The Black Watchmen

[kelbris]

Hi everyone, I just wanted to share an idea with you all. I am a player in a game which is in early alpha now but will be completed/released early next year known as the black watchmen, TBW or Division66 depending on who you ask.

It is a really good puzzle/action game (depends on your class) that blurs the line between reality and fiction. There are 4 levels of involvement-Red, Orange, Yellow and Green (not for the faint of heart), Red level is similar to the games Missing: Since January and Evidence: The Last Ritual which would have characters in the game send you e-mails, Orange level has the above plus pre-recorded voice messages from characters in the story sent straight to your phone AND they add your area to the story.

Yellow level is the above + phone calls with real actors portraying characters in the story AND you can receive packages with information etc straight to your house (can be contained on a USB, Disk with encryption or other devices, or even plain paper), finally, Green level is where you go out into the world and do missions based on the story (flying a drone, battling enemies with a paintball/nerf gun in an area they hire out etc), they may also call on you (via black van possibly with the symbol on it) to participate in a mission over the course of 12 hours along with the online community.

The best feature though is that we can change the story, we can succeed or fail. If anyone is interested they can go to http://www.blackwatchmen.com for info on pricing, classes etc. I guess you could say it is similar to the old 2001 game Majestic but only more modern and it is more about paranormal stuff then conspiracies (but there might be a bit of conspiracy stuff there, unsure). If anyone has questions the site does not answer, feel free to ask me.

[xRECKONERx]

I love ARGs. This looks neat.

[kelbris]

If you like the sound of this then I would also highly suggest TSW. It contains elements of an ARG in it (missions which can involve out of game research such as a website, heck there is one where you have to call a phone number belonging to a fictional company to get a clue) and the creators of TBW have also worked on several such ARGs for TSW (gate 33, end of days etc). In fact the name "the black watchmen" was bought from Funcom by the makers of TBW and was originally an organisation used in promotional material for TSW.

[xRECKONERx]

God, you should meet Nuwen. She's in charge of holiday events in TSW

[kelbris]

That explains why they are thinking of doing a Mafia game on the TSW forums, Nuwen had a hand in it. I THINK

[Anatole Kuragin]

Are ARGs this in-depth and reminiscent of David Fincher's The Game very common?

It would be hilarious to sign up for one of these and not tell my wife, then all of a sudden I'm being abducted by enemy agents and receiving strange messages and shit.

[kelbris]

So far there has been only 1 other ARG that has been so in-depth, others are just simple "websites with hints to places in the real world" ones or code-solving ones (such as EverymanHYBRID which has both of those) but only other one as big/good was Majestic from 2001 which was shut down due to "lack of players", but some people claim it was because their conspiracy stories might seem a bit similar to 9/11 which would offend people.

Also, before you receive any phone calls you may hear a short message telling you what the call is for, this is to prevent people from panicking or freaking out (Majestic did the same thing).

[Hyperion]

This seems very interesting! I recently got involved with the Endgame ARG (http://www.ancientsocieties.com/), but this seems WAY more involved, so I'm a little hesitant signing up.