Mssv

Over the next three months, I’m going to be travelling to six different countries.
Amsterdam (Sept 25th-29th): I’m speaking at the PICNIC Academy about ARGs on either Tuesday or Wednesday (pay no attention to their schedule, they’re moving things around). I’ll also be around for the rest of the conference, including Come Out and Play.
Brussels (Oct […]

There are some skills that ARG designers should quite obviously have: an understanding of stories, a good grasp of how online communities work and a very creative mind. One often gets overlooked - emergency management. No matter how well you plan your game, if any part of it is live, if any part of it […]

Like many others, when I was kid, two of the games I had the most fun with were Lego and Meccano. It would be trite to go into the reasons why, and it’s enough to say that construction kits like these offer kids a unique place to use their imagination to build anything they want, […]

It’s said that it takes 4000 hours of study and practice to become an expert, whether it’s for sport, music, dance or academia. 4000 hours works out to be about three years of full time study - the same length as an undergraduate degree.
For the past three years, I’ve worked at Mind Candy as Director […]

It turns out that I’ve been using the term ‘epistolatory’ when what I really mean is ‘epistolary’. Think of all the precious seconds I’ve lost, typing out those two extra words. Think of those lost Google hits.
Epistolary literature refers to fiction where the story is told in the form of letters written by the protagonists; […]

“What’s this?” I asked, toying with a white cylinder with letters printed across it.
“It’s a cryptex,” explained Eric Harshbarger, one of Mind Candy’s in-house puzzle designers. “Like the one from the Da Vinci Code.”
In The Da Vinci Code, a cryptex is a cylinder with five wheels that can be rotated independently; each wheel has letters […]

Updated with a link to my Google presentation.
Flying from west to east, I can recover from jetlag at about 2.5 hours per day. This means that when I come back from San Francisco, 8 hours behind GMT, I take a little over three days to return to my normal circadian rhythm. I once read that […]

Interesting article from today’s New York Times, What a College Education Buys:
Moreover, if you’re not planning on becoming, say, a doctor, the benefits of diligent study can be overstated. In recent decades, the biggest rewards have gone to those whose intelligence is deployable in new directions on short notice, not to those who are locked […]

After two years, the Cube has been found, and with it comes the end of Season 1 of Perplex City. A couple of days ago, we launched a new site at perplexcity.com (we call it the Puzzle Portal); it’s still in beta, but there are going to be some good changes over the next few […]

The ghost of Orson Welles strikes again - according to the BBC, ‘the Belgian public television station RTBF ran a bogus report saying the Dutch-speaking half of the nation had declared independence.’ Lots of faked footage of celebrations, traffic jams, and 2600 calls were made to a phone number given out during the show, which […]