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To put it mildly, Phillip Jeffrey was a little surprised when, opening his mail one day early last month, he found that he'd been tasked with saving the world.
The immodest directive was written on the back of a photo he'd shaken from a manila envelope along with a ball of yarn and a poster for the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium.
"I had no idea what it meant," said Mr. Jeffrey, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia. Even so, he recognized the magnitude. Saving humanity, after all, shouldn't be taken lightly.
"This changes your everyday life," he said.
Within hours, he'd unravelled the first layer of the mystery. Fifty or so bloggers and techies from around the world had received the same strange package. Mr. Jeffrey soon realized that he'd been thrust into the narrative of a massive new alternate reality game (ARG) called The Lost Ring that will take thousands of players and close to six months to complete.
A synthesis of conventional video game, role-playing adventure and scavenger hunt, ARGs have quietly nurtured a huge cult following over the past decade. The games start with a central mystery - a fictional murder, perhaps, or an abduction - and guide players through a months-long series of digital and physical clues placed all over the world. The key to unlocking one part of the puzzle might be placed in a blog; another in a Simon Fraser University locker.
With their blend of fictional storylines and real-world clues, ARGs lie somewhere between reality and fantasy.
"The players know it's not real, but the game acts like it is," said Jane McGonigal, who designed The Lost Ring and is revered among the ARG community for developing several intricate games. "It's a giant mystery that's been broken into thousands of pieces."
A tight-knit community of several thousand international players - ARGonauts in gaming vernacular - work together to solve the mysteries, discussing clues in online forums such as unfiction.com and holding conferences in Las Vegas, Vancouver and Boston. The real reward for wrapping an ARG is the gratification of international collaboration rather than any material incentives, players say, though some game sponsors dangle big-screen TVs and other prizes.
"It's about the community," said Geoff May, a Web developer and avid ARGonaut in Kitchener, Ont. "And it gets you doing things away from the computer."
ARGonauts tend to be young, Web savvy and a potentially lucrative market for the corporations that quietly sponsor most ARGs. The Lost Ring, supported by both McDonald's and the International Olympic Committee, has already attracted more than 100,000 active players, according to Ms. McGonigal, even though it's still 4½months away from an expected Aug. 24 completion date: closing day for the Beijing Olympics.
The plot of The Lost Ring centres on the mystery of six Olympic-fit young people who, on March 3, mysteriously awoke in cornfields around the globe. They suffered from complete amnesia and had a message tattooed on one arm: "trovu la ringon perditan" - Esperanto for "find the lost ring."
Subsequent clues have suggested the six are competitors in an ancient Olympic sport called labyrinth running in which competitors are shown a maze diagram, blindfolded and then placed in the maze, from which they must escape using only their memory.
Two weekends ago, a group of Kitchener players organized a labyrinth-running training session in hopes that one of the amnesiacs might show up. Mr. May, who has set up a wiki dedicated to The Lost Ring, persuaded 14 friends to form the walls of a human labyrinth on a snow-covered field. While participants comprising the walls hummed, a blindfolded competitor had to clumsily navigate his way out by sonar, avoiding contact with his training partners.
More ad hoc runs have been scheduled for Madrid, San Francisco, New Zealand and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Such extreme dedication is the norm in ARGs. For I Love Bees, a hugely popular ARG carried out in 2004, ARGonauts had to answer phone calls made to 220 payphones throughout the United States. When players couldn't make it to a given payphone by a prearranged time, they would phone surrounding businesses and plead with them to answer the payphone ringing nearby.
"They really immerse you in the story," said Rob Teszka, who last week skipped class at UBC to track down a Lost Ring clue after ARGonauts at one discussion board deciphered a puzzle suggesting a clue awaited in locker #125 of SFU's Segal building. Mr. Teszka jumped at the chance to lend a hand. Opening the locker, he found an envelope bearing a logo for the Western Maryland Railway Co. Inside was a new clue written in Esperanto.
After he posted the clue online, hordes of ARGonauts offered instant translations. "It was really, really cool, said Mr. Teszka, who's been playing ARGs since 2001, when The Beast, a game for which clues were hidden in posters and trailers for the movie A.I., first inspired the underground fanaticism that exists today.
In the years since, game developers have shifted their focus to tackling social issues. One of Ms. McGonigal's previous efforts was World Without Oil, a 2007 game that presented players with a catastrophic oil-crash scenario. In solving the game, puppet masters hoped that ARGonauts might also devise some solutions to a potential real-world oil crisis.
"I see ARGs as a real force for good in the world," Ms. McGonigal said. "Even games that don't have a serious topic still encourage international collaboration in an unprecedented way."
As an example, she points out that The Lost Ring is an international effort on par with a United Nations campaign, translated into at least eight languages and harnessing problem solvers from seven continents.
"You're creating not just a game, but a whole world, a whole universe," Mr. May said. "It's really an art form."
