Alright so I have followed ARGs. I have read about ARGs and I took part in creating puzzles for one. For my final I decided I was going to create an ARG from scratch which was extremely fun, but I think I did it slightly off. I followed all of the instructions I received on the final for creating an ARG. I also followed the rather formulaic method of having an issue of an oppressive entity that the protagonists are trying to over through and combined with the other ARG plotline they are on a quest to find their imprisoned loved ones.

So far so good, I have a working plot line. Yet, as I started to make the puzzles and figured out how my main character, Dr. Guerrero, was going to ask for the players’help. I had an epiphany. See Dr. Guerrero’s wife and daughter are being held hostage by this king pin who is obsessed with finding seven indigenous relics that could resurrect his dead love. In order for Guerrero’s family to be safe and eventually be returned to him, he must decipher ancient riddles that explain the use of the artifacts. Guerrero starts a blog which he calls for any one and everyone’s help in deciphering the texts. He also encodes messages asking for help.

Professor Whalen brought this up in passing during our second to last class. He said we all need aliases from time to time. At first that sounded deeply paranoid, but then I realized how many times a day I use an alias especially around computers. Whenever I login to Amazon or ebay I am something other than who I am. I am my screen name and online whenever I go on to eaglenet.

I believe that for every alias you use a different persona is assumed. For the school account I am the beginning letter of my name and my last name and whenever I am lsouth, I try to represent myself in an academic manner. When I am just using a screen name in a chat sight I am who ever I want to be in that moment. I recently have been commenting in a news blog from Spain and they know me as SurE. When I am this screen name I am as loud spoken and very politically minded. In non-virtual setting and when I am not assuming this Alias, I tend to think before I speak. I am mostly quiet unless I feel confident in my response. While I am this character I don’t have to think my answers through I can just answer for the sake of discussion.

So I have to admit that after walking out of our last class session yesterday I felt a huge sense of relief; not enough to drop to the ground, throw my hands up, and yell "Praise you, Lord Jesus!"...but really enough to surprise myself that I had made it through this course that I started out not knowing anything about. Like a few of you have already done, I would like to just make this blog about my personal experience and thoughts about our World Building course.

I thought about starting this post with a list of words not to google, but I elected against it. Let's be honest though, we've all shrieked and dove from our keyboard at least once, uttering some variation of “Holy God, what have I done!?” and crawling under your desk to pull the power cord on your computer to avoid having to brave whatever godforsaken image is gracing your display. Don't lie to me. We all know what I'm talking about. What I'd like to address in this post is what it is exactly that possesses people to post such 'nsfl' images on the internet (that's 'not safe for life', for you, granny) and why, oh why do we still click on those links from those sketchy friends of ours. I think on one level, the answers are the same: curiosity.

Why indeed, friend.

Like my good friend Catzby already posted in his final blog here, I too will share my feeling with this unique and seemingly ubiquitous course. I honestly signed up for this class because it was the only one open that I could actually get credit towards my major. "World Building" sounded like a focused on creating worlds to write fiction for. Like, having good minor characters and being able to effectively describe a new world to a reader. While it wasn't exactly like that, it did show us the possibilities of interacting with an audience and new worlds with technology and media.

Favorite Assigned Reading: Personal Effects: Dark Art
I felt this book was overall more encompassed of our class. It had really cool mediums to explore and incorporated lots of different medias to explore. Easy to read and fun.

Favorite Movie: The Matrix
Duh, it's only the best movie ever. If you somehow haven't seen it, then just watch this.

I know that we talked about how the kindle is a transmedia device, but I felt oddly dissatisfied with the discussion. I know that we tend to see it as a rather evil entity usurping the rightful domain of books, but it is really more that and not really usurper at all. Let me just clear the air, no one will ever take books away from us. It is too much of a ritual for people to hold a book while reading it or be comforted by a books smell. In other words the kindle is not trying to take books away from us, it just a different media of storytelling.

It is away to be able to download a plethora of books fast anyway you happen to be which is convenient and cheaper than buy regular books. Now you think but then so it must be taking the place of a book, well, its not really. Is a computer that plays movies, downloads e-books, and manages to play TV shows taking over: cinemas, books, and TVs? No its not it just has the capability to make your life easier and a kindle doesn’t just allow you to store books but you can store your mp3 music, get a newspaper subscription, or keep up with blogs.

Is it just me, or can no one else go through Youtube videos without running into a racist remark posted underneath in the comments section at least once during the course of a day? One of the most fascinating things I've watched happen on the internet since I first started using it is the amount of racist things people say to one another, and what they'll say them for. It's not as though I spend my time online looking only at WorldStarHipHop.com videos, which tend to be the subject of a lot of racial hatred against blacks by white people. I seriously find racism almost anywhere I go on the internet.

Message boards were where I first started seeing people make frequent use of "the N word," but I dismissed it somewhat because the boards I was interested in reading were dedicated to gamers. Gamers tend to have some anti-social personality traits, and while I still found it weird how many of them seemed to hate based on race, I sort of just wrote it off and didn't think too much into it, feeling that they were all just bitter angry kids. In actual games, too, I would hear and see people using racial slurs towards one another, although not always hatefully. Some kids just thought it was funny to call each other by them, and the conversation was still friendly. In a way, I felt better to know that these kids probably weren't racist, but it was still unsettling to hear how comfortable they were using them. I am by no means easily offended at vulgar language, but racial slurs are in an entirely different realm.

For the final project, I chose to create a work of transmedia fiction. The story actually feeds off a currently fictional universe that a favorite band of mine developed for their recent album release. Opinions of My Chemical Romance tend to be polemic, so whether you like them or hate them, I don't care; I don't own the new album, "Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys", but I listened to several tracks, investigated the concepts behind it, and my imagination took off from there. MCR invited their fans to create & submit their own fanworks, as it were, and I took this as an OK for me to mess around in that universe. Frankly, I wasn't sure if MCR had created their own ARG (NiN did) due to the number of website/easter eggs that abound (important organizations have their own websites; main characters have radio transmissions; etc.), but ultimately I don't think there is one.

A short synopsis is in order: In 2019, Better Living Industries (BL/ind) is attempting to control the population using methods similar to how the government in the film "Equilibrium" tries to control theirs. In this world, a group of outlaws calling themselves the "Killjoys" rush around resisting BL/ind. The album "Danger Days" is intended to represent the soundtrack of their adventures. This is where I set my story.

At the beginning of this course I had no idea what to expect. In fact, I thought World Building referred to a style of colonization where worlds were actually destroyed and then built up.

Needless to say I was completely wrong, and it has been a much more pleasant experience because of it. Also, needless to say, I had no idea what any of these topics we covered initially were. Cyber Punk? Transmedia Fiction? No clue.

But now that we are at the end of the semester, and we've had all kinds of crazy discussions, I feel enlightened about a world I never knew existed. My perception of people who played ARG type games was that of nerds dressed in Medieval times fighting with rubber swords. I had no idea that these games were intense and involved an incredible amount of mental fortitude to first of find out about, and second of all, complete in a reasonable amount of time with perfect success. Those within the ARG community are incredibly talented at what they do, and even though I still think of them a kind of creepy, I have way more respect for them now as opposed to before.

Here we go:

Death of a Model.

CHARACTERS:
Sheila Miller – protagonist, friend of person that died.
Nicole Stanton – dies at the beginning, acts as a trailhead.
Detective Robert Houghlander – cop, helping Sheila, maintains a blog about the case.
Gregorio Napoleono – antagonist, killer of Nicole, wants to kill Sheila because she saw him murder Nicole.

SEQUENCE OF EVENTS:
1. Nicole’s Death. – interactions with S & Det. - Twitter post and blogspot trailhead.
2. Puzzle 1, poem – link to killer (Gregorio introduced).
3. S finds a ROT-coded puzzle that proves the murder was planned.
4. S receives a binary note that translates into Italian. Link to Gregorio.
5. Reason for killing Sheila is revealed. In puzzle 4 - 10 shift cypher.
6. CLIMAX. Gregorio and henchmen vs. Sheila, but detective catches them.
7. Happily ever after.

SETTING:
nondescript neighborhood in NYC.

PROOF & PUZZLES:
(I had to do a quick run-through of the ARG because of the puzzles I incorporated, I had to play out the events in semi-real time, so if you read the Twitter & the blog from the earliest account up, events unfold in a coordinated, albeit hurried, way... Also might be missing some of the finer details, I tried to fix everything I could)

www.twitter.com/itssheeeela
www.rhoughlanderdet.blogspot.com

STORYLINE: