There is something appealing about the idea of a major public game which is a kind of cross between Facebook, a reality TV show and the Motion Wii controller ‘ and the inventor of the TV program Heroes, might just be able to deliver that for Nokia. If he does expect lots of copycat games to emerge by year end or early next year.
Don’t be put off by the title ‘ the Conspiracy for Good (CfG) almost had us yawning, it sounds a little like a Good News TV program, but the complexity that Heroes creator Tim Kring has weaved into the starting elements shows the potential for something bigger than American Idol or Big Brother, potentially better known than Heroes itself. At some start it will almost invariably lead to a major motion picture or a TV series.
It starts simply by visiting the web site and registering and reading up on the history of CfG and how it came about, and seeing the sinister English villain Blackwell Briggs, a major corporation which is evil and does things purely for profit, at the expense of the human condition. It preaches good works, but keeps foreign workers in poverty and pain. Naturally it is British, like all the villains in Hollywood, with overtones of BP right now if you are an American.
After ten minutes of messing around following the clues, it becomes a toss up between putting it away until later or wasting the entire day/week enmeshed in the mind of Tim Kring, trying to get to the bottom of where the clues are being left, and how to follow them.
The Conspiracy For Good (go to www.ConspiracyForGood.com) was dreamed up by Kring, and it will be spread around the planet with the resources of Noka, although initially it is only for the UK public, although we’re not sure how they will keep it hidden or why they would. Unlike Apple, it doesn’t seem that Nokia insists on you buying a Nokia device to play it, although you may have to visit its App store Ovi. The game is set to play in the UK first and foremost, and then we presume will be opened to the rest of the world.
The idea is to set up a treasure hunt all over the internet, finding the decryption codes for past (mostly music) files which the Conspiracy for Good has collected. The enemy Blackwell Briggs will try to stop you and has called on all ‘right thinking’ citizens everywhere to back some UK law changes which allow private citizens to ‘help’ the police by going vigilante, and one such move is to connect the UK’s profligate network of security cameras, and link it to image recognition systems that can track in real time anyone with a police record or anyone who has even been accused of a crime. Blackwell Briggs plans to offer the technology and processing power to do this. Naturally it would use such a system to eliminate political activists who oppose Blackwell Briggs.
Unfortunately we have come across people who would consider such a plan highly viable and quite reasonable – rather good for keeping Britain British or America American. There are far too many ‘right thinking’ people all over the world with nationalistic tendencies. Which leads us to the conclusion that some people might end up joining Blackwell Briggs, rather than the conspiracy. We hope not, though for the game to work it should at least be possible.
Naturally, outraged members of the ConspiracyForGood have left videos and clues about what to do next all over the internet and the game is advertised by famous people speaking on a web page insisting they are ‘not a member’ presumably of the CfG. The first step is to take the special code number revealed on a page of the site, 77472, and put it as a decryption code into the back files of the Conspiracy, which then reveals a haunting song called Dreams Deferred. We looked for the song on iTunes ‘ not there. Although there were three other songs of the same name and an album, we think this has been commissioned as part of the ‘score’ of the game.
The song borrows from the Magpie song, you know ‘ ‘one for sorrow, two for joy,’ but only buried within the reprise of the song, it’s not the tune or in the main body. The web page it plays from tells you that this song has some Morse code in it and shows you how to examine its structure using Audacity, a music editing program, it helps you find and interpret the Morse code, and you are off and running.
We’ve played these games, and three days later, having had no sleep, you have yet another epiphany and solve the clue that takes you to level 46 and find, like any episode of Heroes, that there are yet more layers. So we shall leave it to the youngsters out there this time.
The idea is that some of the clues take you to the Nokia Ovi platform, which you can do via the web, or through a Nokia phone. And it is the players, not Kring, who will continue to write the story of what happens to the ConspiracyForGood ‘ so that it becomes a form of interactive theatre, using both musical and physical participation, although we’re not yet sure of how he plans physical participation, perhaps a barricade outside a Blackwell Briggs office. The outcome will involve real financial contributions to the Chataika Basic School, located in the village of Chataika in Eastern Zambia. So solving the puzzles will really do good in the real world.
Kring is quoted saying, “Our goal with the Conspiracy For Good is to entice, engage, and inspire the audience to drive real-world change through their participation in a narrative.”
So once the trick with Audacity is worked out, music is embedded in web sites with messages in them, which lead to more clues, some at the CfG website, some, no doubt, all over the web.
In the UK, participants will be able to download a special edition app called Conspiracy For Good: DeadDrop powered by Nokia’s Point & Find service. This will first become available in the UK Ovi Store in mid-July, and will allow players to point at objects and images in the real-world to discover clues and participate in challenges during the series of upcoming events in London.
Few people, and no young people, believe that Nokia (or Ovi) is cool. The ConspiracyForGood might just be the thing which changes that.