Esk

I’m involved in an ARG called Perplexcity. This game involves buying, collecting, solving and trading puzzle cards in order to solve the overall puzzle, find the cube and win the prize (£100′000). However, it’s more than a trading card game. Perplexcity is the name of a city somewhere not on Earth, and the backs of the cards make a map of the city. There’s a whole host of “fake” websites as part of this game, including several blogs of the characters involved in the hunt, company websites like Whipsmart and strange hidden secrets on the perplexcity.com site itself. The characters often give puzzles for us players to solve on their blogs, a fact I recently discovered.

Scarlett gave this mosaic puzzle, which I solved one morning out of boredom, and, on a whim, sent the answer to Scarlett. I forgot about this for several days, until I caught up on the blogs again, and found this post: Success! which mentions my name as one of the two solvers of the puzzle. Woo! I am teh greatest! I really do feel famous, which is probably a little sad, but hey.

One of the things that makes games like this so addictive is the interaction between the players and the puzzle team — you really feel like you’ve achieved something when you get recognition for solving a puzzle rather than just the self satisfaction of knowing you did it. That’s why the leaderboard for solved cards works — you can compete against other players and see not only how many cards they’ve solved, but which ones, how hard they are supposed to be, and read discussions on the cards if you are stuck. You also get leitmarks for passing certain milestones — I’m not sure what they are, but I’ll be posted one at the end of the month, so I’ll let you know.

That’s the other thing that’s keeping me hooked — the team spirit. Most trading card games actively discourage helping one another, and most puzzles are designed for individuals to complete. This is different. There are some cards which require teamwork to be solved, and there have been puzzle events in the UK and US and clues given at certain times if you’ve been following the trail — once a plane flew across the sky in Manchester with a banner showing a clue to the puzzle, and you could have known to be there if you’d solved previous puzzles.

One card — The 13th Labour — is 64-bit encrypted, and would take ridiculous amounts of time to crack with one computer. So, players have organised a joint effort — everyone who wants to help downloads a client and lets it run on their computer, until all the combinations have been tried. There’s no way one person could keep track of all the clues, and most people haven’t yet bought all the cards, but we can all follow the story thanks to the group of people keeping this wiki up to date, and many other player-run resources like it.

The really great thing about all this, is that you don’t have to have all the cards, or even any cards, to win it. Because of the sharing community involved, you can get all the information that has yet been gathered at the touch of a button. It’s a level playing field even if you come in late, like I have, and it’s not about how much money you’ve spent. It’s mostly about putting in reading time, and then helping to solve whatever puzzle is immediately present in the story.

Oh, one more thing. There’s another card that is yet to be solved — #256 Billion to One. It has a picture of a man standing in a French town, with Japanese text on the side. The text says “find me” and the man appears to be Japanese. Please visit http://billiontoone.org and see if you know this man. If you do, please help by emailing the site. Thanks.

This game is eating my life. I love it.