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.

William Shatner speaks Esperanto and the Curse of Incubus

For the past two years my husband and I have gone on Esperanto learning kicks over the summer. This year we had enough of the language under our belts to start having fun. We ordered a book of poetry in Esperanto, downloaded some songs from iTunes in the language, and we even found a film spoken entirely in Esperanto!

The film is called Incubus. Made in 1965, Incubus falls somewhere between a guilty-pleasure B horror flick and an Ingmar Bergman Cries and Whispers or The Seventh Seal. The plot of this movie isn't nearly as important as the emotion and symbology conveyed by the cinematography- which the film can express much better than I can. There has been a lot of discussion about William Shatner's pronunciation of Esperanto- which he learned expressly for the film in a matter of weeks.

But what I'm really interested in is the curse. The special features of the Incubus DVD made a convincing case for the Incubus Curse. Wikipedia did a good job of enumerating the incidents, too.

1. The pure young woman threatened with rape by evil was played by Ann Atmar, who committed suicide a few weeks after the film wrapped.

2. The spooky, creepy bad guy in the film was played by Milos Milos. About a year after the film was shot, Milos shot his girlfriend, then himself.

3. One of the female "bad guys" was played by Eloise Hardt. Her daughter was later kidnapped and murdered.

4. In 1993 Consolidated Film Industries reported that the only print and all negatives of the film had been lost in a fire.

To listen to the film's producer, Anthony Taylor, describe the incident, he was crushed when he learned the last surviving print of Incubus was destroyed. Several years later, Taylor's friend happened across a battered and forgotten version of the film (subtitled in French) at the Cinematique Francaise in Paris. The print was in awful shape, and it took international cooperation, modern technology, Taylor's passion to revive the film, and funds and promotion from the Sci-Fi Channel to bring the light and shadow, the love and hate, the purity and corruption of Incubus to a new generation of spec fic fans.