So last night I was up late, reading up on Alternate Reality Games. It's these games where the people running the game attempt to blur the line between reality and their game world. They put up websites, create email accounts for the express purpose of the game. They leave clues, puzzles and hints in unlikely places and wait until people notice. Sometimes, these clues come up in the real world. They may get a phone call, or meet somebody.

Anyway, the clues that start people on alternate reality games are sometimes called Rabbit Holes (you know, like Alice in Wonderland). Recently, the gamer world is a buzz with a highly public Rabbit Hole in the Halo 2 video game trailer. Apparently, the website ilovebees.com appears in the trailer for a small time period, and when people got to the website, it had weird defacing, which led down a really strange path.

This really got me interested in the concept of ARG's. It's got all the strange puzzles and equally strange plots. Then I remembered a pretty strange post on the Abandonware Forums a few months back. It was by someone not really known in the community but he posted a topic asking for help.

In it, he asked for people's help in deciphering a flash-based puzzle left behind by a friend who had suddenly disappeared. There were quite a few responses to it, but I don't ever remember checking the puzzle out, thinking the guy was pretty much a nutjob asking for help on a forum where people didn't even know him.

My interest in ARG's somehow brought back my memory of this strange post. Thinking that it might be a rabbit hole, I was really interested in seeing if it was an ARG and if I could get into the game somehow. But then some weird things started happening. When I dialed up to try to check the website, my firewall said that for some reason, the ISP changed me to another VPN (virtual private network). My brain went uhmm at that but I ignored it. Then I went to check on the forums. It's disappeared. Or at least I can't access it. Which made me think of another strange thing that happened.

When I logged into the unofficial IRC channel of that forum last night, nobody was on. Usually at least one person should have been online at the same time and the channel should have had a topic, but it was completely empty. I know nobody could ever have possibly coordinated all of those events just for me (and how would they have known I was getting interested anyway?), but it was a pretty weird collusion of events anyway.

BTW, for a kinda creepy read on an ongoing ARG, try reading the guide on this Urban Hunt wiki.