Thursday, June 19, 2008

Wanna Live In An ARG?

These New Yorkers do.

Of course, the game designer in me immediately started thinking about ways this could've been done to allow replayability.

Maybe consider the apartment's game elements as platform rather than content, which would give the family the ability to develop their own games. Kids love devising their own ciphers and stories as much as experiencing them, after all.

Say the apartment's codes and hiding places were configurable and content-agnostic: designers could create and hide their own clues that would redirect to other locations in a whole new sequence of puzzles. You'd still run out of unique clue locations fairly quickly, but at least you'd get more play out of your hella expensive live-in game.

Oh, and the story's already been optioned for the movie treatment by J. J. Abrams.