as contacts on Krotzler’s site started receiving postcards from Germany from someone named Anna addressed to “My Dear Ear.” She was sorry to have left without continuing the conversation, but we knew where to find her.

Application of a little heat revealed the message that had been written in invisible ink:

Earlier we had found a hidden directory on Krotzler’s website and had tried seemingly everything to get in there. Turns out we needed to put a space in the Username.
Username: Ivan Krotzler
Password: Sindbad

Lots of neat stuff in there, right? Digging around found this threatening-looking note saying “I know who you are, Ivan!” There were also three screenshots of videos from The Cure. Plus a 0 and 1. After much deliberation, it turns out that if you take the exact times that the image appeared in the videos, put the 0 in front and the 1 in back, and switched it all around, you get a telephone number: 1-646-736-1140. That is an answering machine with an outgoing message from Isabell. (Eek! She’s the wife in the book!)

Several days pass. No contact from anyone. Penny posted a note on Facebook promising to get back to everyone within a two days, but four days later, there was nothing. The players were getting out their torches, pitchforks, flamethrowers, and angry mob etiquette books. The next day, there were even rumors that the whole cast of characters was eaten by wild dogs.

This afternoon I got a telephone call from a blocked number. Letting out a whoop, I fumbled the digital recorder I’ve been carrying around with me like a teddy bear since I left a message on Isabell’s machine days ago and tried to answer the phone, speak coherently, and record everything. Here it is, me running up the stairs as I spoke, trying to evade the curious family who was trying to figure out what in the hell I was doing. I think both my interrogator and I were equally nervous, but we both did well under the circumstances.

So that’s where we stand. Now, here’s the kicker -- After listening to German podcasts of Sebastian Fitzek, many of the players are convinced that he’s the man on the tape as well as the man I spoke to today. Considering this is a man who showed up at a book reading in a straitjacket and showed up at a live event in an abandoned hospital bound and gagged, well…

I’ve got to get him to sign my book.

As is sometimes the case with Alternate Reality Games, the break in the case came suddenly, just when the players were complaining that we would never get a break in the case.

On the IRC chat channel we had discussed and discarded seemingly everything, overthinking every aspect of the tapes, the emails, the author’s website, and anything else we could think of. “You are the one in charge” seemed like a clue, but I scoured my tape recorder’s battery compartment and plug receptacle and found nothing of interest save an old looking barcode.

Unfiction’s SpaceBass figured out a way to trick SpamGourmet into sending more than one email to the recipient. A couple of us tried his hack. I didn’t have high hopes.

The people on chat asked me to take more pictures of my package and recorder. I posted one to Twitpic on Sunday.

On Monday, those of us who used the SpamGourmet hack to send P.Martin mail got a response with an attachment:

Swell, he’s a parrot. Wait, what? Something has changed. The “OPEN” on the battery compartment has been changed to read “TURN.”

Cue major discussion and overthinking again. Luckily, I had already listened to both sides of my tape, so I didn’t have to spend time trying that. All that was left was to check out that old looking bar code that had seemingly nothing interesting at all about it.

Other people in chat reported that their “Device ID” and “Part No.” numbers were different from mine. Intriguing. I posted the closeup of the bar code, which others decoded – it was in Code 39 and read “6776616C686579.”

Hmmm, I thought – that looked an awful lot like it could translate from Hex to Ascii. Sure enough, it reads “gvalhey” when converted to Ascii. A quick decode from Rot-13, and “gvalhey” becomes “tinyurl.”

Hey! We got something, here!

We had collected a crowd by this point. Three of us were near our recorders and gathered the information from them. All the bar codes appeared to be the same, but the Device ID/Part No. were different. We had 1, 2, and 3 for the part numbers. On a whim, I tried putting the Device IDs at the end of the Tinyurl in order of the Part Numbers – http://tinyurl.com/995273018 (995/273/018). And whaddaya know? Dr. Ivan Krotzler in San Diego is a psychiatrist who has recently experienced a break-in and had patient data stolen from his office.

Perhaps patient data like tapes of therapy sessions?

Contacting Krotzler’s site netted a response from a Penny Farmer, who explained that Krotzler went missing last Friday and she’s very worried about him. And that’s where we stand now.

Believe it or not, the time elapsed between getting the photoshopped picture and finding the new website was 1.5 hours. And that was 11 days after getting the first recorder.

So that’s an example of how a puzzle in an ARG can work. We still don’t know who P.Martin is or why he sent us the mysterious tape recorders of mystery, but at least we know where he wanted us to go.