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One of the many sad results of Perplex City being put ‘on hold’ is that I can’t explore the effect of cognitive enhancement on society. As a former neuroscientist who studied experimental psychology at university, I always enjoyed writing about my pet fictional company, Cognivia, and its range of cognitive enhancements including Ceretin (wide-spectrum enhancement), [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s late notice, I know, but I’m going to be in Second Life tonight at midnight, talking about Perplex City, ARGs and (unsurprisingly) Second Life. It’s part of the Second Life Future Salon, and hosted by the Electric Sheep Company. You can find out more here. Also, you don’t need to be in SL to [...]

Next week, I’m speaking at a couple of conferences on Perplex City in London. Can you guess I didn’t get much notice? Anyway, if you happen to be going to either, please say hi!
Tuesday November 28th: BBC Audio Drama Festival. I’m speaking on the Gaming panel, which is at 9:30am and also repeated at 11:30am.
Friday [...]

I occasionally get emails from people asking how they might work for a company that creates ARGs; many of these people are students. Since the question is repeatedly asked, I thought I’d put my answer here in case it interests anyone else.

Some San Francisco thoughts:
Despite being a fairly small city, it’s very difficult to get around. We used a car for most of the time, but this only worked because we had a person who was happy driving us around all the time. As for public transport, it was initially very confusing. Here were some questions: [...]

I’ve been at Mind Candy, developing Perplex City full time, for almost two years now. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a Bruce Sterling novel, jumping from neuroscience to a job which didn’t exist five years ago and is still difficult to explain to people. It’s obviously been a fun, if hectic, time, and it’s [...]