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Valve's Adam Foster has posted a fascinating article on Gamasutra about the creation of the Portal alternate reality game (ARG) that first revealed the existence of Portal 2. Adam shares his thoughts and experiences on creating ARGs in general, which I'll be briefly summarizing below.
For those of you who weren't around for the Portal ARG, the original Portal was updated out of the blue on March 1st 2010 with a mystery message in the changelog which read, "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations." Players soon discovered that a series of radios had been placed throughout Aperture Science's test chambers. When picked up and brought to certain parts of each level, the radios began to play morse code beeps and strange noises. Those noises turned out to in fact be encoded SSTV images, which players quickly began to unearth.
[box=center]
One of the twenty six "dinosaur" images discovered in the original Portal.[/box]
Some of these images contained a code, which eventually turned out to be the MD5 hash of a phone number for a landline. This landline happened to be plugged into an old modem hooked up to a PC in Adam Foster's kitchen. Dialling into this number via a terminal with a 56k modem gained access to a BBS which, when given the correct login, yielded several correspondences from Cave Johnson and screenshots or concept art of Portal 2 converted into ASCII images.
[box=right]
An ASCII-converted piece of concept art showing Atlas and P-Body.[/box]
After the images were found, Valve released another update to Portal 2 on March 3rd 2010, which altered and extended the game's original ending to foreshadow the opening events of Portal 2 and the Lab Rat comic, which takes place in the interlude between both games. The following ARG, dubbed the infamous "Potato ARG", began almost a month later, even without assistance from Foster, who was too busy working on Portal 2 itself. If you're looking for more information on the Potato ARG, you can read more about it here.
In the main section of Foster's article (which I stress you should read in full), he details the correct way to build an ARG that is fun to solve and allows people to participate. He outlines his core design rules, which included:
For those of you who weren't around for the Portal ARG, the original Portal was updated out of the blue on March 1st 2010 with a mystery message in the changelog which read, "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations." Players soon discovered that a series of radios had been placed throughout Aperture Science's test chambers. When picked up and brought to certain parts of each level, the radios began to play morse code beeps and strange noises. Those noises turned out to in fact be encoded SSTV images, which players quickly began to unearth.
[box=center]
One of the twenty six "dinosaur" images discovered in the original Portal.[/box]
Some of these images contained a code, which eventually turned out to be the MD5 hash of a phone number for a landline. This landline happened to be plugged into an old modem hooked up to a PC in Adam Foster's kitchen. Dialling into this number via a terminal with a 56k modem gained access to a BBS which, when given the correct login, yielded several correspondences from Cave Johnson and screenshots or concept art of Portal 2 converted into ASCII images.
[box=right]
An ASCII-converted piece of concept art showing Atlas and P-Body.[/box]
After the images were found, Valve released another update to Portal 2 on March 3rd 2010, which altered and extended the game's original ending to foreshadow the opening events of Portal 2 and the Lab Rat comic, which takes place in the interlude between both games. The following ARG, dubbed the infamous "Potato ARG", began almost a month later, even without assistance from Foster, who was too busy working on Portal 2 itself. If you're looking for more information on the Potato ARG, you can read more about it here.
In the main section of Foster's article (which I stress you should read in full), he details the correct way to build an ARG that is fun to solve and allows people to participate. He outlines his core design rules, which included:
- It must be clear that there is something to decode. In the case of the radios the morse code sounds were instantly recognisable which hinted at the noise in the other radio signals hiding something too.
- Similarly to the first, it must be clear what the boundaries are between what is part of the game and what is not. Some players tried to track down the physical location of the phone number to see if that was part of the game. The number was unlisted so they were unable to, but if they had it may have caused a bit of a shock for Adamn when they showed up at his house.
- It must be unambiguous when something has been solved. It would be very frustrating for players to think they had successfully found the correct message, only to later realise they had gotten it wrong and were spending their efforts on false leads. The SSTV images are very clearly correctly decoded when found, even if their purpose is initially mysterious.
- Using real encoding methods makes it easier and more fun for the players to solve the puzzle (and easier to create as well) and easier and more educational for players who may not initially know the encoding method to learn it. How many of you didn't know about SSTV until this ARG?
- Only a select few core enthusiasts will be the ones actually solving all your puzzles but others will want to feel like they are participating too. In the case of the Portal ARG this consisted of an update to Portal with a new feature (the radios) and a related achievement as well as an extended ending to the game.
- Have bottlenecks that will control the pace of the game. The MD5 hash hiding the BBS phone number had to be brute forced. The game could not progress until this was solved, giving a natural downtime that let other players and followers catch up with what was happening and stopping the game from ending too soon.
