The decision has been made.
Come 2012, the ever-awesome ARGFest-O-Con will be finding its place, once again, north of the border – to be hosted in Toronto, Ontario!

In its earlier years, ARGFest had one incarnation in Vancouver, British Columbia, but over the following years the fest has grown and mutated, filling out its amazepants of awesomesauciness.

If you’ve been to previous ARGFest events, you’ll already know how entertaining and enjoyable the conference is, even just by the community focus and social tomfoolery. But in addition to all that, ARGFest has become a hotspot for speakers and experience designers to share their studies, advice and woes, educate and entertain through their presentations and case studies in the Alternate Reality Gaming and Transmedia Storytelling space – from grassroots creators to mainstream media marketing campaigns.

Speaking for myself, it’s greatly exciting to finally be able bring this event which is dear to my heart to my home country (I hadn’t yet been sucked into ARGs back when Vancouver played host), and it pleases me to no end that the fest committee has chosen Toronto to host next year’s conference.

ARGFest 2011, Bloomington

I very much encourage you to consider attending this event — the gears are in motion and planning is under way, and as soon as more details are decided (such as the dates), you absolutely must mark them off on your calendar!  Whether you are a professional designer, transmedia producer, ARG creator, artist, storyteller, or especially a player of ARGs, or simply enjoy creative projects, stories, and games – this event is for you!

The ARGFest committee has more than proven their ability to create a conference that will impact in many ways, both in professionalism and social merriment. With games to play, puzzles and mysteries to solve, wisdom to soak in, inspiration to take home, and many friends to make, meet and greet (probably for the first time in meat-space), and a wonderful urban attraction (Toronto, remember?) to explore and discover, how could anyone not want to come and experience some Canadian hospitality?

As the exquisite J.C. Hutchins, who offered the keynote at last year’s ARGFest in Bloomington Indiana, said:

People, man. People.

Canadians are all over that :)   Stay tuned for more announcements as the planning progresses… Read the official announcement at ARGFest.com

And finally, don’t ever, ever watch this video to whet your appetite for Canada… seriously, don’t even think about it. Ever.

Also: Poutine. Tim Hortons. Mounties. Canadian Tire. C(anadian) N(ational) Tower. Maple Leafs. Igloos. Royal Ontario Museum. Toronto Island. Ontario Science Center. Skydome Rogers Center. Harbourfront. Hockey. Hockey Hall of Fame. And sooooo much more, eh…?

One day, you sit down to watch TV, and catch a teaser trailer for a movie not scheduled for release for another year. It catches your eye, but you inevitably move on.

The next week, you receive a bulky piece of mail containing a hardcover book… you don’t initially recognize the author, or the company that sent it, but the topic interests you. As you open it, a piece of paper drops from its folds on which is written an email and phone number with a note asking you to contact the author by either method.

You’re curious, so you call the phone number and hear a recorded message from this person, who outlines their desperate situation and asks for help.

At this point you wonder where it came from. Out of curiosity, you start checking around. A quick google shows that the author doesn’t seem to exist, nor does the company. But you do find that the book and author are related to an upcoming movie, and you remember the teaser that caught your attention last week – the author’s name is familiar now, and you recognize their face.  Now you’re excited. For whatever reason, the lead character in the movie just contacted you, personally, and they need your help – a series of events are unfolding, right now, today, this week.

Enticed, you dig a little deeper… in doing so, you discover websites that reveal more about this character, this company, and the recent events that prompted them to contact you, and why. You find other people online who’ve been contacted as well, so you chat with them to find out what they know, and team up with them moving forward.

Over time, there are puzzling situations that you have to resolve, other characters you need to talk to, interact with and influence in your strive towards various accomplishments and resolutions, discovering more and more of the story as it plays out.

You’re taken places – nearby locations for secret exchanges of information, or for real-world tasks to be carried out. You watch videos, find clues in commercials, record and share videos denouncing an antagonist’s propaganda, even crowd-source a solution to a problem on your cell phone, with a bit of augmented reality thrown in… Your ongoing curiosity in this amazing story drives your enthusiasm. Your interaction and teamwork with others doing the same forms bonds and friendships, and a community of fans.

You become immersed in the story so much that when it ends and you’ve saved the day, you cheer and celebrate with your community and your friends!

Oh yeah, and there was that movie you wanted to see too… You wonder if or how your actions helping this author and the company had an influence in that story. Now you have to see the movie (and with friends, especially other people with whom you’ve shared the experience)!

You go and see the film. On screen you spot the actual location you visited to receive top secret information from the company that sent you the package. Then the person who asked you for help, the lead character in the movie, references the mystery that you just helped solve!

Your experience, the story you helped to complete over the course of a few months, connected you with a grander set of events – you became a part of the movie.

Shortly after the movie airs, Amazon shoots you an email recommending a novel that’s soon to be released – an autobiography written by the fictional author as their followup to their other book, the one you received in the mail.  You want it.

Being a comic book fan, you’re excited to hear about a series soon to be released centered on the company that sent you the package; about its rich history, chronicling many of its past …’mishaps’. You want it.

You’re at the local toy store one day, and you see a bobblehead – of the author. It makes you chuckle. You want it.

A year down the line, with this property still going strong (it’s now a thriving universe with a history, many developed characters, events, and stories you’ve come to follow and enjoy), a sequel to the film is announced… along with a video game spin-off on the gaming console you own. You want to immerse yourself in them, and discover what other exciting experiences the universe has to offer. You note their release dates.

Then, as you sit down for dinner, tuning into the latest episode of the TV series continuation that launched a few months ago, you get a phone call.

You recognize the voice.

It’s the author… the real person is talking to you. They’re called you because they remember how you helped them last time.  Your help is needed again.

They ask you, and you say yes.

The workshop, run by Haley Moore and Michelle Senderhoff, focused on the value artifacts have within a storytelling experience and the ease with which they can be made, creatively, even with little to no budget.

The most fun and interesting activity was the hands-on artifact creation exercise. We were given a brief, but wild short story to work from, with the task of creating items to place in a safe that would serve to fill in the mysterious backstory of one of the characters. The outline presented to us was this:

…help a hot brunette recover his grandfather from mysterious kidnappers who have also stolen his uncrackable safe and hidden it in an unknown location.  After remotely blowing up a courier car sent to retrieve the safe, and getting the coordinates of its destination from an apparently indestructible GPS unit, the players find themselves in the woods, unearthing the safe.  Its contents may reveal a secret about the hot brunette’s grandfather that he never would have guessed, or they may raise even more questions.

We were then led to a table strewn with craft supplies and unique items one might pick up cheaply perhaps at dollar stores or garage sales.  Of course, having a much larger budget to work from would afford the ability to create highly customized, quality props, or manufacture lines of items that can be distributed, transported, collected, etc.  The intent here however was to present a challenge to be creative in the context of an ARG without a notable budget.

With only the items on hand, what ended up being produced for placement in the safe was not simply a collection of the grandfather’s items that would tell his story, but would hint at an additional mystery. Composed of what at first glance were unrelated heirlooms, on closer examination they actually had interconnecting properties that would lead to the revelation of a grand secret.

For a full rundown, Haley Moore documented the workshop’s artifact creation task and outcome at Workbook Project. It’s well worth the read!

For this demo ARG, the dead drop was aimed to bring players together somewhere in the search for a safe. To take advantage of that, the items within the safe would hold additional value in their shared discovery by players.  Each item left a dangling question or had a curious property begging for closer examination, which would reveal a new mystery. A letter, for example, had a strange symbol stamped on the bottom. Each item was also connected with the rest; they’d always only be parts of the connected story – the symbol was a partial outline of another item that was found in the safe, which led to the key that would be used to decode part of the hidden message, all within the safe.

The real value

This workshop demonstrated that a good mystery is always welcome, and helped to demonstrate the value of artifacts when used within a transmedia story, or ARG. Rather than simply creating individual items for use in the story, the workshop attendees wanted to create something even more valuable to their players than just physical items.

For those players in this ARG who would venture out to retrieve the safe, the most memorable thing that they would take home with them wouldn’t be the artifacts themselves, but the experience they shared with others, the collaboration, and the story they unraveled together.

Unique/Rare artifacts

A simple artifact itself may hold little to no physical value. It may even be poorly constructed of cheap material. But it’s the value placed by individuals themselves through association that make it a treasured item and enhance the storytelling experience as a whole – whether for the one who takes it home, or to those who had a hand in its discovery from across the world, over the internet.

Artifacts can help any range of storytelling experiences truly come alive. Especially in grassroots ARGs, the inclusion of unique physical elements incorporated into the story is an enormous benefit to the project, and the shared value is held by the community who experienced it.

Mass produced artifacts

At the other end of the spectrum, items produced en masse for large scale marketing campaigns for an existing IP and distributed to masses of fans may even be simple and produced relatively cheaply, but their inherent value is, generally speaking, in the memories the player has of the experience and of being a part of something much bigger. Physical artifacts, of any caliber, help bring a story to life.

This kind of “swag”, however, could be controversial. There’s a stigma associated with it, that players may want the swag items only for their inherent hype value, even as a way to gain money off a popular property. Quite often items from mainstream media projects will end up on eBay, with hefty prices attached because they know that fans who missed it will dish out the dough to have them in their collection.  In these cases, we need to ask if the items serve to play a role or enhance the storyworld for the fans, or if attention is gained only temporarily for the items themselves, being collectible or holding monetary value.

Story-enhancing artifacts

image: faismoijouer.com

An example of a story that incorporates real world artifacts is the novel series led by Cathy’s Book. Each novel comes packaged with numerous items described in the story, each telling their own little bit of the larger picture.  As the reader progresses through the story, the mysteries described on the pages therein can be explored first hand with the actual physical items.

There is great benefit to expanding a story into the real world for the audience through relevant props and artifacts. This artifact workshop not only demonstrated how simple artifacts can easily be created, but also how being wrapped in an experience, a real-world context, can bring a story to life – personal and memorable on an entirely different level. They don’t need to cost a small fortune, nor do the artifacts themselves need to be high quality – just relevant.  Their value is found in far more than just their physical form – it’s the experience to which they belong.

ARGFest museum

As a side note, a regular component of the annual ARGFest conference is the ARG Museum. This is a wonderful exhibit of artifacts and swag collected by players over many years of ARGs and transmedia campaigns. It contains anything from unique and rare items created for grassroots projects, to highly coveted quality collectible items manufactured for popular franchises. If you attend the next ARGFest, please be sure to check it out, and perhaps you’ll find some inspiration for ways to bring your story off the page!

Tupperware. In the woods.

Who wouldn’t want to find that?  Well if you do, you’re probably a geocacher, or else you’d make a good one.

A brief primer: What’s Geocaching?

Geocaching (pronounced gee-oh-cash-ing, or gee-oh-kay-shing to some) is a relatively new hobby that began in 2000 when selective availability, the government regulation that degraded GPS satellite accuracy to the public, was discontinued. GPS devices – handhelds and navigational tools among them – became all the rage, and far more useful and practical!

Not one day later, Dave Ullmer of Beavercreek, Oregon thought “Hey, this might be fun!” and he hid what would now be revered as the world’s first geocache (now commemorated by a plaque). Back then he called it a ‘GPS stash hunt’, and his little scavenger hunt spawned a hobby that now covers the world, literally.

Since then, the process of using a GPS device to hide and locate containers of any shape or size in any publicly accessible location has been labeled Geocaching, with its own website (www.geocaching.com) and massive database of over 1,000,000 geocaches world-wide. It’s grown into a pasttime that’s family-friendly, takes place outdoors, away from the computer, it can be competitive or challenging, it’s nature-respecting, relaxing, adventurous, and for people of all ages all around the globe.

Evolution of the geocache

In the ARG world, we make use of a method of exchange called the dead drop, which is used to exchange information or items covertly between two parties at a given location without them meeting face to face. A geocache is essentially an independent dead drop. It, however, remains in place, whoever finds it leaves it there (re-hidden) for the next person, and it contains at the very least some form of log sheet for the finder to sign and date as a record of their visit.

Geocaching, since its inception, has also evolved to incorporate a far wider range of cache styles and types.

As its popularity increased, people soon began placing containers that could only be located after solving puzzles to determine its coordinates. Sometimes you’d have to visit multiple GPS waypoints, picking up clues at each, in order to locate the final container. Some were simply tasks you had to accomplish at a specific location to be successful.

Arguably the most educational and interesting type of geocache, however, is the Earthcache. These are geocaches the details and accuracy of which are heavily scrutinized before publishing, and which explain or teach about natural landmarks, geological history and the like. In order for a player to legitimately log an Earthcache as found, the player must answer a few questions (like a little exam) about the subject matter, sometimes only solvable on-site, and generally they have to at least visit the location and share a photo as evidence of having been there.

Telling stories and creating experiences

What’s great about geocaching is its flexibility to be used as a story-telling tool, incorporating real-world tasks and rewarding players. While dead drops are typically a single task or event belonging to an overarching story, a geocache (or a series of geocaches) must be entirely self-contained. They must also be placed in such a way as to be able to last and be maintained for an indefinite amount of time.

In 2001, while still in its infancy, geocaching took on a unique promotional project. Paramount approached the webmasters of the site at the time, and partnered with them to produce a geocache series called “Project APE“. These 14 caches located worldwide were part of a promotional campaign for the film Planet Of The Apes.

Much like ARG dead drops, clues were released about the drops before they were published, and geocachers were among those in the hinted locations who were on their toes. These caches were very time sensitive. They were published as sequential missions around the world, telling events within the film’s universe, yet fictionally independent from the film. The missions were to retrieve highly sensitive items from caches placed by field agents fighting against a government coverup, while avoiding being detected by federal agents.

The caches themselves were specially labeled, and generally contained collectible items like props from the film as prizes for the first to find. The final cache, a special bonus cache, even contained coveted tickets to the film’s premiere for the first finders.

For all intents and purposes, these were legitimate geocaches. However, being placed by local geocachers on behalf of the marketers, over the years they began disappearing as they were either collected, stolen, or simply archived or retired for lack of maintenance. Currently, only two original Project APE caches remain active. One is still available in Brazil, and the other in Washington. The latter is maintained by Geocaching.com staff as the one and only remaining APE cache in the United States. Players who find these geocaches are rewarded a unique and rare icon for their finds collection. Three other APE caches have also been adopted, but were converted to traditional geocaches.

Since Project APE, however, geocaching has continued to be refined and made more self-supportive and independent. It’s been receiving more media attention recently as the GPS buzz spreads, and as mobile devices become cheaper and more consumer friendly – especially handheld phones, now packaged with GPS capabilities. It’s a hobby that’s sure to continue attracting people from all countries and walks of life for years to come.

Geocaching stories post-APE-pocalypse

With more and more tools and technology being made available, the potential to create more involved story-based geocaching experiences is enticing.

Another series inspired by Project APE is Forbidden Zone Geocaches. This is a series of caches designed to expand on the mythos of the APE caches, and provides an independent website for players to keep track of their progress and discoveries until they’ve found all the necessary tips to unlock the secret final mission and locate its cache.

More local to myself, there’s a geocache named LAARU BRAVO which takes on another mission-based theme, creating a story and self-contained experience with tasks that must be accomplished in order to locate the cache container. Reading past logs, many geocachers have even described their experience while still remaining effectively in character.

Another adventurous geocache with a small story based on an existing franchise is called Tomb Raider, located near San Diego. The story itself is minor and contained to the initial puzzle, however the journey to locate and find the cache is the player’s extension to the story, and that is where the real adventure lies.  More than simply finding a tupperware container in the woods, as it were, many geocaches prompt the player to embark on real-world hikes and experiences they otherwise may never have thought they’d ever be doing. This is one of the main attractions to the hobby, and wherein lies some of the best opportunities to tell stories and create experiences.

While many still view geocaching as a hobby that should remain simplistic and easy for laypeople to pick up and go, there’s no reason why it should be limited to such a view. These sorts of experiential geocaches are what attract the attention of visitors from around the world. There are many geocache series and unique caches that make headlines. A quick google shows a sample list of bookmarked “must do” geocaches, many quite distant from the geocacher’s home town. People love memorable geocaches, and elaborate story-based geocaches are a rare commodity; especially well created ones.

Geocaching 2.0: the Wherigo

Creating extensive stories for geocaches is not a simple task, given the rules and guidelines now in place for publishing at Geocaching.com. There is another new type of geocache, however, that promises to provide a method for generating even more interactive experiences. This is the Wherigo. It’s a form of executable application that runs as a “cartridge” on a currently very limited number of GPS devices, including Garmins and some Pocket PCs. Wherigo caches are more complex to create, but afford a lot more flexibility for storytelling, tasks and scripted actions.

While generic geocaches are primarily coordinate-based with optional calculations or separate puzzle solving required, the Wherigo makes use of the GPS device and provides live interaction with a script based on your physical location. This means stories can be told in segments on the field, and different types of puzzles and missions can be created to be executed, and solved while outside.

From Wherigo.com:

Wherigo is a platform that allows you to build location based GPS experiences on your computer and play them in the real world. Think Zork, Secret of Monkey Island or Myst, but in the park around the corner, or on the beach during your family vacation. Rather than clicking the mouse and selecting a location to move your character, you actually walk from one location to the next to advance the story.

Support for Wherigo cartridges is still fairly thin, but it should only be a matter of time before Android*, iPhone, Blackberry, or other smartphone app versions appear. Additionally, while not officially Geocaching activities, there are other organizations that provide location-based gaming experiences similar to this, such as GPS Mission or SCVNGR.

Bushwacking to the future

Geocaching is still in its infancy, with so much untapped potential as a story-telling method. As time goes on, hopefully we’ll see more innovative use of this pastime to provide memorable and entertaining experiences that span more than words on a screen or numbers in your hand, but engage players through multiple media. Who will create the first truly transmedia geocache? Has it already been done?

If you’re a geocacher, I’d recommend checking out the geocaches mentioned above next time you’re in their areas. If you’re hiding geocaches, I challenge you to do more than just hide tupperware in the woods (or magnets in the city) – create an experience to remember! Write a story, an adventure! Even if the container is easy to find, the journey to get there is what people will remember most.

Do you know of other notable geocaches that have given you memorable experiences?
Do you know of any that tell amazing stories?
Please share in the comments below!

And if you haven’t already, buy a GPS or GPS enabled smartphone, and sign up at geocaching.com!

* Update: The official Android port of the Geocaching app is now available, see Geocaching.com/Android

Some Geocaches to add to the To-Do list:

• Tomb Raider (GCWD13)
• Project APE (Bookmark list)
• Forbidden Zone Geocaches (website) [article]
• Necropolis of Britannia Manor III (GC2B034) [article]
• The Journal (GC484C)
• Sixth Sanctum (GC17XT8, series)
• The Sentinel (GCK060)