Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games

Years earlier, Reznor had heard about a complex game played out over many months, both online and in the real world, in which millions of people across the planet had collectively solved a cascading series of puzzles, riddles, and treasure hunts that ultimately tied into the Steven Spielberg movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. Developed by Jordan Weisman, then a Microsoft exec, it was the first of what came to be called alternate reality games — ARGs for short. After leaving Redmond, Weisman founded a company called 42 Entertainment, which made ARGs for products ranging from Windows Vista to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Reznor wanted to give his fans a taste of life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state, and he decided that a game involving millions of players worldwide would help him do that in a big way.

Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games