Perplex City

Perplex City was a long-term alternate reality game

Alternate reality game

An alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions....

(ARG) presented by Mind Candy

Mind Candy

Mind Candy is a British entertainment company, formed in 2003 by UK internet entrepreneur Michael Acton Smith, and based in Shoreditch, London, England...

, a London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

-based development team. The first "season" of the game had players looking for "The Receda Cube" (referred to simply as "The Cube"), a priceless scientific and spiritual artifact to the people of a fictional metropolis

Metropolis

A metropolis is a very large city or urban area which is a significant economic, political and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections and communications...

known as "Perplex City", that had been stolen and buried somewhere on Earth. The game offered a real-life £

Pound sterling

The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...

100,000 reward (approx. $

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

200,000 or €

Euro

The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...

150,000) to whoever found it. Like most alternate reality games, the story of Perplex City is told through blogs, puzzles, and other various media.

The game began in April 2005, and was won by Andy Darley of Middlesex

Middlesex

Middlesex is one of the historic counties of England and the second smallest by area. The low-lying county contained the wealthy and politically independent City of London on its southern boundary and was dominated by it from a very early time...

, UK, who found The Cube in a wood in Northamptonshire, UK on 2 February 2007.

According to Mind Candy

Mind Candy

Mind Candy is a British entertainment company, formed in 2003 by UK internet entrepreneur Michael Acton Smith, and based in Shoreditch, London, England...

, the first wave of cards for the new game season, called Perplex City Stories

Perplex City Stories

Perplex City Stories is the planned second season of the popular alternate reality game Perplex City, run by Mind Candy. Although no plot has been revealed yet, the first wave of puzzle cards was released on March 1, 2007....

would be released on March 1, 2007. However, in June 2007, they released an announcement which declared that the second season was on indefinite hold.

Perplex City is a massive fictitious metropolis that has an unknown number of connections to Earth. It has a near-future feel to it, with advanced mobile technology, neuro-enhancing pharmaceuticals and kilometer-high skyscrapers. There is also a slightly more Utopian element to city life than we commonly find on Earth. The most important characteristic of the city's culture is the importance they place on puzzles and other mental pursuits. Their leading competitive event, the Academy Games, is primarily a competition of intellectual skill rather than physical strength. In fact, nearly every part of their culture touches upon the cryptic and mind.

Their religions fall loosely around a mythology of building, construction and technology, none of which are explicitly theistic. The Cube is, in all cases, a sacred and holy object, and rightfully so. It possesses a range of unusual properties which many believe to be of a supernatural origin.

Citizens of Perplex City

Key figures in city life include Sente Kiteway, Master of The Academy (The academy being an advanced learning institution in the city) and former custodian of the Cube. His two daughters, Scarlett and Violet, communicate regularly with the people of Earth through their blogs. Pietro Salk, an investigative reporter for leading newspaper The Sentinel, produced many leads before he was unceremoniously killed off for getting too close to the truth. The team at the Academy tasked with returning the Cube (and ostensibly authors of the puzzle cards) are also frequently in touch, and Kurt McAllister is an important ally to players on Earth.

Plot

An artifact called the Receda Cube is stolen from the Perplex City Academy, and somehow makes its way to Earth. A Cube Retrieval Team (CRT) is formed to search for the Cube. Because citizens of Perplex City are unable to travel to Earth, the Master of Perplex City Academy, Sente Kiteway, asks for help in finding the Cube from the citizens of Earth, offering to share any leads or clues the he or the CRT may get.

Clues to the location of the Cube are periodically left by the person who stole it, known only as Combed Thunderclap. Soon it is discovered that an organization called the Third Power, and a Cube-worshipping cult called the Reconstructionists are also looking for the Cube. While the people of Earth are left to search for the Cube on Earth, various citizens of Perplex City, particularly Kurt McAllister and Sente’s two daughters, Scarlett and Violet, attempt to find additional clues in Perplex City and to discover the identity of Combed Thunderclap. The former three discover the lab in which the Cube was made. They find that the Cube can be used as a weapon and a teleporter, and was built by Sente. The Cube is finally found by the people of Earth in Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire is a landlocked county in the English East Midlands, with a population of 629,676 as at the 2001 census. It has boundaries with the ceremonial counties of Warwickshire to the west, Leicestershire and Rutland to the north, Cambridgeshire to the east, Bedfordshire to the south-east,...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

; they also determine that it was Violet who stole the Cube and hid it on Earth, in an effort to keep it out of the hands of the Third Power.

Puzzle cards

Mind Candy sells a series of collectible puzzle cards. These share familiar characteristics with other collectible card game

Collectible card game

thumb|Players and their decksA collectible card game , also called a trading card game or customizable card game, is a game played using specially designed sets of playing cards...

s (CCGs). They are sold in booster packs, with each pack containing six random cards from the total possible 256 cards. Cards are divided into sets and subsets of varying rarity and difficulty. The most common cards are red, then orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and the rarest are silver.

Unlike CCGs such as Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering , also known as Magic, is the first collectible trading card game created by mathematics professor Richard Garfield and introduced in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast. Magic continues to thrive, with approximately twelve million players as of 2011...

or Pokémon

Pokémon Trading Card Game

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is a collectible card game based on the Pokémon video game series, first introduced in Japan in October 1996, then North America in December 1998...

, though, the cards are not designed for competitive player-versus-player "combat". Instead, each card depicts a different puzzle, with the rarer cards also featuring more complex riddles. Cards are marked with unique identifiers which can then be entered onto the Perplex City website, earning points and a place on a leaderboard

Leaderboard

Leaderboard is a series of golf simulation video games that was developed by Bruce and Roger Carver, and published by Access Software.-Summary:thumb|left|Teeing off on the first hole ....

. Many cards contain hidden features, such as ultraviolet or heat-sensitive inks, and they cover a broad range of themes from pop-culture trivia to cryptography

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

and logic brainteasers. They are also larger and less homogeneous than cards from other CCGs, and the back of some cards contains a different piece to a huge map of the city.

Once players solve a card, they should go to the Perplex City website and enter the answer in. If they are correct, they receive points for the card, as well as a position on the chronological solves board for that card. In addition, each card is a member of a four-card set. If all four cards are solved by a player, they receive double points for each card in the set.

Cards may be purchased online at retailers such as Firebox in the UK, ThinkGeek in the US, often on ebay, or at one of thousands of other on-line and in-store locations. A few web-stores have become available which only sell puzzle cards, including MyPerplex.com, and PerplexMe.co.uk.

Unsolved cards

As of February 2010, two cards from the first season are yet to be solved:

Riemann (S1, Card #238) apparently asks players to prove the Riemann hypothesis
Riemann hypothesis
In mathematics, the Riemann hypothesis, proposed by , is a conjecture about the location of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function which states that all non-trivial zeros have real part 1/2...

. However it is generally accepted that this cannot be the actual expected answer, as it would be impossible for the website server to validate such a solution, and would also require Mind Candy to know the proof in advance. The correct approach to the card is not yet known.

Billion to One (S1, Card #256) features the face of a man, with a caption in Japanese that reads 私を見つけなさい, which roughly translates to "Find Me." His image has been spread to social networking sites, in attempts to locate and make contact with this person.

Out of print cards

Currently, Mind Candy no longer prints two cards. The cards were excluded from wave-three print runs for fairly rudimentary printing reasons (two cards did not fit on the print layout). While these problems have been rectified, Mind Candy has no plans to replace or reprint these cards in the future. They are:

Card #238 (Riemann) - chosen to be excluded due to the complete inability of the card to be solved for the foreseeable future.
Card #245 (Relativity) - chosen to be excluded more or less at random, but the decision was no doubt influenced by the fact that the problem and solution are quite complex.

ARG features

The puzzle cards are intended as an introduction to the characters and story of Perplex City itself, and the deeper mysteries of the Cube theft. Clues found on the cards direct players to various websites, blogs, emails, phone calls

Telephone

The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

, and SMS messages

Short message service

Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices...

, originating from Perplex City. These often feature puzzles of their own, whose solutions lead to further puzzles. Frequently these puzzles require players to co-operate in reaching various goals.

Perplex City has been running since late 2004, much longer than the traditional ARG. Its longevity has allowed for a number of events that simply would not be possible within a two-month traditional lifespan of an ARG. Some examples of this include:

Players wrote a book to enable a character to become a "published author" and gain access to relevant archives.
A full length CD of cryptic techno music was released by a Perplexian musician.
A banner plane flew across Manchester with a keyword that enabled access to a new area of the game.
Sixty players attended an in-game event in search for clues, only for one of their own to be revealed as a mole and escape in a black helicopter.
220 people participated in the first Perplex City Academy Games in London, a high-tech scavenger hunt across the capital. A month later, a similar event was held in New York.

Mind Candy

Perplex City is notable within the ARG field for charting new water with a unique business model

Business model

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value...

. Typically, ARGs tend to either be exercises in viral marketing

Viral marketing

Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses...

for new products, or grassroots projects developed by amateur groups. (One exception was Majestic, a subscription-based ARG run by Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...

, which received a poor commercial reception.) Perplex City aims to become a truly self-supporting venture by selling the collectible puzzle cards that tie into the "alternate reality" aspects of the game.

This initially attracted a degree of controversy from players accustomed to playing ARGs for free. However, Mind Candy has assured the player base that purchase of the cards is not required to play the game, nor collect the reward. The cards and the ARG are related loosely enough to enable anyone to follow the game free-of-charge if they so wish, and the concept has since been embraced by many.

In other words, from a commercial standpoint, buying the cards is encouraged; However the game is built using enough online story elements and engaging character interaction as to make buying the cards optional to playing the game. Where some players might choose to only buy the cards, some other players might opt to only follow the story online and buy no cards. By majority, most players seem to buy roughly 20 or 30 cards and engage in occasionally reading the web elements.

The cards were first released in select outlets arounds the world, but are increasingly readily available from retailers both on- and offline. On September 7, 2006, Mind Candy announced that GameStop

GameStop

GameStop Corporation is an American video game and entertainment software retailer. The company, whose headquarters is in Grapevine, Texas, United States, operates 6,500 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New...

was to begin carrying Perplex City cards in 700 stores in the United States. As of September 26, 2006, some 682,425 cards have been marked as solved on the Perplex City leaderboard, with 45,215 players registered.

Mind Candy received a round of venture capital worth $

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

3 million from Index Ventures

Index Ventures

Index Ventures is a venture capital investment firm based in Geneva, Switzerland, with offices in London, Jersey, and starting in 2011, Silcon Valley. The firm was founded in 1996 by Neil Rimer and Giuseppe Zocco. Since its inception, the firm has raised four main venture funds and a growth...

, an investor in Skype

Skype

Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...

and other technology companies.

In June 2007 Mind Candy announced that it would be putting season 2 of its ARG on hold indefinitely.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Perplex City

Citizens of Perplex City

Plot

Puzzle cards

Unsolved cards

Out of print cards

ARG features

Mind Candy

See also

External links