» LARP
Friday, December 7, 2007
Weisman gets new gig infiltrating physical world with old-timey modern-fantasy mecha
“Jordan Weisman, founder of FASA, has licensed the rights to MechWarrior, Shadowrun and Crimson Skies from Microsoft to his latest startup, Smith & Tinker.” S&T apparently aims to draw on the lessons of ARGs, the medium Weisman helped pioneer at his company 42 Entertainment, and carry them into the realm of Internet-connected real-world objects (in the form of games and toys). No announcement has yet been made that gets more specific than that. But if you put CS, SR and MW in a blender and poured the resulting paste all over a website, it would indeed look like Smith & Tinker’s.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
True Dungeon gets yet more competition: get your Aliens on at Origins
And now here’s TerrorWerks, “a fully immersive event” set in “the immersive enviroment of a massive space station.” Also, it’s immersive. But I kid! I am psyched to see more attempts at this. I don’t think I ever posted properly about this other thing at Gen Con, either: “Guardian 6 is an immersive live-action event in which you take on the mantle of an agent working for a secret agency. As a secret agent you will be sent on missions that will take you to different locations where you will interact with mysterious individuals.” Different locations, eh? It’ll be cool to see if distributing the event makes it more immersive or less… and my ARG experience tells me to bet on more.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Attention motorists: Perplex City is closed
Yeah, I saw the news and didn’t post because it just made me unhappy. (Especially when people started asking, right there on the goodbye posts from the story team, if this was all a setup to the start of season 2. For some reason the jackassery of which the Internet is capable keeps surprising me.) Mind Candy has put the second season of the Perplex City ARG on indefinite hiatus, and everyone on the story team has left the company. Stony silence about the issue on Mind Candy’s corporate site, which is always a wwwwwwonderful sign, but there are various messages and discussions out there, and the PXC-focused sites do all have some in-story bits about the end.
So what’d we learn, kids? That tying your product to a $200K prize is a good way to have to keep doing it over and over, even if the product improves? (Wave 2 of the Season 2 puzzle cards will still be released, BTW.) That even a sucky story is a better purchase motivator than a delayed (and suckier) story?
(Postscript: Mind Candy is allegedly looking into doing an online-hybrid product in the vein of Webkinz and, yes, Bella Sara. I WARNED YOU)
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Perplex City season 1 really, really over
Yeah, you know the Cube, right? The one that’s worth 200 grand? Some English guy found it.
[This exciting account of the find doesn’t quite explain how the general area to search in was deduced, but once it was, the solve essentially came down to one card. A common, even. Also, cards for Season 2 have been solicited to retailers.]
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
True Dungeon truths for ‘06
The lowdown on True Dungeon’s gameplan for 2006 has been announced, along with a video peek of the enhanced adventure for this year, Escape from the Spider Cult. The massive live dungeon-crawl event will benefit from increased volunteer training, improved props and environments, and 5.1 stereo surround sound. Other adjustments and improvements are in the press release (below), but one that may bite them in the ass is giving “dead” players the option to hang around and watch. Oh sure, you’ll heal her, but you wouldn’t heal me two rooms ago! Find another ride home, buddy!
Read More…
Monday, March 20, 2006
Call for True Dungeon volunteers
The folks at True Dungeon are gearing up for Gen Con 2006 already. While event specific information is promised in a couple weeks, the crew is looking for volunteers, who will get various levels of swag and other compensation (even a hotel room). Read the press release below if you’re inclined to lend a hand.
Read More…
Saturday, November 27, 2004
True Dungeon to expand at Gen Con Indy ‘05
Easily the most lavish LARP-like game in the industry these days, True Dungeon is preparing for its west coast appearance at Gen Con SoCal next weekend. In an email update sent yesterday to fans of the game, Jeff Martin, president of True Adventures Ltd., said “The finishing touches are being put on an agreement where True Dungeon will greatly expand at Gen Con Indy 2005. The event will more than double in size, and it will move to the Grand Ballroom in the Marriott Hotel which is directly across from the Exhibit Hall.”
Read More…
Thursday, September 30, 2004
ARG: another acronym to embrace before it destroys you
Many of you likely know all about I Love Bees, the mysterious site the URL for which was flashed briefly at the end of an online trailer for Microsoft’s upcoming first-person shooter Halo 2. You may also remember the promotional online puzzle games that tied in with Steven Spielberg’s A.I., which games came to be known collectively as “The Beast” and whose community of players called themselves the Cloudmakers. Rich with game-world detail, convincing characters and sometimes-fiendish puzzles, these alternate reality games, or ARGs, are… well… basically just LARPs. I Love Bees recently took another step closer to LARPhood when it not only challenged players to find and answer pay phones being called by an in-game AI, but anointed the answerers of certain calls with membership in the “crew” of the AI’s lost spaceship.
One player is not happy. Eric Burns laments that the collaboration with strangers in real time that made his experience in the Cloudmakers so compelling will be weakened and eventually destroyed by this singling out of a few lucky players. But collective-detection to unlock a story is basically How to Host a Murder - you can keep fiddling with the puzzles and the means of revelation, but you can’t disguise the fact that, after all the fire and motion, you are still just waiting for the next piece of story to consume. A story is not a game. ARGs are now making the leap from that model to the model of Mind’s Eye Theater - by adding actual gameplay. So far, it’s just the game of Prisoner’s Dilemma; do you, the individual, stick with the group, or do you defect? Other games are possible in ARGs, and we will no doubt see more than a few of those possibilities soon. The question is whether going from the How to Host a Murder model to the model of today’s LARPs will come with the same loss of accessibility - and popularity.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Laws harps on LARPs
In his latest installment of See Page XX, Robin Laws points out the enormous popularity of LARPs in Hollywood these days (go on, think about it. I’ll wait). Laws goes on to compare TV’s version to the game convention version, with some interesting conclusions. In particular, he makes this statement: “I can see the creation of a cash-prize LARP circuit as a serious business opportunity for someone with the capital and vision to make it work.” Perhaps intentionally, Laws doesn’t mention True Dungeon, which has had player eliminations and significant prizes for a lucky winner from the get-go. Of course, True Dungeon doesn’t want to be called a LARP, so never mind.
Friday, September 5, 2003
The werewolves are like Spider-Man. There’s no infrin… um… oops
I don’t actually know Gothic literature well enough to say whether the World of Darkness’ feud between vamps and werewolves is original. Nor have any of us seen the list that WW claims it has, the list of “60 points of unique similarity” between WoD material and the upcoming Kate Leatherpants film Underworld. In any case, the timing of this lawsuit’s announcement is a bit odd. Who is this supposed to be publicity for, anyway?
In other news, Orpheus, World of Darkness hardcover game number umpty-ump, actually looks kind of interesting: original, not overly tied to the rest of the world, still saddled with the misnamed Storyteller system but otherwise kinda Delta Green-ish and tasty-looking. I have every confidence that the next five books in the limited run of material to which Orpheus belongs will both A) be what brings about the announced end of the WoD, and B) hopelessly muddle what currently looks like a fun game. That doesn’t change that this book looks good, though.
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