On Friday night, I took part in my first Alternate Reality Game (ARG). It was called Find The Future and it was played by 500 people, all locked inside the New York Public Library for an entire night (8pm to 6am). The experience alone was pretty damn awesome, but I am more interested in the game that was played. ARG’s are a relatively new and undisciplined concept, and experiencing one first-hand was very educational. Typically, ARG’s have a goal beyond the final achievement; in this case, the goal was to teach players about great moments in history so that they can then turn around and be inspired to influence the future. Did the game do its job? Well, let’s take a closer look.
The night began with famed game guru Jane McGonigal explaining to the 500 players all gathered in the gigantic reading room what was going on. Our mission was to have collectively written a 600-page book by the end of the night. We had a website and a smart phone app to help us out as we scoured the exhibition areas of the library, looking for 100 famous artifacts and the stories they told. Along with each artifact was a writing prompt inspiring the players to reflect on ideas of their own that fit into the significance of the history they were observing. Alternating between running around the huge library in small teams and sitting down to write, it was our aim as a collective group to cover all 100 topics and create enough content by the time the sun came up.
I don’t think I could have asked for a more unique all-nighter. There were a few other details about the night that made it more than just a scavenger hunt crossed with a writing group. It all began a few months ago: The application process for being invited to this game consisted of a twitter-esque prompt; in 140 characters or less, we were to explain what, by the year 2021, we would be the first person to accomplish. We were to be as creative and ambitious as possible. There was also extra space for us to expand on our answer, in case 140 characters couldn’t tell the whole story. The organizers selected players by the creativity and vision they displayed in their submissions, but that wasn’t the only thing the application was used for.
Throughout the night, groups of players were taken on tours of “the stacks” - the library’s massive archive of books that runs 7 stories below the floor of the football field-sized reading room and out under Bryant Park, which lays directly behind the building. The public is normally not allowed into the stacks, and to be honest there isn’t much to them besides an endless aisle of steel bookshelves, but two pieces of the game were hidden down there, giving players an incentive to take the tour.
One piece of the game to be found in the stacks was a postcard (well, 500 of them), which had a personalized “message from the future” hand-written (by the organizers) on it. The message was about how the scenario we had written about in our application would (hopefully) play out. It was a nice touch. Each of us had to take one and then deliver it to the person it was addressed to. With everyone scattered throughout the library all night, this was a challenge, and ultimately one of the more chaotic aspects of the game. (By 5 am, there were still people who had not received theirs.) Still, it allowed people to make connections with others who weren’t already working directly with them. The other piece of the game hidden in the stacks was a coded message, a phrase that was to act as a rallying cry for anyone silly enough to remember it. But to understand the process of figuring that puzzle out, you must learn more about the main game itself.
Using the smart phone app as their main tool, squads of players roamed around exhibition areas and scanned QR codes that were taped next to displays. In some nod to the “alternate” reality we were supposed to be experiencing, the app took about a minute to “power up” after coming into “contact” with the artifacts. Thankfully, we found an exploit; this annoying delay was circumvented by closing the app and re-opening it, thus allowing us to quickly scan many items without much reflection. We had to progressively unlock tiers of artifacts in order to know which ones to hunt for, but this was as simple as finding one artifact from each tier. Finding the artifacts themselves wasn’t hard, as we knew what rooms to look for them in. If there was ever any difficulty associated with finding something, it was usually due to poor planning on the organizer side than lack of skill from the player.
Each artifact was “infused” with special powers that you, in turn, absorbed when you scanned its QR code. However, for as much thought that was put into these powers and the technological mechanics that went into figuring them into the game, they had absolutely no effect on how we experienced the game. This was the first real head-scratcher of the game. Why put something in if it didn’t matter to the outcome?
Next, back at the reading room, we looked at the artifacts we had just scanned on the game’s website, and began writing as a team on the prompts that each one provided. An added incentive to urgent gameplay was the fact that certain stories had to be done before certain deadlines. This ensured that we couldn’t spend too much time doing one thing, as we always had to get back to doing another. Unfortunately, the website wasn’t as reliable as it should have been. There were times when we’d come back from scavenging to find that none of our progress had been recorded on the site. This would have crippled our night, but there was another little work-around that trivialized the game even further; we discovered that you could unlock the artifacts directly on the website without even scanning them in.
From there, it was simply a game of “find the prompt that you feel like writing about” and the book was finished by 4:30 am. That coded message in the stacks I mentioned earlier was really the only aspect of the game resembling a puzzle and it was the most ignored aspect, too. Some pieces of paper were found in the stacks, each with a symbol (to represent each of the aforementioned frivolous powers) and a single syllable of a word. One of the organizers was wandering around with the papers in her hand, so when she mentioned their origin, I immediately asked to see them. I spread them out on a table, but could not see much sense in them at first. Then I looked at the “VIP” badge that I was given (as was everyone) when the game began; it had the ten symbols visible on one side. From there it was as simple as organizing the papers with their symbols in the same order as the badge. Their corresponding syllables came out to: ve ni mus vi di mus ___ rum scrip sit. We were missing the seventh symbol, but the rest was easy: venimus vidimus librum scripsit - Latin for we came, we saw, we wrote a book. (Note: Yes, I am taking most of the credit for figuring this out.)
The game could be declared a success if your only measurement was the book that was produced, which will be kept in the library’s archives forever. But lost on the way to the goal was the part where we actually learned about the past and made a difference in the future. How interesting was the book? Without an editor or a filter, how good could the words of 500 sleep-deprived people be? This game coincided with the Library’s 100th anniversary and was used to drum up some publicity, but it felt like there was a lot of missing nuance to it. Maybe some deadlines were missed and the scope was pulled back. Maybe we have a lot more to learn about ARGs that even the experts don’t know.
I will say this: put into the framework of a game, the act of writing a book (even if we each only contributed a couple pages) was enjoyable and inspiring. I don’t know if the motivation was very efficient, as the game itself took months to plan and by itself probably had more than 600 pages of copy and documentation to accompany it. Even though the loopholes found in the game allowed us to skip most of the mechanics and trivialize the game, we were all able to meet new people and share an experience that nobody else will ever have. That is, running around the Library at 3 in the morning, hopped up on Red Bull and coffee.
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