And once again, one blog leads to another. My last post was about Amanda Palmer, and this post is also about Amanda Palmer. It's about a different Amanda Palmer, though - a fictionalized version.
I first heard about alternate reality games a few years back when I was browsing Wikipedia. I read about I Love Bees, which was a promotional ARG for Halo 2. The concept fascinated and frightened me at the same time. I actually had nightmares for a while about the whole idea. It was just creepy.
An ARG, if you don't know, is sort of like a roleplaying game. Well, not exactly; it's more complicated than that. It's a game that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. You have contact with the characters and help them solve a mystery or problem. There are usually lots of fictional websites involved and there are always insane puzzles. It's really part of the whole viral marketing thing, as most ARGs are made to promote something or other.
Right after the Amanda Palmer concert I attended in December, I was browsing the Shadowbox (the Dresden Dolls forum) when I found a thread titled "leaving the light on? WKAP secrets..." It was pretty far in, but it chronicled the mystery from the start. I was late, but the clock was still ticking.
ARGs start with a rabbit hole of some sort. For this one, it was a URL hidden in several places related to the album: on the album's website blinking in morse code, in thank you messages sent out through e-mail to those who purchased the record digitally. The URL was this: lostandfoundthings.tumblr.com.
At first, it just looked like an interesting blog that was a collection of odd art and quotations. Then on September 16, the owner, Laura, made a blog post that changed things and made people realize there was something more going on here.
Eventually, other websites were revealed. There was the website for WKAP-FM, a radio station owned by Jack Fox, the last person to speak to Amanda. Alexa Webb Report, a news website that featured stories about Amanda's disappearance from her friend's house in Acton, Massachusetts. Monolith and Sky, the website of Amanda's former Manager, Koosh Nall. Joie de Vivre Salon, a strange art gallery owned by five suspicious sisters. And Fans of Robert Johnson, owned by the mysterious RJ.
There were other characters that came to the surface with MySpace pages later on. Beth, Amanda's real-life assistant, was a character. Melody, a friend of Amanda who is desperately looking for her. Jude, Amanda's ex-boyfriend. Sheila, a hard-partying girl with a rude attitude. Sam, the Guitar Hero addict.
But the most significant, and most enigmatic, was The Stranger.
He is one of the few characters we actually have direct contact with, and he has given us the most information.
I think when the game became really, really interesting was when he instructed us to e-mail him and request something to be hidden. These so called "secrets" were sentences, quotes, information, that we were to hide in art for someone else to find and share. Initially, these were hidden in the physical world, but that made things move very slowly and so the hiding moved to Twitter, where information got around much faster.
The secrets slowly revealed bits of information about all the characters. The mystery still hasn't been fully worked out, but it's clear that there is some sort of voodoo or other trickery about that's allowing Amanda to die and be reborn multiple times, and that the Joie de Vivre sisters are behind it. It's also highly likely they did the same for RJ, who may have been Robert Johnson himself in a previous life. We're not even really sure anymore if the correct question is "who killed Amanda Palmer?"
But the fascination goes beyond that, even - there may be more philosophical layers than I can chew on. It's amazing, how this game has made people really think. I'm too tired to go and find some of the quotes, but there has been a lot of musing from certain "players" about the true nature of this ARG and the meaning of it. It's not just a game, and it's not just promotion. It's art.
The connections between characters and the mystery of it all have become like a second life for me and several others. The only downfall are the lulls in activity that occur every once in a while, when there are no new secrets, no new messages from The Stranger, and no new blogs from any of the characters. Eventually, though, it will pick up. Things will start moving again, and I'll get sucked in. That's just the way the game is played.
Monday, October 5, 2009
5: WKAP?
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