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1. "I don’t know any trivia." Assuming you’re not a moron, this is nigh impossible. Everyone knows trivia, or at least a good quizmaster’s definition of trivia, which is “interesting information.” And personally, I tend not to write mega-obscure, you-either-know-it-or-you-don’t questions, i.e., “What’s the third-largest city in Albania?", which aren't particularly engaging (the correct answer is “Who cares?”). That’s not to say anyone can win a quiz game, because not everyone does, and some people are indeed better at trivia games than others. But a little lateral thinking goes a long way—e.g., "What celebrity’s name is the inverse of a popular casino game?" (answer here)—so give yourself a chance.

2. "I’m so going to come to your show and kick everyone’s ass and win, and everyone in the room is going to carry me out of the venue on a litter while servants dressed as sexy librarians feed me grapes." A statement like this is a clear sign that someone is going to lose, and lose badly. The overconfidence gets in the way of the lateral thinking I jut described. Serious trivia nerds aren’t the most virtuous people on earth, sure, but being a braggart isn’t one of their common faults.

3. "You should buy this great trivia book I found at Urban Outfitters and use the questions in that.” Really. I mean, not that we’re the world’s most refined auteurs, but the best of us take some care in the craft, so we prefer to cook up the queries on our own. As for where we get the information, this damn world is burying us in an avalanche of information; asking a quizmaster where he finds question fodder is sort of like asking an octopus where he gets his water. The more interesting question might be how we get our questions—how we create and develop them. Expect the inevitable documentary in the next couple years.

4. "Is it the same questions every time?" Possibly the hardest part of this job is that you constantly need to come up with fresh content (though many of us have perfected recycling strategies—out-of-town gigs, private events, etc.). The entertainment, and the competition, largely hinges on surprise. A quiz game with the same questions over and over again seems among the most pointless things I can imagine; after a couple years, I’d be reduced to entertaining just one really, really brazen cheater in a Doctor Who T-shirt, me and him staring at each other from across an empty room, most likely in my apartment. Speaking of which…

5. "You should give me the answers ahead of time." Usually, this is not a particularly dumb statement so much as a tired joke. It’s always some pleasantly avuncular older man at a private quiz party; he smiles as he reaches into his wallet to faux-hand me a $20 bill. Hardy-har; I tend to smile and let it pass. But at least two times, it’s been said to me with complete and utter seriousness (and, alas, not with any serious promise of bribery). I utterly fail to see the point of winning a quiz game by cheating, even if you crave the prizes—if you have the balls to be a flagrant, out-and-out cheat, there have to be more efficient ways to make some dough. (Similarly, I'm grateful that most live-trivia fans resist the urge to use their phones to look up answers. It saves the quizmaster from having to constantly play Whack-A-Mole, and besides, how pathetic is your life if you do this?)

6. "You totally should accept my incredibly stupid wrong answer, because I know that I read somewhere that it’s correct." Nobody is perfect, quizmasters among them—the quizmaster who has never asked a flat-out wonky, unusable question is as rare the quizmaster who regularly got laid in high school. Errors are unavoidable. But for the love of Charles Van Doren, if we tell you your answer is wrong, it’s wrong: Shut up, sit down, and live with it. Especially if your documentation for said brilliant answer is your vague, alcohol-sodden memory. Not long ago, I was the entertainment at a bar mitzvah, and I asked a simple question about the most popular names for baby boys and girls. An adult—not a kid, mind you—insisted on grinding the entire event to a halt so that he could obnoxiously lobby me that my (correct) answer was wrong, because he had “read somewhere” that the most popular baby names for boys are “Aiden, Jayden and Kayden.” Please, just take a moment to listen to yourself.

7. "You should go on [trivia TV show of the moment]." I suspect most quizmasters have at least attempted to be on a TV game show, or—as in my case—went on a show and lost, thus inspiring them to start their own game show. I was on "Jeopardy!" I lost on "Jeopardy!" (And I hate the fact that every time I write the name "Jeopardy!," I have to include that damned exclamation point, which makes it look like I’m constantly shouting about "Jeopardy!" Also, Alex Trebek made my skin crawl.) I was someone’s Life Line on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire"; "Cash Cab" has solicited contestants at my show; and I actually won a VH1 game show you’ve never heard of. So yes, we have probably considered going on [trivia TV show of the moment], thanks.

8. "Do you wear that jacket to bed?" At every event, I wear one of several blinged-out quizmaster jackets (I like to put on a show). The most common, and logical, question is where did I get the jackets. (It’s the magical combination of thrift stores and a genius fashion-designer friend.) But I swear, at least a dozen times I’ve been asked if I wear one of the jackets while I have sex. Excessive glitter and fabric paint really chafe, and besides, these things are hard enough to clean to begin with.

9. "Do you idolize Alex Trebek?" See No. 7. I actually don’t think Alex Trebek is a very good role model for quizmasters, or really anyone. You need a serious sense of humor to deal with the slings and arrows of live trivia—drunken patrons, ornery venue owners, technical mishaps—and Trebek strikes me as way too dry a person to handle that. The better idol, to my mind, is Bob Barker. Amid all the giant checks and yodeling mountain climbers, people are constantly making jackasses of themselves on "The Price Is Right," but in his tenure, Bob never made them feel bad, even helping them to laugh at themselves. And throughout, he kept the game moving along like a true pro. He could handle a bar full of quiz nerds on a Monday night, no problem.

10. "You’re a quizmaster? How’s that a job? Can’t anyone ask a trivia question?" Sure. And anyone can tell a joke. And anyone can sing a song. And anyone can toss a football. Well, not many trivia geeks can, but you get the idea.

Noah Tarnow is the star of the Big Quiz Thing. You can learn more at bigquizthing.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.

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The other night I attended the premiere of a video game. It was an odd little duck—the premiere, that is. The video game is L.A. Noire, an interactive thriller from Rockstar Games (coming out in May), and it was not odd at all. But the premiere was a bit of a puzzle.

In many aspects, it was more traditional roll-out than premiere—a demonstration of the product, followed by prepared remarks from the company and then a Q&A for the fans. But this was not Comic Con or E3 Expo, where we’d expect a whole weekend’s worth of such events; this was at the Tribeca Film Festival. And to answer the question of why L.A. Noire was occupying a slot at the Festival was Geoff Gilmore, the host for the event and also the festival's chief creative officer (and former longtime director of the Sundance Film Festival). Gilmore has no small amount of cinema street cred in the bank, and he was visibly excited to present this premiere of what he described as “a whole new sphere of storytelling: narrative gaming.”

The movie business and the video game business (or the “interactive” business, as it's known) have been flirting for some time. Blockbusters get licensed to interactive producers for video games (even E.T.!), and sometimes games get developed into movies (i.e., the Resident Evil series). Each of course is vying for a sometimes-overlapping audience, but as technologies advance and delivery platforms begin to resemble each other, this flirtation is becoming a bit more serious, though still awkward. And the tone of the event, from the perspective of Gilmore and the TFF, was an invite to the interactive industry to go back to cinema’s room later that night. Interactive, from the tone of Rockstar, is playing hard to get. The company's reps, Rob Nelson and Simon Ramsey, while seeming pleased to be there, were clearly more focused on promoting the game than celebrating any potential union between the sectors. When asked to identify the game's ideal audience, Ramsey answered that Rockstar was not just looking to Rockstar fans (who comprised the majority of the audience), but also to fans of film noir. And what better venue to reach these fans than a high-profile film festival? And if the initial outreach to cineastes is in the guise of a serious discussion of the arts, then so much the better.

The game itself is a bright shiny thing. Immaculately art-directed, it takes place in the Los Angeles of 1947, and the protagonist (“you”) is a WWII hero recently promoted to detective, trying to solve a series of grisly (and graphic) murders. The animation of the characters' faces was mapped using a new process that approximates photographic-level graphics, and it's impressive, as is the richness of the period LA scenery. It was written and directed by Brendan McNamara, and features a cast of 400 and a “script” of 2,300 pages. As progress in the game is ultimately determined by engaging in a series of interrogations of potential suspects in which you, the player, must determine the truthfulness of statement—literally by choosing between Truth/Doubt/Lie after each interogatee response—both the script and the facial animation are much more important than they would be in, say, a first-person shooter.

As pretty as the game is, the product demo of the game was an interesting experience, in the full sense of that word. It was novel, if not newsworthy, to get a peek at the next big Rockstar game (considering their track record), and at the same time it was squirmy. The demo was a live projection of one of the Rockstar team playing an early chapter, and watching a stranger play a videogame is as stultifying as it sounds. The cut scenes which lay out the arc of the story are fun, but when the game proceeds into actual play there are small gaps and pauses that the gamer takes in stride when playing but are less than riveting for those looking over his shoulder. All of the dull parts of game play—driving the car from scene to scene, climbing the stairs—were live and in real time. And to watch and not be distracted by mashing your thumbs, your attention is freed to wander and notice the little things, good and bad—the richness of the sound design, and the incongruity between near-human facial gestures and weirdly mapped fabric (which is notoriously hard to depict via CGI). A live demonstration was not as evocative as perhaps the organizers had hoped.

That point where video games are so immersive as to become watchable by third parties is not that far away, though, and L.A. Noire is a clear effort to approach that point. It’s very pretty and very well realized, but at the same time, the fact that the mechanics are based on interrogations, on an immense but still finite logic tree, can be reminiscent of reading a souped-up “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Above all this, the decision of the TFF to “premiere” L.A. Noire, is a component of the engaging gospel of Geoff Gilmore: finding the places where cinema overlaps similar media, and to even find a Unified Field Theory of Narrative. And while L.A. Noire may not be the apotheosis of that, the event was a window on the ways the two industries will step on each other’s toes while they consider the prospect of finally getting it on.

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

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More than ten million people have downloaded “Words with Friends,” and many others play similar versions: Facebook Scrabble, Pogo, Lexulous. The game feels more refined than flinging birds from slingshots and is best enjoyed, as its name suggests, with people you know. I play against friends, family and co-workers in California, Missouri and Massachusetts, and, in many cases, the game has become our most frequent contact.

In short, we’ve entered a New Age of Electronic Scrabble—a Golden Age, even, bringing together former roommates, mothers and sons, friends and long-distance lovers. But there's a dark side to “Words with Friends”—a nefarious quale, if you will—that represents the greatest smartphone-induced threat to our nation’s integrity since the Blackberry ruined pub trivia. It appears in the form of “zax” or “hame” or “henting,” each of which are underlined in red as I type this in Microsoft Word, and each of which have been successfully deployed against me in “Words with Friends." And I'm certain that when my opponent played “hame,” she was as surprised as I was to find that the word existed.

In short, the problem we face is an epidemic of guessing. Unlike traditional Scrabble, where you can demand, on the spot, that your opponent find “zax” in the dictionary, “Words with Friends” opponents can be separated by zip codes, boroughs, even time zones. The game offers no penalty against guessing—it simply declines your attempt, politely encouraging you to try another improbable-but-high-scoring combination of letters. My friend “had a feeling” that “quale” was a word, so she guessed. Another friend played “zikurat” (45 points) before informing me that, of course, "ziggurat" has a number of alternate spellings. Admittedly, I’ve made a number of questionable plays myself.

Here’s a list of words that I've seen used in recent games, with accompanying definitions adapted from the OED:
• Arf—in certain dialects, a form of “argh”
• Dungs—to cover with manure
• Gar—a fish with long bill-like jaws
• Haled—to pull (past tense)
• Heeder—a male sheep from nine months old to its first shearing
• Malfed—no OED entry!
• Quod—to put in prison
• Varve—“a pair of thin layers of clay and silt of contrasting color and texture which represent the deposit of a single year (summer and winter) in still water at some time in the past (usu. in a lake formed by a retreating ice-sheet)”
• Yar—to snarl, as or like a dog
• Zona—“zone,” if you’re an anatomist

Each of these appears in something called the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon, or, ENABLE, a public-domain dictionary used by "Words with Friends" to determine which words count and which don't. I'd guess that many words on this list are beyond most players' vocabularies—and yet online Scrabble creates an irresistible scenario where we play words we don't even know.

Scrabble, it seems, has met its steroid problem, with its own competitors threatening the game’s integrity under the banner of, ”Well, everybody’s doing it.” Chalk this up to the Internet enabling (remember the dictionary’s acronym?) yet another flaw in human nature. So, until the overlords of “Words with Friends” institute a penalty for guessing, something must be done. To that end, I propose all players abide by a simple honor code: For words of three or more letters¹, you should be able to offer a definition.

It's impossible to enforce, of course. But try we must. Otherwise, what will we do if, God forbid, we somehow find ourselves playing a real-life game of Scrabble against a real-life opponent? Skills atrophied, will we just stare blankly at our tiles, wondering if "Phrzk" might possibly be a word?

¹ The use of two-letter words opens up so many layers of Scrabble strategy that it would be foolish to require anyone to know that “jo,” “aa,” and “ka” are defined, respectively, as a Portuguese coin, a stream, and the “name given by the ancient Egyptians to a spiritual part of a human being or a god which survived after death and could reside in a statue of the dead person.” Thus, they’re fair game.

Reeves Wiedeman plays “Words with Friends” under the name ReevesW. He welcomes all honorable competitors.

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The night before, during a tough trivia night at the Pig and Whistle, my friend Michelle had scribbled a name and address on a cocktail napkin. “Go to 580 California Street, head up to the 16th floor and ask for the Jejune Institute.”¹

“What is it?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you anything but that. Trust me, you’ll like it.” She saw me wavering. “It’ll take fifteen minutes. If you want to stop after that, you don’t have to do anything else.” And so with a few hours to kill on a rainy Saturday, my girlfriend and I went.

Which is how we found ourselves in this small office in a high-rise overlooking San Francisco’s Financial District. One wall was covered with framed photos, plaques, maps and artwork. Obscure scientific journals and odd trinkets sat on the shelves. An older man who looked extraordinarily like Terence Stamp in The Limey, minus the insane Rottweiler look, addressed us from the television. Broadcasting from a secret remote location, he explained the Institute’s role in “socio-engineering” and how various devices like telepathy and the bending of the time-space continuum will help mankind. (Think DHARMA from Lost.²) He told us to turn to our right, reach into the table drawer, and sign the consent form we’d find there.

“Do not read the initiation form,” warned the man. “I repeat: Do not read the initiation. If you do read the initiation, then do not tell anyone what it says. And do not follow the instructions.”

“What the fuck are we doing?” asked my girlfriend.

Following the instructions on that form, was what we were doing.

MASSIVELY IMPORTANT SPOILER WARNING: This is where, if you’re into puzzles, games, cults, scavenger hunts, multi-media entities or anything reminiscent—and you live or are vacationing in the greater San Francisco area in the next month (that is, before April 10th!)—you should follow the advice of my friend Michelle and just go without asking any more questions. Reading the rest of this will, ultimately, ruin it.

The directions that the man had so sternly told us to ignore led us on a wild afternoon: ducking past security guards, prowling down alleys, pushing aside metal lock boxes looking for codes, locating hidden bricks on ancient churches, peering over the balconies of private businesses and cracking passwords to listen to secret voicemails.

It was a game, but it was something more than that, too. It was a game of Nonchalance. Part public-art installation, part scavenger hunt, part multimedia experiment, part narrative story—yet even taken together, these terms don’t describe the project fully.

After my experience playing the game, I spent a few weeks obsessing about it before contacting Jeff Hull, the project’s creator. "What’s your take on this?" he asked. “Magazines have had a tough time trying to get a handle on what this is.”

A few inches north of six feet, Hull has a shaved head and soft melodic voice. He began his foray into multimedia projects a decade ago with the group Oaklandish, an artist-collective that specializes in outdoor film screenings, public art exhibitions and urban capture-the-flag games. “I had always been theorizing about narrative across media in an immersive way. In 2008, the opportunities presented themselves to produce this.”

The question is, just what is ‘this’ anyway?

Hull initially conceived of creating a simple multimedia art project. “There was this trail by my house I’d take my dog for a walk. The idea was [that participants] would gather there, tune into a radio broadcast that would walk them up the river and tell this story along the way. The experience would take a half hour total.” But some projects have a life of their own. “The universe just expanded. It became so much deeper than we initially conceived.” Turns out, he was producing an alternate reality game. “I didn’t even know what an ARG was at the time,” said Hull. “We were totally ignorant of it.”

An ARG is an interactive multi-media game that utilizes a combination of new-school tech (websites, emails, videos) and old school (live actors, flyers, sidewalk graffiti) to create a narrative for players to participate in. When I told a friend about Nonchalance, he said it reminded him of the David Fincher movie The Game. While Nonchalance’s wasn’t nearly as elaborate as the one found in that film—not once while I was playing did I have to break out of an open grave in Mexico, for example³—it’s a pretty good illustration of how an ARG works.⁴

My first experience with an ARG came in 2001 after reading a post on a message board encouraging people to closely examine the poster for the new Spielberg film A.I..⁵ In the credit sea of producers and writers was one for Jeanine Salla, who was listed as the film’s “Sentient Machine Therapist.” A quick Internet search led to a string of fictional websites that unspooled the story of a murder that took place in the year 2142. Players who entered their contact information almost immediately began receiving emails and phone messages from the game’s characters containing clues to solve the mystery. The game was quickly dubbed “The Beast” by participants.⁶ But there were problems.

First, it was tough to emotionally connect to a project that was put together by the bottom-line hungry Hollywood machine.⁷ It ruins some of the fun when you feel more like a consumer than a participant. Another problem was The Beast’s nationwide scope. It only made sense that the studio wanted to attract as wide an audience as possible—this was an advertising campaign, after all—but the Beast’s broad geographic reach made it unable to make use of many real-world settings. A live event in New York would mean leaving out the West Coast and Midwest, etc. As a result, most of the narrative was confined to websites, that is, puzzles that can be solved from office chairs; and unlocking a hidden page on a website isn’t nearly as exciting as creeping down an alley, finding a box and removing it to reveal a password. Worst of all for The Beast was that, due to its attachment to the upcoming A.I. premiere, it arrived with an expiration date. It lasted during the spring and summer months of 2001. After that, anyone coming late to the party had to settle for message-board posts describing how cool that thing they missed was.

By contrast, the Nonchalance experience put together by Hull has a DIY texture to it, every piece of the project designed and, more or less, hand-crafted by Nonchalance or one of Hull’s artist friends. Instead of having the backing of a movie studio, this venture was almost completely self-financed. It also purposefully used well-defined local settings—walkable sections of San Francisco—to more fully blur the lines between reality and game.

And best of all, Nonchalance was built, to use Hull’s term, to be "perpetual." I could enter the game fourteen months after it was debuted and still have much the same experience as the first person to ask the receptionist on the 16th floor for Jejune, please. Now, however, an end date has been assigned, and after a nearly three-year run it will be no longer after April 10, when the epilogue is completed.

The game was released in a series of Acts, chapters in an ongoing story. Think of it like seasons of The X-Files. (Except without the eventual and inevitable letdown.) If you were watching at home on a week-to-week basis, the end of the season was accompanied with a long and painful wait for the next one to start. In the same way, after Act I was released, players who solved it had to wait patiently for Nonchalance to design and release the second act. And when they solved that, they had to wait once again for Act III.

From the beginning, Hull and company rewarded the game’s earliest adopters and most obsessive players. In between acts, the group produced a series of "mini-episodes." So, for example, in the interim between Act 1 and II, a handful of gamers were told to meet at a payphone for instructions. After completing the assigned task—dance like crazy on a public sidewalk—they received a map that allowed them to get a headstart on Act II.

The “mini-episode” between Acts II and III took the form of a rally held in San Francisco’s Union Square, put together by the Elsewhere Public Works Agency—one of the game’s fictitious groups—as a way to expose the horrors the Jejune Institute.⁸ The rally was attended by over 200 people, who witnessed members of the EPWA “scare away” that Terence Stamp-looking dude from the indoctrination video. So, while you can start from the beginning and play almost the entire game in a week’s time—just as you can watch all of The X-Files on Netflix Instant over a week—you won’t have the same experience as that first batch of players.

As the references to EPWA and a rally against a fictitious organization hint at, the point of an ARG like Nonchalance’s isn’t to just give a bunch of random clues that get players from point A to point B. That’s just a scavenger hunt. What makes an ARG different is the narrative layered on top of the clues: there’s a story being told.

In the alternate reality of Nonchalance, the story revolves around the warring of two entities vying for the minds of San Franciscans. There’s the science-heavy—most likely evil—Jejune Institute which may or may not be suppressing and controlling the thoughts of the city’s citizens, and the EPWA, an underground rebel group trying to dismantle Jejune. There’s also Eva Lucien, a mysterious woman who is somehow the link between the two. She went missing in 1988, her last-known appearance near Coit Tower. If my tone sounds hesitant, it’s because this description may not be completely accurate. You try deciphering a story spread across so many different platforms and with so many different characters.⁹ It’s dizzying.

In addition to Hull, another key figure behind the game was Sara Thacher. If Hull was the dreamer behind the project, Thacher was the one who ensured the dream machine ran properly. "We didn’t even think about beta testing before Sara got involved," said Hull. Thacher has since moved on to the Go Games, but while she was still with Nonchalance, I accompanied her on a biweekly trip she took through Chinatown to make sure the pieces of the game were still intact.

“The story isn’t as important as the experience of doing it,” she said. “Talking about the project isn’t able to be done. You have to experience it.” She removed a large piece of white chalk from her Ziploc bag and drew the Nonchalance symbol (a slightly tilted rabbit head) on the sidewalk. “This is just to help let people know they’re on the right track.”

Thacher’s background made her a perfect fit for the unique project. A graduate of a local “structured art school,” she realized pretty quickly that she wasn’t into the standard, stuffy-museum path that her art degree was taking her. "The actual person-to-person interactions were the art," she said. She went on to collect a MFA from the California College of the Arts in a new program called Social Practice, designing projects like “Walking a Mile in Other People’s Shoes” (in which Thacher physically walked a mile in someone else’s shoe before shipping it back, along with a personal letter) and “San Francisco Vacation Surrogate” (in which she toured SF for someone who couldn’t, attending events and visiting sites they wanted to see, and shipping them back letters, ticket stubs, postcards and journal entries describing the trip they could have taken). She got mixed up with Nonchalance after answering a Craigslist ad.

The third core member of the group has been Uriah Findley, who Hull knew from his Oaklandish days. Findley’s specialty is audio and video editing but he also designed most of the actual real-world items found in the game. When I first met him, he was carrying an ‘80s-style boombox that was accented with patchy artistic flourishes before spray-painting the entire thing gold.

While Hull was the lead writer of the Game Bible¹⁰, it was this core of three—aided by about 30 different freelance writers, artists and actors—who spent much of 2008 creating the project. But even when the pieces were in place, the hardest part was getting people to walk through the doors of 580 California Street. To do that they had to create “in roads,” bait to attract players. The group posted vague, mysterious flyers around San Francisco, started fictional eBay auctions and utilized a variety of sections on Craigslist to spread the word. “People thought it was a cult,” joked Hull. But soon enough, the people came. After that, it was all word of mouth. In early 2010 the group celebrated the 4,000th person to complete Act I.¹¹

A few weeks after our first conversation, I went with Hull on a Nonchalance venture. We sat in his car, drinking coffee, and waited for Act IV in the game to begin.

In the previous few weeks, eight of the game’s most hardcore players had received a variety of postcards, emails and phone calls from game characters. These communications came embedded with seemingly nonsensical clues. Only when all eight players came together would the clues make sense. The day before, they had been sent the final clue instructing them when and where to meet. Hull motioned to a nearby alley, “They’re going to come out of there… at least, I think they’re going to come out of there.”

At this point, there was still plenty that could go wrong. Someone could have misheard a clue. Or they could have taken a left when they should have taken a right. Or someone might not have shown up, leaving the other seven with incomplete clues. Beta testing can solve only so many problems. So we waited in Hull’s car. And we waited. The silence gave him a moment to reflect on the future, and end, of these games.

See, this whole project, while being a public art installation and all of the other slippery identities contained within that, is also a business development project. Hull is marketing Nonchalance as a media production company with creative services, and these games are a calling card of sorts, a tangible product companies can use to decipher how best to use their services. So far, Nonchalance has completed a handful of client projects, including developing an ARG for Greenpeace and creative consulting for the Oakland International Airport. After the game’s conclusion in April, the group will focus on networking and trying to sell the idea that this, whatever this is, has some value to clients. “We’ve had this ‘If you build it, they will come’ attitude,” said Hull. When I asked him what the group plans to do if they can’t generate the business, he responded immediately, almost instinctively: “We have to.” There’s no other option.

Yet as I sat beside Hull, I could sense some uncertainty about the group’s future. What if all the past work had been for nothing? But then Hull’s eyes widened and he sat up in his chair, suddenly giddy, worries about the future wiped out.

“There they are.”

The first eight participants of Act IV emerged from an alleyway, a little behind schedule but still on course. Hull had once told me the grand mission statement of this project, “The Jejune Institute calls itself the Center for Socio-Reengineering, and that’s something that’s a little bit cheeky, but we’re pretty sincere about that goal. We want to reengineer the way people are interacting with space and with media and with each other. That’s our objective.” That mission was now working.

Eight people—strangers to one another before that day—were on a hunt together. They turned to their right, the wrong direction, basically aiming directly to where we were parked. I ducked in my seat. Then after a brief conference, the group changed course, moving left, the correct direction. They crossed the street and entered a labyrinthine mausoleum¹² where the rest of the act would take place.

“My job here is done,” said Hull. His role that day was simply to make sure the eight got into the mausoleum, at which point the overseeing duties would be handed over to Thacher and Findley. Hull wanted to stay out of the players’ sight on the remote chance someone might recognize him, ruining the illusion of the game. Yet, instead of heading home, he idled in the parking lot. “I think there’s a spot on the second floor we can look down from.”

He turned off his car and we jogged up to the mausoleum’s second floor.¹³ “I have to hide from Sara,” he said. “She’d kill me if she knew I was in here.” From our perch we watched the eight perform the duties exactly as assigned. Hull watched raptly from over the railing, a creator beaming down at this new world he’d made.

Scheduled for April 10th, the game’s epilogue event will be a live socio-reengineering seminar, sponsored by the Jejune Institute. Seating is limited to 200 people, with priority given to players who have been through Acts I to IV. For those able to get in, Hull promises a magical experience. “We’re actually scaring ourselves,” he told me. “What we’re attempting right now we could have never conceived of two months ago.”

But after that day, people walking into 580 California Street and asking for Jejune will be greeted with looks of confusion and, possibly, calls for security. The doorway to the Institute’s world will be shuttered and locked, and our own world will be a little less magical because of it.

¹ Pronunciation is key: It’s a soft ‘je’ sound on that second ‘j’, rhyming with the final syllable in Gerard Depardieu’s last name.

² Or, better yet, go to the official website, which explains it much better than I could.

³ Unfortunately, I might add.

⁴ If you’re still having a hard time grasping this, think of one of those murder mystery weekends. (You’re probably familiar with these less because you actually participated and more because they were one of the go-to plotlines for late '80s, early '90s network sitcoms.) And then extend the timeframe in which the game is played. And the environment where it takes place. And the amount of ways you can receive information. And without having to leave a tip.

⁵ Most ARGs are part of viral marketing campaigns for various movies or TV shows. In 2007, the company 42 Entertainment famously created a series of websites “designed by The Joker” that led fans on a hype-building scavenger hunt through San Diego, the setting of that year’s Comic-Con, which ultimately culminated in unlocking teaser photos and audio clips for The Dark Knight. Almost instantly the photos and clips were uploaded to the Internet, so someone didn’t have to go through the actual game to get that reward, but there’s an argument to be made that going through the scavenger hunt in real-time was the reward in of itself. You know, journey v. destination stuff.

⁶ A number of these participants joined forces and created a massive Yahoo! group account dubbed “Cloudmakers” as a way to share information with one another. There’s a good psychoanalytical paper to be found in examining the collaborative aspect of these ARGs, but I’ll just settle for the following armchair observations: As of this writing, there’s an 81-page forum post on the website UnFiction.org devoted to the various sections of Nonchalance, helping gamers trade information about where to go and how to complete certain goals. While you’d expect the tone of an Internet forum like this to be more along the lines of “I did it first and here’s me bragging about it and spoiling it for you” the posts are actually gentle, almost-parental, nudges to help gamers who are stuck, always being mindful not to ruin the blissful experience that comes with solving a puzzle on one’s own.

⁷ Probably unfairly so, seeing as The Beast was created by an entirely different set of designers from A.I., the only narrative crossovers being that both take place in the future and the appearance of Salla, an extremely minor character in the film who was most likely shoe-horned in to connect the two projects.

⁸ If you can find the YouTube video of the event, or any number of photos from various news organizations, Hull is disguised in a blue hard hat and orange construction vest.

⁹ Not to mention that it takes place in a variety of locations. While Act I takes place in Chinatown, Act II takes place in SF’s Mission District, the “in road” being a 1-watt radio transmitter located at the top of Upper Dolores Park playing a 45-minute, NPR-sounding show, alerting anyone with the patience to listen as to what tasks they have to complete in the area. This second Act took about 6 hours to complete as opposed to the 2 hours spent on the first Act. (Needless to say, there was a moment that second day, sludging through the sporadic but constant San Franciscan rain and trying to break the codes with my then-girlfriend, that I didn’t think the relationship was going to last through the afternoon. And now that I think about it actually, if I were to look back on things through just the right prism, this could’ve easily been the inciting event for our eventual break-up.)

Act III, meanwhile, takes place in the Coit Tower park section of SF. From what I understand—we left before going through it; like I said, relationship on the rocks—this third act utilizes PDAs in a more straightforward way, allowing players to hold up their iPhones or whatever web-surfing doo-hickeys they have in certain positions around the park to view videos shot from that specific location showing events from the past, kind of like watching through a mini time portal.

Act IV is described a bit later in the piece, but I was mostly sworn to not reveal too many specifics. I will say it’s the first part not to take place in San Francisco proper and is the most “hands-on” section of the game. As such, I had a hard time seeing how the programmers were going to make it “perpetual” like the other parts, but they were certain they’d find a way.

¹⁰ The Game Bible being the basic construction and plot points of the actual story. When I asked Hull about his literary influences, he stumbled towards naming McSweeney’s and Kurt Vonnegut before finally settling on Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as the main influence. The tilted rabbit head-shaped symbol that accompanies game locations is a direct descendent of the muted post horns of the Tristero in Pynchon’s novel.

¹¹ Hull says there was about a 50% drop-off with each act, meaning that when the group debuted Act IV, about 120 people were ready to participate in it.

¹² While I was sworn to secrecy about where this specific action takes place, there are enough clues in this piece for you to find it if you’re looking. So have at it if you’re one of those types.

¹³ While in the alcoves of the mausoleum, I pointed out to Hull the odd way the ashes are stored there: They’re in books. One person’s remains are stored in a book standing upright, surrounded by that person’s family, also in books. A large Italian family sat on a ledge like an encyclopedia of their lives. “I love that,” Hull said. “Everyone has a story.”

Rick Paulas is a writer living in Los Angeles.

Top photo courtesy of The Jejune Institute.

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