Find the lost ring

The ARG, or alternate reality game, is a new interactive way of telling stories that became popular with the I Love Bees ARG promoting the release of Halo2. Now the producer of I Love Bees has set another ARG in motion, this one called The Lost Ring.

A look around The Lost Ring website reminds me of a series of mystery puzzle game books I enjoyed years ago. Those books were filled with photographs of newspaper clippings, theater tickets, bloody handkerchiefs, and other random clues which, with the help of disjoint textual description, the reader had to organize and use to solve the mystery. The Lost Ring site is the HTML version of those old puzzle books- which means that you can zoom in on the photos and scraps of paper, and nearly all the clues are linked to other clues, or to web pages that contain further information. Many of these links take you to "real world" websites, so that an ARG character tells some of his or her story on his blog, Flikr page, or has uploaded You Tube videos related to the game.

But The Lost Ring is more than an evolved You-Solve-It mystery book. The game is well-endowed with ARG hallmarks- a spec fictional story element, timeliness that makes the story feel live and relevant, tied to the time in which it is played, and interactivity that connects players of the game.

A sense of the spec fictional is conveyed through a combination of the mystical-historical with the scientific, an aesthetic you can grasp by the images on the clues (owls, old statues, brain scans). The sense of timeliness was created by linking the story to the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China. This sense of timeliness makes the story experience unique- something that only makes sense to participate in during the spring and summer of 2008.

The element of The Lost Ring that first caught my attention was its use of Esperanto. In the opening video trailer for the game, I noticed a mysterious tattoo that read "Trovu la ringon perditan" (Find the lost ring). Many of the clues are written in Esperanto. In addition, the six main characters in the story speak six different languages! This adds an interesting layer to the interactive element of the game. Since it is unlikely the average participant can speak Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, German, French, Portuguese, and English, cooperation between players of different national and linguistic backgrounds is essential to unlocking the mystery.

ARGs already have a history of interactivity- people meeting at phone booths to receive an important clue, participants blogging, creating wikis, and working together to solve the puzzles. The Lost Ring has taken that interactivity one step farther. By encouraging interaction between people of different cultures, The Lost Ring becomes more than a game, more than a story. It's becoming a global event.