The "LA" in "PLAY"

Guest Post: Steampunk ARG at ComicCon

Mike Minadeo is a game creator and fellow member of PEG-LA. In his guest post, he writes about his experience creating and running a scavenger hunt at San Diego’s 2011 ComicCon.

Do you like Steampunk? Well my business partner Fred Muguerza and I have recently become fascinated by this interesting historical spinoff and decided to create a scavenger hunt in San Diego during the ComicCon. The Gaslamp District seemed like the perfect environment for the Victorian theme, and we felt that the antique buildings and glow of the lamps would help immerse the players into the Steampunk mindset.

We’ve become involved in the ARG community and wanted to create this scavenger hunt as the first piece of the puzzle for our transmedia game, The Ultimate Duel. For those not familiar with ARG’s, they are Alternate Reality Games, where the real world is used as a backdrop for an interactive experience. Typically, they are started with an obscure or intriguing “trailhead” (like a QR code) that leads players on a cryptic adventure through a “rabbit hole”. It’s a new and exciting arena with a lot of talented folks who are intent on utilizing new layers of digital technology to create interwoven narrative gaming experiences (and that’s a real mouthful!).

Here’s some important lessons we learned while creating the game:     

Planning the narrative

We actually wrote our entire story before we planned out our game outline. Following our transmedia guidelines, we wanted the scavenger hunt to be an additional bonus layer, not something that would be required to understand the main story.

Scouting the Location

This took many more trips than we thought- this step cannot be underestimated when planning a game.

Planning the puzzles

We wanted to give the adventure a Victorian feel, so I researched the types of puzzles that were played in the 1850’s. Rebuses, rhyming games, and phrenology became themes.

Designing the reward

We wanted to give out a unique reward. A large part of Steampunk, is DIY, and old medals are often incorporated as style elements when creating your own costume. Fred, my partner in crime, is a master fabricator and drew a unique design in Illustrator, transported the file to AutoCAD, and used a laser cutter to make precise cuts.

On the back of the medal, we placed a QR code that leads to our rabbit hole for the ARG portion of our game.

Playtesting

This was the absolutely most important step of the process. After running our test, we added a few failsafes, so that if players got lost, they could find their way back on track.

Things we learned while making and running the scavenger hunt:

What we did right:

                A. Anticipating that nighttime would be free time outside of convention hours.

                B. Targeting anybody wearing a steampunk outfit.

C. Running TWO playtests- one early and one at night to see how the ambient lamplights

would affect the visibility.

                D. Incessantly revising document to make sure our players would not get lost.

                E. Getting groups and families to play together.

What we did wrong:

        A. We didn’t properly market to steampunk groups before our hunt.

B. We didn’t anticipate that people’s schedules would already be full. For example, we had exponentially greater participation on the second day after we had seeded the invites.

C. We were completely surprised by the feeding frenzy of marketers directly outside of convention center- it was total chaos. Enormous corporations like Marvel, SEGA, and even Playboy were using scantily clad “employees” to tempt people with free items and parties. Considering that we were up against these giants with multi-million dollar campaigns, I think we did quite well to attract players and take up their precious ComicCon time.

After all our hard work, we were able to enjoy a bit of the ComicCon and hit a couple of late night parties (even though we weren’t able to sneak past that unyielding Russian bouncer at the door of the SyFy party.)

The Steampunkers loved it, and after all the positive feedback we got, we’re looking forward to completing our next story element. Creating a well-orchestrated scavenger hunt takes a tremendous amount of work, but the effort was completely justified as we watched people get so involved in exploring the world we created. If you’d like to join in the adventure, you can find our next countdown at www.theultimateduel.com.