An alternate reality game ( ARG ) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
139-551: Potato Sack is an alternate reality game (ARG) created by Valve and the developers of thirteen independent video games to promote the release of Valve's game Portal 2 , in April 2011. Valve president Gabe Newell envisioned the game as a "Cross Game Design Event" in December 2010, and allowed the developers free rein to design the game using Valve's Portal intellectual property . The game, requiring players to find and solve
278-441: A QR Code that pointed to a website with a countdown time set to expire on the morning of April 15, 2011. Players who discovered these audio clues would be awarded another potato on their Steam profile. A total of 36 possible potatoes were found: 35 within the games and the referenced Steam group, and a 36th earned by obtaining all 35 of the other potatoes. Concurrent with these changes, Portal 2 became available for pre-loading on
417-443: A solution for each instance. Instances are questions that we can ask, and solutions are desired answers to these questions. Theoretical computer science seeks to understand which computational problems can be solved by using a computer ( computability theory ) and how efficiently ( computational complexity theory ). Traditionally, it is said that a problem can be solved by using a computer if we can design an algorithm that produces
556-417: A "risky marketing move" that relied on Valve's long-standing reputation with the community to build on their trust, as well as a "hugely positive sign of support for indie games" from the company. David Ewalt of Forbes considered the tactic a huge benefit for the indie developers, whose games led Steam sales charts in the weeks leading to Portal 2 ' s release. Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica noted that it
695-696: A $ 200,000 prize to a player who found the game's missing cube. They planned to continue the ARG into a second "season" under the name Perplex City Stories without a large grand prize, but it was ultimately cancelled. In May 2007, 42 Entertainment launched Why So Serious , an ARG to promote the feature film The Dark Knight . It played out over 15 months, concluding in July 2008. Millions of players in 177 countries participated both online and taking part in live events, and it reached hundreds of millions through Internet buzz and exposure. Notably, Why So Serious prompted
834-694: A better future." The game culminated at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, Calif., August 9–11, 2013. Players participated over a six-week period, using social media, mobile devices, and apps, while visiting locations from the story in and around Los Angeles. An ARG accompanying the Kickstarter campaign for Frog Fractions 2 began in March 2014 and completed in 2016. Frog Fractions 2 will be the sequel to Twinbeard Studio's much acclaimed Frog Fractions , although
973-511: A category in the British Academy Television Awards. Likewise, Year Zero was widely heralded following its release. Such acclaim is signified in the ARG's Grand Prix Cyber Lions award, viewed as "the most prestigious of all advertising awards," at Cannes. Adweek published a quote from the selection committee on the award decision, explaining that "42 Entertainment's [viral campaign for Nine Inch Nails] impressed
1112-481: A certain period of time, received large media attention. A few days later, another ARG by 42 Entertainment was released, for the release of the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero . In that ARG, fans discovered leaked songs on thumb drives in washrooms at concerts, as well as clues to websites that describe a dystopian future occurring in 2022. Perplex City concluded its first season by awarding
1251-474: A common goal for their work. The terms " concurrent computing ", " parallel computing ", and "distributed computing" have much overlap, and no clear distinction exists between them. The same system may be characterized both as "parallel" and "distributed"; the processors in a typical distributed system run concurrently in parallel. Parallel computing may be seen as a particularly tightly coupled form of distributed computing, and distributed computing may be seen as
1390-520: A correct solution for any given instance. Such an algorithm can be implemented as a computer program that runs on a general-purpose computer: the program reads a problem instance from input , performs some computation, and produces the solution as output . Formalisms such as random-access machines or universal Turing machines can be used as abstract models of a sequential general-purpose computer executing such an algorithm. The field of concurrent and distributed computing studies similar questions in
1529-419: A cryptic audio clue. These clues were found to be two-part clues relating to the previously-identified locations around Seattle. By mapping these points, using locations commonly shared by one clue, players were led to the name of a Steam group that contained a single member by the name of "dinosaur", a reference to an earlier ARG used for Portal 2 ' s announcement. Screenshots within this user's profile gave
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#17327902917421668-504: A decision problem can be solved in polylogarithmic time by using a polynomial number of processors, then the problem is said to be in the class NC . The class NC can be defined equally well by using the PRAM formalism or Boolean circuits—PRAM machines can simulate Boolean circuits efficiently and vice versa. In the analysis of distributed algorithms, more attention is usually paid on communication operations than computational steps. Perhaps
1807-827: A distributed system communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another in order to achieve a common goal. Three significant challenges of distributed systems are: maintaining concurrency of components, overcoming the lack of a global clock , and managing the independent failure of components. When a component of one system fails, the entire system does not fail. Examples of distributed systems vary from SOA-based systems to microservices to massively multiplayer online games to peer-to-peer applications . Distributed systems cost significantly more than monolithic architectures, primarily due to increased needs for additional hardware, servers, gateways, firewalls, new subnets, proxies, and so on. Also, distributed systems are prone to fallacies of distributed computing . On
1946-676: A great deal of collaborative organizing and action; players went to the streets campaigning for Harvey Dent and gathered in New York City as a part of gameplay. In March 2008, McDonald's and the IOC launched Find The Lost Ring , a global ARG promoting the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. The game was run simultaneously in six languages with new story lines developing in each, encouraging players to communicate with residents of other countries to facilitate sharing of clues and details of
2085-477: A long-standing variant on the genre). Overall, academics have been intrigued by ARGs' potential for effective organizing. Across the board, a diverse range of organizations, such as businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and schools "can learn from the best practices and lessons of ARGs to similarly take advantage of new media and collective problem–solving". As such, implementation of ARGs in these different settings involves finding best practices for honing
2224-401: A loosely coupled form of parallel computing. Nevertheless, it is possible to roughly classify concurrent systems as "parallel" or "distributed" using the following criteria: The figure on the right illustrates the difference between distributed and parallel systems. Figure (a) is a schematic view of a typical distributed system; the system is represented as a network topology in which each node
2363-520: A man's photograph and his first name, "Satoshi", asking players to locate him. In 2020, Tom-Lucas Säger used image recognition software and located Satoshi, reporting it to Laura E. Hall , who ran the website tracking information about the hunt. In 2006, the TV tie-in ARG began to come into its own when there was a surge of ARGs that extended the worlds of related television shows onto the Internet and into
2502-525: A message "4/19/2011 7 AM == 4/15/2011 9 AM", again referencing the planned Portal 2 release date and the countdown timer. As April 15 drew near, about nine heavily involved players from the ARG appeared to disengage from the various chat rooms, leaving with the message "There's a hole in the sky through which I can fly"—a line used in early advertisements for Portal ; when contacted by other players, these individuals remained coy and cryptic about their actions, appearing to have been "infected" by GLaDOS. It
2641-523: A missing friend. In February 2007, Microsoft published the game Vanishing Point to promote the launch of Windows Vista . The game was designed by 42 Entertainment and, due in part to many large-scale real-world events, such as a lavish show at the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas as well as a prizes of a trip into space and having a winner's name engraved on all AMD Athlon 64 FX chips for
2780-444: A more mainstream notice than its predecessor, finding its way onto television during a presidential debate, and becoming one of The New York Times ' catchphrases of 2004. As such, I Love Bees captivated enough fans to garner significant press attention, and partly because of this publicity, Halo 2 "sold $ 125 million in copies the first day of release." A slew of imitators fan tributes and parodies followed. In 2005,
2919-507: A much more expansive ARG called the Potato Sack was run, arranged by a number of independent developers working with Valve, to simulate the re-booting of GLaDOS . The ARG resulted in the game being released several hours earlier than scheduled, among other details. Also launched in March 2010, an ARG produced by David Varela at nDreams featured the 2008 Formula 1 World Champion Lewis Hamilton ; entitled Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life ,
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#17327902917423058-431: A much wider sense, even referring to autonomous processes that run on the same physical computer and interact with each other by message passing. While there is no single definition of a distributed system, the following defining properties are commonly used as: A distributed system may have a common goal, such as solving a large computational problem; the user then perceives the collection of autonomous processors as
3197-471: A number of puzzles hidden within updates of the thirteen games, led to the opportunity for players to release Portal 2 about 10 hours earlier than its planned release by playing games under the pretense of powering up GLaDOS , the sentient computer from the Portal series. The ARG's theme of potatoes is based on plot elements within Portal 2 , specifically that for part of the game, GLaDOS's personality module
3336-638: A pair of articles profiling 42 Entertainment appeared in Game Developer magazine and the East Bay Express , both of which tied into an ARG created by the journalist and his editors. The following spring, Audi launched The Art of the Heist , developed by Audi ad agency McKinney+Silver, Haxan Films (creators of The Blair Witch Project ), to promote its new A3. Roughly a year after I Love Bees , 42 Entertainment produced Last Call Poker,
3475-706: A pole to find these clues as part of another clue during the second phase. On April 7, each of the games in the Potato Sack received a second major update. Players found that by completing certain tasks in the game, they would be presented with login screens for the fictional Aperture Science corporation within the Steam interface. Other tasks and clues led to passwords that could be used to log into these Aperture Science screens. These provided players with compressed archives of pictures that consisted of Portal 2 artwork, including photographs from around Seattle (where Valve
3614-461: A potato icon for each accessed screen on their Steam profile. On April 12, another update for each game was released. These updates were all Portal themed, such as levels based on Aperture Science in The Ball and Killing Floor . Again, players found that by completing specific tasks in the new content, they would be presented with an Aperture Science screen, though this time the screens provided
3753-424: A problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is solved by one or more computers, which communicate with each other via message passing. The word distributed in terms such as "distributed system", "distributed programming", and " distributed algorithm " originally referred to computer networks where individual computers were physically distributed within some geographical area. The terms are nowadays used in
3892-568: A promotion for Activision's video game Gun . Designed to help modern audiences connect with the Western genre, Last Call Poker centered on a working poker site, held games of "Tombstone Hold 'Em" in cemeteries around the United States—as well as in at least one digital venue, World of Warcraft ' s own virtual reality cemetery – and sent players to their own local cemeteries to clean up neglected grave sites and perform other tasks. At
4031-502: A schedule of games to be played to maximize the rate of progression, and eventually, ended up unlocking Portal 2 on Steam about ten hours before this scheduled time. The approximately 1800 players that had successfully earned all 36 potatoes by the time of Portal 2 ' s launch were given the Valve complete pack, including Portal 2 , which they could gift to other players. Players who had found at least thirteen potatoes or played each of
4170-654: A schematic architecture allowing for live environment relay. This enables distributed computing functions both within and beyond the parameters of a networked database. Reasons for using distributed systems and distributed computing may include: Examples of distributed systems and applications of distributed computing include the following: According to Reactive Manifesto, reactive distributed systems are responsive, resilient, elastic and message-driven. Subsequently, Reactive systems are more flexible, loosely-coupled and scalable. To make your systems reactive, you are advised to implement Reactive Principles. Reactive Principles are
4309-462: A second season beginning 1 March 2007. This model was delayed till 1 June, and has again, been delayed to an unspecified date. Mind Candy's acceptance of corporate sponsorship and venture capital suggests that the puzzle cards alone are not enough to fully fund the ARG at this time. In June 2006, Catching the Wish launched from an in-game website about comic books based on its predecessor, 2003's Chasing
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4448-474: A secret decoder ring to decipher a message from a radio program, finds that the coded message is only an advertising blurb. Alexander suggested that instead, ARGs should give players an idea of the type of reward that may be offered, and then can exceed player's expectations when it is completed. Retailers in countries where the disc-based version of the game would have lagged a few days behind the Steam release opted to break their street date to avoid losing sales to
4587-604: A sequence of puzzles, which were ultimately solved within hours of the patch's release. The idea of the Potato Sack ARG came from Valve president Gabe Newell sometime around December 2010. Following on the success of the first ARG, he saw a way to promote both the highly anticipated Portal 2 release along with several independent games through a "Cross Game Design Event". Dejobaan Games ' Leo Jaitley believed that Valve targeted developers that had proven track records of working with other developers, and not necessarily for
4726-405: A sequential general-purpose computer? The discussion below focuses on the case of multiple computers, although many of the issues are the same for concurrent processes running on a single computer. Three viewpoints are commonly used: In the case of distributed algorithms, computational problems are typically related to graphs. Often the graph that describes the structure of the computer network
4865-457: A set of principles and patterns which help to make your cloud native application as well as edge native applications more reactive. Many tasks that we would like to automate by using a computer are of question–answer type: we would like to ask a question and the computer should produce an answer. In theoretical computer science , such tasks are called computational problems . Formally, a computational problem consists of instances together with
5004-431: A significant degree of their power to the ARG's audience, problematizing traditional views of authorship. The majority of the scholarly review on ARGs analyzes their pedagogical advantages. Notably, in the classroom, ARGs can be effective tools for providing exigence on given topics and yield a collaborative and experiential learning environment. By the same token, weaknesses of classroom learning through ARGs include
5143-418: A single achievement, named "Transmission Received". The update added 26 portable radios placed throughout the game's levels, which played a default song until placed in a specific location in their respective maps. When placed in their location, the radio's lights changed from red to green, and they began to emit a string of Morse code , which revealed hidden images when decoded with Robot 36 . The numbers from
5282-558: A sphere of "chaotic fiction" that would include works such as the Uncyclopedia and street games like SF0 as well. Several experts, though, point to the use of transmedia, "the aggregate effect of multiple texts/media artifacts," as the defining attribute of ARGs. This prompts the unique collaboration emanating from ARGs as well; Sean Stewart , founder of 42 Entertainment , which has produced various successful ARGs, speaks to how this occurs, noting that "the key thing about an ARG
5421-519: A story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players' responses. It is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by an AI as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally utilize multimedia , such as telephones and mail, but rely on
5560-695: A token ring network in which the token has been lost. Coordinator election algorithms are designed to be economical in terms of total bytes transmitted, and time. The algorithm suggested by Gallager, Humblet, and Spira for general undirected graphs has had a strong impact on the design of distributed algorithms in general, and won the Dijkstra Prize for an influential paper in distributed computing. Many other algorithms were suggested for different kinds of network graphs , such as undirected rings, unidirectional rings, complete graphs, grids, directed Euler graphs, and others. A general method that decouples
5699-434: A unit. Alternatively, each computer may have its own user with individual needs, and the purpose of the distributed system is to coordinate the use of shared resources or provide communication services to the users. Other typical properties of distributed systems include the following: Here are common architectural patterns used for distributed computing: Distributed systems are groups of networked computers which share
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5838-442: A video game by Daniel Mullins based on a metafiction narrative, including a post-game ARG that involved real-world clues and references to Mullins' past games in conjunction with in-game materials, leading to additional narrative and endings for the game. In December 2020, a long-unsolved puzzle from Perplex City , Billion to One , was solved. The puzzle focused on exploring the concept of Six degrees of separation by presenting
5977-592: A year's worth of teasers. The ARG offered a $ 200,000 prize to the first player to locate the buried Receda Cube and was funded by the sale of puzzle cards. The first season of the game ended in January 2007, when Andy Darley found the Receda Cube at Wakerly Great Wood in Northamptonshire, UK. Mind Candy, the production company, has also produced a board game related to the ARG and plans to continue it with
6116-477: Is the problem instance. This is illustrated in the following example. Consider the computational problem of finding a coloring of a given graph G . Different fields might take the following approaches: While the field of parallel algorithms has a different focus than the field of distributed algorithms, there is much interaction between the two fields. For example, the Cole–Vishkin algorithm for graph coloring
6255-416: Is a computer and each line connecting the nodes is a communication link. Figure (b) shows the same distributed system in more detail: each computer has its own local memory, and information can be exchanged only by passing messages from one node to another by using the available communication links. Figure (c) shows a parallel system in which each processor has a direct access to a shared memory. The situation
6394-403: Is also focused on understanding the asynchronous nature of distributed systems: Note that in distributed systems, latency should be measured through "99th percentile" because "median" and "average" can be misleading. Coordinator election (or leader election ) is the process of designating a single process as the organizer of some task distributed among several computers (nodes). Before
6533-419: Is available in their local D-neighbourhood . Many distributed algorithms are known with the running time much smaller than D rounds, and understanding which problems can be solved by such algorithms is one of the central research questions of the field. Typically an algorithm which solves a problem in polylogarithmic time in the network size is considered efficient in this model. Another commonly used measure
6672-534: Is based) embedded in their alpha channels . Each archive included a portion of a larger archive that was password-protected; the password was unveiled using the glyphs, cyphers, and letters from the first update. The larger archive gave further photographs of the Seattle area. When the locations of these points were mapped and connected per the puzzle's instructions, the map showed the word "prelude". Furthermore, players that reached and logged into these screens received
6811-581: Is further complicated by the traditional uses of the terms parallel and distributed algorithm that do not quite match the above definitions of parallel and distributed systems (see below for more detailed discussion). Nevertheless, as a rule of thumb, high-performance parallel computation in a shared-memory multiprocessor uses parallel algorithms while the coordination of a large-scale distributed system uses distributed algorithms. The use of concurrent processes which communicate through message-passing has its roots in operating system architectures studied in
6950-478: Is necessary to interconnect processes running on those CPUs with some sort of communication system . Whether these CPUs share resources or not determines a first distinction between three types of architecture: Distributed programming typically falls into one of several basic architectures: client–server , three-tier , n -tier , or peer-to-peer ; or categories: loose coupling , or tight coupling . Another basic aspect of distributed computing architecture
7089-469: Is run off a potato battery . Large numbers of people participated in solving the puzzles. Reaction from players and journalists was mixed; while some felt the ARG had limited benefit, some saw the ARG as a show of commitment from Valve to independent game development. The ARG began without announcement with the release of the "Potato Sack Bundle" on Steam on April 1, 2011, which offered the included games at 75% off their normal price. The games included in
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#17327902917427228-492: Is the method of communicating and coordinating work among concurrent processes. Through various message passing protocols, processes may communicate directly with one another, typically in a main/sub relationship. Alternatively, a "database-centric" architecture can enable distributed computing to be done without any form of direct inter-process communication , by utilizing a shared database . Database-centric architecture in particular provides relational processing analytics in
7367-410: Is the number of synchronous communication rounds required to complete the task. This complexity measure is closely related to the diameter of the network. Let D be the diameter of the network. On the one hand, any computable problem can be solved trivially in a synchronous distributed system in approximately 2 D communication rounds: simply gather all information in one location ( D rounds), solve
7506-511: Is the total number of bits transmitted in the network (cf. communication complexity ). The features of this concept are typically captured with the CONGEST(B) model, which is similarly defined as the LOCAL model, but where single messages can only contain B bits. Traditional computational problems take the perspective that the user asks a question, a computer (or a distributed system) processes
7645-483: Is the way it jumps off of all those platforms. It's a game that's social and comes at you across all the different ways that you connect to the world around you." Most ARGs do not have any fixed rules—players discover the rules and the boundaries of the game through trial and error—and do not require players to assume fictional identities or roleplay beyond feigning belief in the reality of the characters they interact with (even if games where players play 'themselves' are
7784-589: The American Art Museum hosted an alternate reality game, called Ghosts of a Chance , which was created by City Mystery. The game allowed patrons "a new way of engaging with the collection" in the Luce Foundation Center. The game ran for six weeks and attracted more than 6,000 participants. The first major attempt (other than EA's failed Majestic ) to create a self-supporting ARG was Perplex City , which launched in 2005 after
7923-399: The "coordinator" state. For that, they need some method in order to break the symmetry among them. For example, if each node has unique and comparable identities, then the nodes can compare their identities, and decide that the node with the highest identity is the coordinator. The definition of this problem is often attributed to LeLann, who formalized it as a method to create a new token in
8062-487: The "magic circle" as elaborated by Salen and Zimmerman is confounded. Ong's Hat / Incunabula was most likely started sometime around 1993, and also included most of the aforementioned design principles. Ong's Hat also incorporated elements of legend tripping into its design, as chronicled in a scholarly work titled "Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat". Some scholars disagree on
8201-518: The 1960s. The first widespread distributed systems were local-area networks such as Ethernet , which was invented in the 1970s. ARPANET , one of the predecessors of the Internet , was introduced in the late 1960s, and ARPANET e-mail was invented in the early 1970s. E-mail became the most successful application of ARPANET, and it is probably the earliest example of a large-scale distributed application . In addition to ARPANET (and its successor,
8340-598: The 59th Annual Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards on September 8, 2007. In January 2008, BBC launched "Whack the Mole" for the CBBC show M.I. High , in which viewers are asked to become M.I. High field agents and complete tasks to capture a mole that has infiltrated the organization. On 16 March 2011, BitTorrent promoted an open licensed version of the feature film Zenith in the United States. Users who downloaded
8479-548: The ARG itself is often referred to as Frog Fractions 1.5 in reference to an in-ARG puzzle solution. The ARG took about two years to solve, involving clues buried in 23 independent games and real-life locations, allowing the game, secretly already uploaded under the guise of a different game, to become unlocked in December 2016. On the release of the expansion Afterbirth for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth in October 2015, players discover clues hinting towards an ARG related to
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#17327902917428618-487: The ARG to progress in a timely manner. While many puzzles of the ARG included cross-game clues—such as finding the password for one of the Aperture Science login screens from another game—Neuse felt they could have increased the cross-game complexity of the puzzles if they had more time to plan it out. The developers were aided by the agility of Valve in its participation. During the second phase, one of
8757-424: The ARG, something he believed they would have integrated more in the game from the start. The release of the Potato Sack on April 1 may have been a bad decision according to Jagnow, as they did not get the press exposure they thought they would in conjunction with the other April Fool's events occurring that day, with some media outlets hesitant to report on potential pranks for fear of having to retract these later. In
8896-421: The ARG, the "appearance" of GLaDOS@Home, to have been the biggest failing. Originally scheduled for April 16 or 17, it was pushed to April 15 to allow more players, including international ones, to participate in the effort to release Portal 2 early, and to gain media attention. Instead, the developers found that existing players of the ARG were frustrated with no new puzzles to solve, while new players brought to
9035-511: The BitTorrent client software were also encouraged to download and share Part One of three parts of the film. On 4 May 2011, Part Two of the film was made available on VODO . The episodic release of the film, supplemented by an ARG transmedia marketing campaign, created a viral effect and over a million users downloaded the movie. That same year, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch conducted an ARG called Cipher Hunt . Hirsch started
9174-481: The Impact Award at IndieCade , presented to games which "have social message, shift the cultural perception of games as a medium, represent a new play paradigm, expand the audience, or influence culture." The Plan of Gauss was a game developed as a didactic strategy to enhance the learning and understanding of mathematics in university students. In this game, the players had to help characters (students) to find
9313-502: The Internet as the central binding medium. ARGs tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g., collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City ) or through promotional relationships with existing products (for example, I Love Bees was a promotion for Halo 2 , and the Lost Experience and Find 815 promoted the television show Lost ). Pay-to-play models exist as well. Later games in
9452-607: The Potato Sack are listed below with their developer and release year. On the release date of the Potato Sack bundle, players found the games within it had recently received updates. Most provided an immediate cosmetic change by replacing or adding assets that referred to potatoes. When players started looking deeper into these new assets, they discovered a series of glyphs that referred to other games associated with specific letters, as well as nonsense sentences that lead to specific cyphers. Other hints were less direct, using online services such as Twitter and YouTube to embed clues. In
9591-465: The Potato Sack games for a minimum amount of time received Portal 2 -themed items within Team Fortress 2 . On June 13, 2012, the Potato Sack bundle briefly returned to Steam under the name "Potato Sack - June 2012". Valve had previously performed an ARG in the week prior to the announcement of Portal 2 , at the start of March 2010. The ARG was initiated by a new patch to Portal that led to
9730-411: The Potato Sack games may have simply wasted their money for something they didn't want to gain almost nothing back. Leigh Alexander of Gamasutra also criticized the ARG for not providing an idea of the expectation of reward when it was successfully completed, comparing the ten-hour gain to a vignette in the movie A Christmas Story , where the main character after saving up money and waiting weeks for
9869-510: The Secret War. The company behind Funcom's last 2 ARGs, Human Equation, a Montreal-based entertainment studio who also created an independent ARG called Qadhos , has even further purchased the rights to a special class of characters, The Black Watchmen, to create their own independent ARG. A spin-off of Human Equation, Alice & Smith , released the game in June 2015. After the success of
10008-402: The Steam client. At this point, several journalists and players suspected that Portal 2 may have been unlocked early at the end of the countdown timer. This correlated with a separate puzzle embedded in messages sent by Newell to a number of gaming sites; the message suggested the "early release" of material and "thirteen offsite chambers", seemingly referring to the independent games, as well as
10147-457: The TV movie The Fallen and produced in the autumn of 2007 by Xenophile Media Inc. was awarded a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement for an Interactive Television Program. Xenophile Media Inc.'s ReGenesis Extended Reality Game won an International Interactive Emmy Award in 2007 and in April 2008 The Truth About Marika won the iEmmy for Best Interactive TV service. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts recognizes Interactivity as
10286-506: The TV series, and the game was promoted through television advertisements run during Lost episodes. The Fallen Alternate Reality Game was launched in tandem with the Fallen TV movie for ABC Family and was originally conceived by Matt Wolf and created by Matt Wolf (Double Twenty Productions) in association with Xenophile Media. Wolf accepted the Emmy for The Fallen Alternate Reality Game at
10425-411: The Wish . 42 Entertainment released Cathy's Book , by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman , in October 2006, shifting the central medium of this ARG from the internet to the printed page. The young-adult novel contains an "evidence packet" and expands its universe through websites and working phone numbers, but is also a stand-alone novel that essentially functions as an individually playable ARG. Neither
10564-424: The boost of sales for Amnesia within the first two days of the Potato Sack sale completely covered the development costs for the added "Justine" content they had developed for the ARG. John Gibson of Tripwire Interactive believed that similar ARGs could be run in the future without the presence of a major title like Portal 2 as long as there is a significant payoff for the players. Journalists noted that many of
10703-451: The case of Toki Tori , sections of new levels included braille code that referred to the latitude and longitude coordinates of Two Tribes' headquarters. One player, "Jake_R", traveled to Two Tribes, where he discovered the glyphs and cyphers posted outside their headquarters. Several of Two Tribes' developers, upon learning of his presence, began filming him from a barbershop across the street. They would later use this footage of him climbing
10842-419: The case of either multiple computers, or a computer that executes a network of interacting processes: which computational problems can be solved in such a network and how efficiently? However, it is not at all obvious what is meant by "solving a problem" in the case of a concurrent or distributed system: for example, what is the task of the algorithm designer, and what is the concurrent or distributed equivalent of
10981-587: The classification of the Ong's Hat story. In 1997, a year prior to the release of Douglas Adams ' computer game Starship Titanic , The Digital Village launched a website purporting to be that of an intergalactic travel agency called Starlight Travel, which in the game is the Starship Titanic's parent company. The site combined copious amounts of Monty Python -esque writing (by Michael Bywater ) with ARG-type interactivity . In 2001, in order to market
11120-517: The collaborative, transmedia elements of ARGs for these respective institutions. Much of this scholarly interest stems from the evolving media ecology with the rise of new media. In sustaining cooperative online communities, ARGs build on "an alignment of interest, where problems are presented in a fashion that assists game designers in their goal while intriguing and aiding players in their goals". This returns to ARGs' framework of transmedia storytelling, which necessitates that ARG designers relinquish
11259-497: The console version. Journalists have defended Valve in these claims, countering that the game's length depends on the amount of immersion the player puts into the game, that the downloadable content is only cosmetic additions for the co-op mode, and that the quality of the graphics on the Windows and Mac version do not suggest a simple console port. Alternate reality game The form is defined by intense player involvement with
11398-438: The correct order, these numbers and letters formed a 32-bit MD5 hash of a BBS phone number. When traced, it was found to originate from Kirkland, Washington , where Valve was based before moving to Bellevue, Washington in 2003. Accessing the number as a bulletin board system yielded large ASCII art images, all leading towards the announcement of the game's sequel, Portal 2 . Later, prior to release of Portal 2 in 2011,
11537-416: The cost of creating the book nor sales figures are available (although it made both American and British bestseller lists) to determine whether the project was successfully self-funded. In a 2007 article, columnist Chris Dahlen (of Pitchfork Media) voiced a much-discussed ARG concept: if ARGs can spark players to solve very hard fictional problems, could the games be used to solve real-world problems? Dahlen
11676-511: The design to keep ahead of the player base. Somewhat unusual for a computer-based game, the production drew players from a wide spectrum of age groups and backgrounds. Although the Beast ran for only three months, it prompted the formation of a highly organized and intensely engaged community that remained active years after the game concluded. Perhaps more significantly, it inspired a number of its participants to create games adapting and expanding
11815-402: The developers and the player community worked around these issues. In some cases, players attempted to download beta versions of the patches to the games, but Valve was able to respond, usually in minutes, to block access to these. Valve also quickly responded to a web site that used Steam credentials to award players the potatoes without having to complete the target achievements; only about 1% of
11954-415: The developers arranged for the Potato Sack sale as to "make it easier for hard-core fans to participate in every aspect of the ARG". Between the December meeting and second gathering in March 2011, prior to the ARG's launch, there was no direct verbal communication between Valve or the developers. Instead, the independent developers spent time, using a shared wiki provided by Valve, to plan out and coordinate
12093-412: The developers asked if Newell would become involved in the ARG. Newell then fed the image with the encrypted message to media outlets. Valve also placed hidden messages in promotional videos for Portal 2 which helped to point the ARG players in specific directions, including calling some of the players out by name. There were points during the ARG that players used unexpected means to solve a puzzle, but
12232-537: The developers of an open relationship, stating that they had "No constraints. No NDAs ." and that the project was "built on trust and mutual respect". Jaitley commented "most studios got involved knowing that there was likely to be some payoff, but without anything upfront or any promises of riches". To help with the ARG, Valve gave the developers a free rein over the game's structure, and full access to Portal intellectual property to include within their games. Such assets included further voice work from Ellen McLain ,
12371-475: The digital downloads. Though direct sales from Steam are unknown, the Potato Sack ARG helped to boost sales of the independent games. The whole Potato Sack promotion was the second-highest selling compilation on Steam in the week prior to Portal 2 ' s release, following Portal 2 itself and ahead of the Potato Sack/Portal 2 bundle. Dylan Fitterer, programmer for Audiosurf , noted that during
12510-559: The end of 2005, the International Game Developers Association ARG Special Interest Group was formed "to bring together those already designing, building, and running ARGs, in order to share knowledge, experience, and ideas for the future." More recently, an ARG was created by THQ for the game Frontlines: Fuel of War around peak oil theories where the world is in a crisis over diminishing oil resources. In 2008,
12649-514: The first major entries in the nascent ARG genre, a number of large corporations looked to ARGs to both promote their products, and to enhance their companies' images by demonstrating their interest in innovative and fan-friendly marketing methods. To create buzz for the launch of the Xbox game Halo 2 , Microsoft hired the team that had created the Beast, now operating independently as 42 Entertainment . The result, I Love Bees , departed radically from
12788-401: The focus has been on designing a distributed system that solves a given problem. A complementary research problem is studying the properties of a given distributed system. The halting problem is an analogous example from the field of centralised computation: we are given a computer program and the task is to decide whether it halts or runs forever. The halting problem is undecidable in
12927-595: The game as a whole. American track and field athlete Edwin Moses acted as a celebrity Game Master, and McDonald's Corporation promised to donate US$ 100,000 to Ronald McDonald House Charities China on behalf of the players. On 1 March 2010, Valve released an update via Steam to their game Portal , adding a nondescript new achievement and some .wav files hidden within the game GCFs. The .wav files actually contained morse code and SSTV encoded images, some including certain numbers and letters. When pieced together in
13066-460: The game ran throughout the 2010 Formula 1 season, in nine languages, with live events in a dozen cities around the world. In July 2013, Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development and The Walt Disney Studios launched The Optimist , built around "a story of Walt Disney, the Imagineers, and other visionary thinkers and their potential involvement in a secret project that sought to build
13205-447: The game with the posting of an initial clue on his Twitter account, followed by the rules. It lasted from July to August 2016, and its goal was to find the clues hidden in various places around the world leading to the location of a statue of Bill Cipher . Said statue could be seen briefly after the ending credits of the series finale . ARGs have been recognized by the mainstream entertainment world: The Ocular Effect, an ARG promoting
13344-470: The game, based on the community's previous attempts to hack the game to discover any secret characters. The ARG included location information near Santa Cruz, California, where the game's developer Edmund McMillen lived. The ARG was successfully completed in November 2015, with the community working together and enabling a new character and additional content to be unlocked for the game. Inscryption ,
13483-400: The game. They also had to develop the new content for their games, which in most cases was work in addition to existing projects that they were presently undertaking. Others had to go back to older programming code and re-acquaint themselves with it before undertaking the new additions for the ARG. Valve's Jeep Barnett helped to coordinate the large effort. The second visit to Valve in March 2011
13622-452: The general case, and naturally understanding the behaviour of a computer network is at least as hard as understanding the behaviour of one computer. However, there are many interesting special cases that are decidable. In particular, it is possible to reason about the behaviour of a network of finite-state machines. One example is telling whether a given network of interacting (asynchronous and non-deterministic) finite-state machines can reach
13761-414: The general fiction of the game. The developers decided to design the fiction of the ARG around the return of GLaDOS, who had been apparently destroyed at the end of Portal , leaving clues to her revival in the various games. The potato theme was based on Portal 2 ' s fiction, in which, during a portion of the game, GLaDOS' personality is placed into a potato battery . To help promote the ARG, Valve and
13900-430: The genre have shown an increasing amount of experimentation with new models and sub-genres. There is a great deal of debate surrounding the characteristics by which the term "alternate reality game" should be defined. Sean Stacey, the founder of the website Unfiction, has suggested that the best way to define the genre was not to define it, and instead locate each game on three axes (ruleset, authorship and coherence) in
14039-483: The global Internet), other early worldwide computer networks included Usenet and FidoNet from the 1980s, both of which were used to support distributed discussion systems. The study of distributed computing became its own branch of computer science in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first conference in the field, Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), dates back to 1982, and its counterpart International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC)
14178-532: The group managed, after nine months of development, to create a viable game that was soon seized upon eagerly by the Cloudmakers group and featured in Wired magazine. Because of their similarities, video games and ARGs continued to be associated through many projects, In 2009, Funcom , a game development studio from Oslo , Norway, hid a gate on its corporate website, which led to an ARG which would be part of
14317-537: The images form the BBS phone number "(425) 822-5251" and when you dial into the BBS it will prompt the user asking for a login. Entering the username "backup" and the password "backup" (from the 12th audio file) will show text saying "Aperture Laboratories GLaDOS v3.11", followed by "Copyright (c) 1973–1997 Aperture – All Rights Reserved" then will proceed to show the user ASCII art images and paragraphs quoting Cave Johnson . If
14456-489: The infra cost must be considered. A computer program that runs within a distributed system is called a distributed program , and distributed programming is the process of writing such programs. There are many different types of implementations for the message passing mechanism, including pure HTTP, RPC-like connectors and message queues . Distributed computing also refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational problems. In distributed computing ,
14595-509: The integration of a screenshot of the chat log into one of the puzzles. In another example, another chat room user, following a red herring , visited a physical location near the California studio for Team Meat; Edmund McMillen was able to arrange to meet the user and give him a signed copy of Super Meat Boy . Monitoring of the players enabled the developers to provide hints and clues for puzzles that players were struggling with as to allow
14734-456: The issue of the graph family from the design of the coordinator election algorithm was suggested by Korach, Kutten, and Moran. In order to perform coordination, distributed systems employ the concept of coordinators. The coordinator election problem is to choose a process from among a group of processes on different processors in a distributed system to act as the central coordinator. Several central coordinator election algorithms exist. So far
14873-425: The jury because of its use of a variety of media, from outdoor to guerrilla to online, and how digital [media] can play a central role of a big idea campaign." Distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems , defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers . The components of
15012-495: The model, extending it from an anomalous one-time occurrence to a new genre of entertainment and allowing the community to grow even after the Beast itself concluded. Members of the Cloudmakers group went on to form ARGN, the primary news source for the genre, and Unfiction, its central community hub, as well as designing the first successful and widely played indie ARGs, such as LockJaw and Metacortechs, and corporate efforts such as Perplex City. On March 1 and March 3 of 2010, Portal
15151-596: The movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence directed by Steven Spielberg that finished Stanley Kubrick 's unfinished project to adapt Brian Aldiss 's short story " Supertoys Last All Summer Long ", and also a planned series of Microsoft computer games based on the film, Microsoft's Creative Director Jordan Weisman and another Microsoft game designer, Elan Lee , conceived of an elaborate murder mystery played out across hundreds of websites, email messages, faxes, fake ads, and voicemail messages. They hired Sean Stewart , an award-winning science fiction/ fantasy author, to write
15290-512: The need for a flexible narrative conducive to collaborative learning in large groups and a sophisticated web design. In a contribution to a volume focusing on play and cities in Springer's Gaming Media and Social Effects series, Eddie Duggan (2017) provides an overview of pervasive games, and discusses characteristics in ARGs, LARPs, RPGs, assassination games and other games where the notion of
15429-401: The other hand, a well designed distributed system is more scalable, more durable, more changeable and more fine-tuned than a monolithic application deployed on a single machine. According to Marc Brooker: "a system is scalable in the range where marginal cost of additional workload is nearly constant." Serverless technologies fit this definition but the total cost of ownership, and not just
15568-493: The person is idle for 4 minutes, the following text will say "Hey! Please login now. You have one minute left." and if left idle for one more minute the next text will say "Your login time (5 minutes) ran out. Goodbye", disconnecting the user. Portal was updated again on March 3, 2010, at 2:24 PST with the description "Added valuable asset retrieval", The game ending was retconned to add the Party Escort bot, who dragged
15707-477: The player back into the enrichment center rather than allowing them to escape. setting up the events of Portal 2 . Influenced heavily by the Beast and enthusiastic about the power of collaboration, several Cloudmakers came together with the idea that they could create a similar game. The first effort to make an independent Beast-like game, Ravenwatchers , failed, but another team soon assembled and met with greater success. With very little experience behind them,
15846-399: The potatoes were earned this way, and Valve later revoked them, though let players earn them again though legitimate means. Other players examined the files and binary code of the patched games to try to find password strings or other identifiers that would normally be seen only while playing the game. In at least one case, where this action served to reveal the solution to the puzzle before it
15985-483: The pre-launch campaign for The Secret World , a game released in 2013. The gate was discovered only in 2013, therefore requiring the puppet-master to adapt the scenario to its actual setting. Funcom has done a total of 16 ARGs that tie in with The Secret World , with the first one starting in May 2007. The ARGs focussed on several different storylines, such as: The Expedition of Roald Amundsen, The Sanctuary of Secrets and
16124-408: The problem, and inform each node about the solution ( D rounds). On the other hand, if the running time of the algorithm is much smaller than D communication rounds, then the nodes in the network must produce their output without having the possibility to obtain information about distant parts of the network. In other words, the nodes must make globally consistent decisions based on information that
16263-421: The project contained 666 files, prompting the game's puppet-masters to dub it " the Beast ", a name which was later adopted by players. A large and extremely active fan community called the Cloudmakers formed to analyze and participate in solving the game, and the combined intellect, tenacity and engagement of the group soon forced the puppet-masters to create new subplots, devise new puzzles, and alter elements of
16402-465: The promotion, more than 6000 people were playing his game at a time, compared to 300 players before the event. Fitterer also saw an opportunity to create a new game based upon the ARG-themed addition to Audiosurf . Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games was also pleased with the sales increased; while not a windfall, it helped him to continue to live comfortably. Thomas Grip of Frictional Games claimed that
16541-629: The question, then produces an answer and stops. However, there are also problems where the system is required not to stop, including the dining philosophers problem and other similar mutual exclusion problems. In these problems, the distributed system is supposed to continuously coordinate the use of shared resources so that no conflicts or deadlocks occur. There are also fundamental challenges that are unique to distributed computing, for example those related to fault-tolerance . Examples of related problems include consensus problems , Byzantine fault tolerance , and self-stabilisation . Much research
16680-452: The real world. As with Push, Nevada , ABC led the way, launching three TV tie-in ARGs in 2006: Kyle XY , Ocular Effect (for the show Fallen ) and The Lost Experience (for the show Lost ). ABC joined with Channel 4 in the UK and Australia's Channel 7 in promoting a revamped website for The Hanso Foundation . The site was focused on a fictitious company prevalent in the storyline of
16819-473: The sales or popularity of the specific games. Valve invited the twenty independent developers to their headquarters on December 16, though did not explain the rationale for the visit. Only there did Valve explain the promotion, with the ultimate goal being the early release of Portal 2 at the conclusion of the ARG, according to Gaijin Games ' CEO Alex Neuse. According to Rob Jagnow of Lazy 8 Studios, Valve assured
16958-403: The same place as the boundary between parallel and distributed systems (shared memory vs. message passing). In parallel algorithms, yet another resource in addition to time and space is the number of computers. Indeed, often there is a trade-off between the running time and the number of computers: the problem can be solved faster if there are more computers running in parallel (see speedup ). If
17097-423: The simplest model of distributed computing is a synchronous system where all nodes operate in a lockstep fashion. This model is commonly known as the LOCAL model. During each communication round , all nodes in parallel (1) receive the latest messages from their neighbours, (2) perform arbitrary local computation, and (3) send new messages to their neighbors. In such systems, a central complexity measure
17236-471: The site by the media were skeptical and saw the event as "a cheap media ploy to get players to buy the Potato Sack in the hope of an early Portal 2 release". Overall, the alternate reality game received mixed response from gamers, some praising it as outstanding marketing between Portal 2 and the indie gamers, others considering it a way to force players to buy games they do not want to gain access to Portal 2 earlier. Pete Davison of GamePro considered it
17375-462: The story and Pete Fenlon , an experienced adventure game " worldbuilder ", to serve as developer and content lead. The game, dubbed "the Citizen Kane of online entertainment" by Internet Life , was a runaway success that involved over three million active participants from all over the world during its run and would become the seminal example of the nascent ARG genre. An early asset list for
17514-432: The task is begun, all network nodes are either unaware which node will serve as the "coordinator" (or leader) of the task, or unable to communicate with the current coordinator. After a coordinator election algorithm has been run, however, each node throughout the network recognizes a particular, unique node as the task coordinator. The network nodes communicate among themselves in order to decide which of them will get into
17653-409: The third phase, where certain players were "taken over" by GLaDOS, Jagnow felt they extracted these players from the game too early as they were influential in coordinating the chat rooms and wiki, leaving the remaining players confused. Instead, Jagnow suggested they should have found a way to allow these players to continue participating until near the end. Jagnow considered the push of the crescendo of
17792-482: The thirteen games in the Potato Sack, GLaDOS would be rebooted earlier, effectively suggesting an earlier release of Portal 2 before the originally scheduled time of 7:00 AM PDT on April 19, 2011. The number of potatoes found would also serve to help to "boost" the effort. Only one game, Killing Floor , saw an update in this phase, where a special chamber in their Portal -themed map would be opened for players to complete for an in-game achievement . The players organized
17931-427: The user reviews for Portal 2 on Metacritic evoked negative opinion of the game, believed to be tied to the minimal impact on Portal 2 ' s release time. These users cited complaints about the game being too short (with some saying it is only four hours long), the existence of paid downloadable content at launch for some versions, and supposed evidence that the game on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X were ports of
18070-427: The voice actress for GLaDOS , who recorded additional lines for the developers of the games to taunt the players with. Furthermore, the developers were given the opportunity to play what had existed of Portal 2 to build ideas for the ARG. Valve and the indie developers worked together over the next few days to design the ARG, creating the three phases, the timing between phases to allow for the puzzles to be solved, and
18209-487: The website-hunting and puzzle-solving that had been the focus of the Beast. I Love Bees wove together an interactive narrative set in 2004, and a War of the Worlds -style radio drama set in the future, the latter of which was broken into 30–60-second segments and broadcast over ringing payphones worldwide. The game pushed players outdoors to answer phones, create and submit content, and recruit others, and received as much or
18348-498: Was entirely possible to ignore the alternate reality game without any negative effects or losing any potential benefits. Luke Plunkett of Kotaku was more critical, commenting that for most players in North America, having the release only ten hours earlier—occurring overnight for many—would be "business as usual" in that they would not be able to play until the next day; thus, players that purchased and spent time in
18487-540: Was first held in Ottawa in 1985 as the International Workshop on Distributed Algorithms on Graphs. Various hardware and software architectures are used for distributed computing. At a lower level, it is necessary to interconnect multiple CPUs with some sort of network, regardless of whether that network is printed onto a circuit board or made up of loosely coupled devices and cables. At a higher level, it
18626-444: Was later revealed that these players, contacted by Valve a few days prior, were invited to Valve's headquarters to be the first to play Portal 2 . At the end of the countdown timer, the countdown website redirected to a new page on the fictional Aperture Science website, calling itself "GLaDOS@Home". Spoofing other distributed computing efforts like Folding@home , the site stated that if players generated enough CPU cycles by playing
18765-423: Was originally presented as a parallel algorithm, but the same technique can also be used directly as a distributed algorithm. Moreover, a parallel algorithm can be implemented either in a parallel system (using shared memory) or in a distributed system (using message passing). The traditional boundary between parallel and distributed algorithms (choose a suitable network vs. run in any given network) does not lie in
18904-538: Was to affirm the plans for the launch of the ARG. The first update was tied with April Fools' Day , with the addition of potatoes and gibberish sentences being in line with the pranks one normally sees on that day. Throughout the ARG, the players were monitored by the developers through the Internet Relay Chat , forums, and web sites that were being used to coordinate the solving effort. This allowed, for example, Two Tribes to prepare for Jake_R's visit, and
19043-402: Was truly solved, the ARG players discouraged this behavior and apologized to Valve for these actions. When possible, the developers laid red herrings for those that tried to hack the ARG, including the use of Rickrolling . Jagnow commented on several changes the developers would have made in hindsight after the completion of the ARG. One aspect he considered was the weak part of the fiction of
19182-472: Was updated to include a promotional ARG for its then-upcoming sequel, Portal 2 . It was created by the Portal 2 development team, and while it was mostly made to discover the next entry in the Portal franchise, it also included a way to extend the Portal universe. Portal was updated at 2:33 PST, with the update's description reading "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations". The update also added
19321-514: Was writing about World Without Oil , the first ARG centered on a serious near-future scenario: a global oil shortage. In October 2008 The British Red Cross created a serious ARG called Traces of Hope to promote their campaign about civilians caught up in conflict. The USC School of Cinematic Arts has run a semester-long ARG called Reality Ends Here for incoming freshmen since 2011. The game involves players collaborating and competing to produce media artifacts. In 2012, Reality Ends Here won
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