unfiction.com

An editorial reply.

I wrote the following in response to a recent article on ARGN by Larry Eisner, "Building Fences," and the resulting discussion that it sparked among the ARGN staff. I was thankful that both had forced me to articulate some concrete thoughts about why things are the way they are with respect to the unforums, beyond just "it's always been that way" or "it feels right" and I am curious to see how the wider community might respond.

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Elonka's book is out, in the US as The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms (in the UK it will be called The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles), by award-winning code-breaker and game developer Elonka Dunin. She's got a page up on her site with more information about the book and links to purchase it on Amazon.

An email tip to ARGN yesterday revealed the mysterious site for Last Call Poker. It appears to be a free online poker site, but posts on the site's forums talk about strange new users and pages on the site, which seem to have been placed there by someone called "The Dealer."

Lucky has a story to tell and a niece he'd like us to help. Are you willing to accept the wager?

For a while now, I've wanted to chime in on ARGTalk, a self-proclaimed "balanced and fair" website that originally advertised itself as the first site to print the reviews, rumors, and speculation "the other ARG news sites are afraid to post." Now with the recent transformation from Meta site to ARG game, ARGTalk has gone under the microscope as community members try to make sense of what the true purpose of the site is, and whether or not this is a shift from its original mission. In this writer's humble opinion, however, ARGTalk has failed as a neutral, supportive site, regardless of whether it is real or make-believe.

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Ares Station, a popular grassroots alternate reality game, wrapped up yesterday with an announcement posted to the main page of the game's titular site. Not originally conceived as an ARG, the game was in fact a joint thesis project by two students at Indiana University Bloomington, Nathan Mishler and Will Emigh.

The Puppetmasters will be appearing on the player chat network at irc.chat-solutions.org in the channel #aresPMchat tomorrow, Saturday, May 7, 2005, at 8:00 pm GMT to chat with players about the game. A player/lurker survey about the experience is also in the works.

Congratulations to the entire Puppetmaster team on their successful run!