Out of Character

Welcome to the Corestone ARG!

Hi there! My name is Michael, and this is an alternate reality game (ARG) that I've put together for a university project. Thanks for stopping by!

At first, Corestone Alternate Energy Solutions may seem like any other business in the electric power industry, but there's more going on than meets the eye. And it's not just the arcane pseudoscience they use to generate clean energy. Someone at this company is trying to keep a secret—a big one.

But it also seems like someone else is trying to expose it. And if they're going to succeed, they need your help.

What is an ARG?

If you're brand new to ARGs, congratulations on finding your first! I've put a lot of thought and effort into making this ARG one that will hopefully be manageable for beginners while still being enjoyable for veterans.

That being said, if you are a complete rookie, you might need a crash course. Like I said up top, an ARG is an alternate reality game. The "alternate reality" part of it typically involves a story that is told in a way that feels real, like the audience exists within the world of the story. If you've ever read an epistolary novel (a book told through letters, like The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis or World War Z by Max Brooks), you get the idea. The reader feels like they're reading real letters or documents instead of a novel. ARGs take this to the next level, with some even requiring players to visit real-world locations and complete real-world tasks.

That's the "game" part of it. What makes an ARG special is the way that it requires players to solve puzzles and mysteries in order to follow the story and reach its conclusion. Because of this, I'd argue that ARGs are comparable to ergodic literature, which is literature that requires the reader to actively work in order to understand the story. Cain's Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers is a famous example of this. The book contains 100 pages which must be removed from their binding and rearranged into the correct order to solve the murder mystery. ARGs similarly require their players to play if they want to get to the end of the story.

According to the NightMind Archive, a catalog of ARGs, the first ARG was the marketing for The Blair Witch Project in 1999. The promotional material included a website with fake missing person reports, a full fake documentary, and missing posters put up in real life. This project inspired Spielberg to promote his 2001 film AI in a similar way using a game called “The Beast.” That game then inspired a community of individual creators to begin creating their own similar projects. In 2006, a member of that community named Sean Stacey coined the term “alternate reality game.” Other terms for this concept include “unfiction” and “chaotic fiction,” and while “unfiction” remains a popular term within the community, “ARG” has become the most popular way to refer to these projects.

Most modern ARGs are web-based, although as I mentioned above, they can involve real-world tasks like geocaching, and they essentially require players to use puzzles, codes, and ciphers to obtain pieces of information. Altogether, this information tells a story, although it is typically obtained out-of-order, requiring players to play detective and assemble the narrative themselves. For example, some recent ARGs include Happy Meat Farms and the Welcome Home Restoration Project. ARGs like these were the inspiration for my project.

My advice for solving an ARG is to look for anything out-of-place and write it down. If you see a strange set of numbers in one spot, you never know when you'll find a keypad you need to punch it into, so it's best to hold onto it. Look for any connections you can, and be creative. Is that pattern of bright and dim lights Morse code? Could that block of nonsense text be deciphered with a Vigenère cipher? Is this black-and-white static image really a binary string that needs to be converted into text? Be willing to try anything, and don't get discouraged if you find you're wrong. Good luck! You've got this!

A Few Ground Rules

A couple minor requests, just so we're all on the same page and nobody (else) dies:

1. Please don't look at the source code. Let me be clear: I am an English major. I have taken exactly one (1) web design class in my life, and it was five years ago. It's safe to say I've forgotten most of it. Most of this website is held together by an unholy amalgamation of guesswork, trial and error, questionably trustworthy Internet tutorials, and what I can only imagine is a considerable amount of straight-up divine intervention.

With this in mind, I suspect it would be incredibly easy to decipher my coding and figure out all the puzzles that way (assuming, of course, that my code is comprehensible to people who actually know what they're doing.) I put a lot of effort into creating this game and its puzzles because I think they'll actually be enjoyable and satisfying to solve, and I think it'd be a shame to just peek into the Javascript and say “oh look the butler did it” without actually solving the mystery yourself. (Incidentally, there is no butler in this story. Spoiler alert, I suppose.)

2. Do not call the phone numbers IRL. There are a handful of phone numbers that appear in this game. Don't waste your time (or anyone else's) calling them on your real phone. There is a way to use them built into the game, so you won't ever need to call any of them in real life. I briefly looked into setting up real phone numbers, and then I realized that's complicated and hard, so I found another solution. You can too.
3. Collaborate with others. Here's the thing: I hate asking people for help. It can feel like being a burden or admitting weakness. But here's the other thing: I literally could not have done this project without others' help. I have friends with strengths and skills that I don't have, and I needed them.

And the fact of the matter is that we all have different strengths, and asking for help is how we combine and share them. So, as someone who has had to humble himself and ask others for help, I invite you to do the same. If you run into a puzzle you can't figure out, or if there's a clue you can't find, ask for help! Run it past friends, or post about it somewhere. (This is also a selfish request because it means more people will see and interact with this game, haha!)

I also recommend sticking to Matthew Patrick's five guidelines for interacting with ARGs: Never publish private info, stick to publicly available info, be safe in public and do not trespass, do not call private businesses or individuals, and find one central place online for ARG discussion. (To be clear, you won't need to go to any physical locations or call any phone numbers for this ARG, but it's still a good guideline to have.)

About the Project

I'm a student at Brigham Young University - Idaho, and our English department has an English Scholars Program where students work with a faculty mentor on an extracurricular project. Last semester, I wrote a major research paper and burned myself out academically. To recover (ostensibly), I decided to do a creative project this semester and burn myself out creatively for good measure.

I've been interested in ARGs for a while, but the specific impetus for this project came two semesters ago while reading a book on narrative theory. I was interested in the idea of “hypertext narratives,” which grant the reader a degree of control in constructing the narrative by allowing them to engage with portions of the text in custom order. The name comes from Internet hyperlinks, which make these narratives easier to create, but there are printed hypertexts as well—Choose Your Own Adventure books fall into this category by letting readers jump around and make choices about the story.

The idea to specifically create an ARG came from a discussion with another student who was working on a project about the relationship between epistolary fiction and found footage films. Our conversation turned to ARGs, since as I mentioned above, an ARG presents itself as a real-life artifact in order to facilitate suspension of disbelief and thereby immersion, just like epistolary fiction and found footage. I feel that an ARG’s interactive element—which makes it a hypertext narrative and ergodic literature—can further that immersion by helping its audience feel like a participant in the story. This project has been an attempt to test and practice that hypothesis by creating my own ARG.

Acknowledgments

I cannot overstate how ambitious this project was and how foolish I was to embark on this journey. The only thing that exceeds my hubris is the kindness and generosity of the many people who helped me to accomplish this task—or at least to accomplish enough to call it a finished project, haha!

• Professor Steven Hopkins, my faculty mentor for this project
• Taylor Ruiz, who gave me advice about video editing
• Bridger Allen, who gave me advice about 3D modeling and animation
• Joseph Stamps, who gave me advice about puzzle design and played Anthony Lee
• Amanda Newman, who played Sabrina Kondo, Ava Campbell, and Kimberly Steele
• Ren Smith, who played Cassandra Campbell
• Nico McKnight, who played Eugene Campbell and Timothy Doris
• Arianna Phelps, who played Marcia Thue
• Cole Walker, who played Jude Morse and Jonah Reed
• Nate Wassink, who played Lucas Cecil
• Carley Ray, who provides me with endless moral support
• the staff of Motel 6 in Rexburg, Idaho, who allowed us to film in their room for free
• the staff of the Mac Lab at the McKay Library, who were incredibly helpful with 3D printing and technical support
• an uncountable number of wonderful and talented people who have forever affected the way I think about and tell stories

Resources

The vast majority of stock footage, photography, and sound effects used in this project come from Pxhere and Pixabay and are used under the Creative Commons Zero license, which permits free use without attribution. That being said, specific citations are available on request.

Other tutorials, software, and resources used for this project include W3Schools, Inkscape, Paint.NET, CapCut, Blender, Mixamo, MakeHuman, MuseScore, and Audacity.

This website was created and is hosted on Glitch.com.

Report Issues

If you run into any technical issues, please send me an email describing the problem so I can try and fix it.

Game Progress

Mouse over the following text to see your progress through the ARG. (Unfortunately, progress from before 8/2/2024 will not be shown. You will need to revisit logins and redial phone numbers for them to show up.)

#/7 Logins Found

#/6 Phone Numbers Found