Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

A puzzle I made for ARGTalk. Click it to see the animation.

A stalker’s image from the notorious ARGTalk ARG. I did the scrawl and the poem in the lower right. The ARG itself got a lot of bad press for two reasons – one deserved and one not. First, people felt duped when the supposedly legit news site was actually a rabbithole into a game. That was to be expected, and ties in well with many things that people say today about being honest about what is game space and what is not. Back in 2005, however, the water was a lot muddier and people did not want to see anything that took them out of the game, so this was an experiment down that kind of road.

The second reason people dissed the game (and the undeserved one) was the poor production value in the trailhead talk show. That was by design, which people would have realized had they stuck around to figure out how the story worked out in the end. Instead, they left at that point and ridiculed the “Attack by bubblewrap.”