Ace Member, Stephen had a major birthday coming up and decided to get his family together to play an epic Alternate Reality Game (ARG) inspired by the Jejune Institute – an immersive game created by Oakland Based artist, Jeff Hull. Though Stephen had some previous experience making puzzles, creating an ARG with a coherent narrative based on a specific site presented a new challenge.
Tell your story and build your world in as few words as possible. People are here to play a game, not to read. Let them discover the world, as much as possible, through the gameplay. -Stephen’s advice
He used the Ace Laser to cut some of the key pieces for his adventure:
- An acrylic box to hold kazoos
- An acrylic screen with a logo for a movie inside a book.
- A wooden mirror box for the grand finale
Keep reading for edited excerpts from his fabulous in-depth write up of The Solano Human Project on Medium.
Check out the full original post to immerse yourself in his fantastic Alternate Reality with:
- Great storytelling, and intricate worldbuilding
- Text and instructions for each section of the game
- Walk throughs for each clue, real player experiences, and lessons learned along the way (including one’s not mentioned in this shortened version)
- Shoutouts to local businesses
- More pics of the game in action
The Solano Human Project
For my birthday, I created an Alternate Reality Game for my family to play; it took place along a few blocks of Solano Avenue in Albany, California.
To start, I gave everyone a card that said:
That’s right, I managed to rent a phone number with my initials in it! The card also introduced people to the game logo. I tried to mark almost every in-game item with the logo. (For reasons, as I write this blog post, the game is transitioning to a new logo so the ones in the pictures might be inconsistent.)
After you send the text, you receive a message from the year 2066:
We are texting you through a Time Portal from an Alternate Future Universe, where the Cyborgs have taken over. (Spoiler alert: it sucks!) We call ourselves Team Human. It is too late for us, but we hope we can help your timeline.
Next year — you call it “2024” — will be critical.
It is the year “FibJourney” floods social media with fake images. It is the year a self-driving car kidnaps the CEO of Raytheon. It is the year “ChetGPT” gains sentience and hacks into a NORAD base station.
To help you stop them, we’ll show you how the Cyborgs take power with their SLICED MEN weapon, and we’ll show you how to fight back with anti-Cyborg technology. And, most importantly, we’ll tell you the codename of the future leader of Team Human so you can contact her next year.
But we can’t do any of this in the open — ChetGPT is always listening, always scraping. So we will send you coded messages (and even objects) through the Time Portal. Pictures may look different from yours because they are from the Future. Act quickly — the Time Portal can only stay open for a limited amount of time.
YOU WILL GET A SERIES OF QUESTIONS.
TEXT THE QUESTION NUMBER, “:”, AND THEN THE ANSWER.
IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW THIS FORMAT, YOUR TEXT WILL BE SENT TO A RANDOM PERSON.
This is basically the “intro video” to every escape room, to set the stage. It’s the longest text that will be sent during the game. (Random texts — like “hi” — would result in Easter eggs.)
The rest of this article is a spoiler-filled walk-through. If you want to play the game*, STOP READING NOW!
*Email [email protected] if you want to play.
I started the game with a couple of warm-up questions.
Q1:YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS AT 1286 SOLANO AVE. ARE YOU THERE NOW? [REPLY “1:YES”]
> 1:yes
The Cyborgs did not begin by waging open war against the humans.
At first, they freed us from all labor, and promised us lives of leisure.
But then they began to crush our spirits, starting with sports.
A NEARBY SPORTING GOODS STORE PROVIDED THE CYBORGS WITH EQUIPMENT FOR THEIR ENORMOUS BODIES.
Q2:WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE SPORT?
[REPLY “2:_ _ _ _ _ _”]
> 2:tennis
TALL AS TREES, THE CYBORGS WERE UNSTOPPABLE AT NIMBLEDON.
The next clue was a dry cleaning receipt that lead my family to the first non-player character (NPC) interaction which helped set the tone for the rest of the game.
I made 3 T-shirts as swag, one for each kid who participated. I took a standard A’s shirt and used a Cricut to iron on a ring diacritic above the “A”, the “Team Human” logo on the right sleeve, and the kids first name on the left.
The Oakland Å’s — the Ångströms, named after the measurement in physics — will move from Oakland to Anchorage to escape California’s strict anti-Cybernetics-in-sports laws. (Their all-Cyborg team was the subject of the documentary ‘Androids in the Outfield’).
TO SAVE HUMANITY, THE ÅNGSTRÖMS MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO LEAVE OAKLAND.
For those of you not in the Bay Area: in 2025, the Oakland A’s are planning to leave Oakland — their home for more than 50 years — for Las Vegas, and it’s highly unlikely that this decision will be reversed. A streak of gallows humor like this runs throughout the game.
The players then received instructions to buy a greeting card from another local business.
I took this photo of a nearby gallery and asked an AI (probably Stable Diffusion? I forget) to generate a dystopian robot-filled version of it. (I used a lot of AI tools to make a game about AI taking over the world! Irony!)
They located the card and found the next clue:
Inside, the text of the card reads “If we work together we can defeat the AI.” Within the folds of the card I tucked this photo, which I made with Adobe Firefly:
After following a few more clues including an elaborate geocache puzzle, the players found a PO Box Key (learn more about these clues and some of the important lessons learned on Medium). Inside the mailbox was an acrylic box I custom built at Ace Makerspace.
There were several layers of deception here. The box says it’s filled with candy. But the “candy” looks like a weapon (sticks of dynamite). But the “dynamite” is actually a toy (a kazoo). But the kazoo is actually a weapon (in the context of the game).
THE KAZOO WAS THE ULTIMATE WEAPON AGAINST THE CYBORGS — THE SOUND PERMANENTLY DISRUPTS CYBORG CIRCUITRY.
(If someone complains about the sound of a Kazoo, they likely are part Cyborg.)
Will playing the kazoo really stop the robots from taking over the world? Maybe! Couldn’t hurt!
Some people thought this puzzle was the big finale…but wait, there’s (a lot) more:
Eventually the players found their way to the Berkeley Human Thrift Shop (Actually the Berkely Humane Thrift Shop) to find the next clue. They knew it was a book, but which book?
The players also came across this flyer/clue in the window of a local coffee shop.
For the grand finale, I created a tiny Kusama mirror room in a wooden box I built at Ace Makerspace filled with some figurines I bought in Mexico, and tucked it in there:
The answer to the puzzle is on a sticker in the box.
YOU DID IT! CONGRATULATIONS, AND GOOD LUCK NEXT YEAR. YOU’LL NEED IT.
I wanted to end with a bang, but I also didn’t want my route to involve any backtracking, so it wasn’t possible to finish at the thrift store or the post office. I think this worked fine as a finale, people were very surprised to see this little world inside a semi-public space, and everyone took pictures of it.
Total playtime was about 90 minutes. I gave very few hints (mostly things like “don’t guess!”, and “keep walking”).
TAKEAWAYS:
- Branding to indicate what items are in-game worked well; I should have applied it more consistently. You can always make the branding more subtle to make the puzzle harder.
- Likewise, if you are vague about whether there are any NPCs in your game and how they would be identified, you need to be careful that your players don’t act inappropriately with innocent bystanders.
- Edit edit edit! People want to do the least amount of reading possible to play your game; try to convey your story with as few words as possible
- Hearing people say “Don’t give us any hints!” is a good sign — an indication they trust the puzzle and that the payoff will be worth the effort.
- Playtest, even for a one-off! I did a walk-through of the game the night before with a friend, which uncovered many problems with both the technology and the narrative.
THE END