This is yet another ‘journal entry’ assingment for english class. I know I have the other blog to post these things on, but I found this entry to be important enough for me to put on my main blog.
I saw that Portal was free on Steam for about two weeks, and I immediately signed up to download it. I played it, and thought it was an amazing game. It has a great storyline, though it is a little short. I also have to admit it creeped me out a bit, with the robot that tries to kill you and all.
Anyway, I looked on Google to see if there was a sequel to continue the storyline. I found that Portal 2 was scheduled for release in Q4 of 2010 (Between October and 2011). When I read more about Portal 2, I found a site called Portalwiki, which was focused on something called the Portal ARG.
An ARG is an ‘Alternate Reality Game’ (Wiki article). Basically, an ARG is a game that takes place in the real world, and where the storyline goes is based on players’ actions. There is no AI in these games, and any non-player-characters are controlled by a developer of the game, or ‘puppetmaster’.
In the case of the Portal ARG, the developers at Valve are the puppetmasters. An important thing to remember is that the ARG was concieved by the developers, not the marketing team at Valve. This means that it isn’t a viral marketing stunt, but an attempt to extend the Portal universe to the real world. And no, GLaDOS isn’t being built in real life (Though it would be cool…)!
The Portal ARG is centered around providing information about Portal 2. The information is provided in ways that are quite hard to understand at first, but with all the players of the ARG, the information gets deciphered.
I will use the sound files that contained SSTV images as an example of what I think is the process that happens for the players to decipher the information. In the following process I will use arbitrary numbers of people as examples. This is my theory on how it all gets figured out:
Please remember that this is only my theory, and it is based on what I think. Do not quote me as if I am certain in what I am saying.
1. Valve releases the radio update with the new sounds.
2. The sounds are discovered in-game by 50 people.
3. 25 of those people post about the update online.
4. When people read that, 10 of them extract the files, and try to find their signifcance.
5. 5 of those people who extracted the files tried many different possible ways of decoding them, 3 of them tried Spectrograms, 2 of them used SSTV.
6. The 2 who successfully decoded them as SSTV post them online, and they circulate to sites like Portalwiki.
You can see above that many people will find the sounds, half of them dig deeper, and then there are the select few who go very deep, and they all try different methods to decode them. With many people trying different decoding methods, it gets done quickly. All of the people participating after step 4 are effectively playing the ARG.
Valve has released many different clues, such as SSTV images and Morse code embedded in sound files, and a fake BSOD at a speech containing code. Those are the smaller clues, there is also a BBS from which came a lot of different clues in the form of ASCII images.
The BBS number was found within the SSTV images and the Morse code. It was in an SSTV images, crossed out on a piece of paper. The BBS login credentials were found in the Morse code as well.
The above information about the ARG is to provide some in-depth background for what kind of info Valve is giving people. There has been much speculation on this information, and if there is a certain theory that proves very popular, it will change the path of the ARG. For instance, if someone suggested, based on the SSTV images, that GLaDOS was to become an elephant, and everyone thought it made sense and agreed, further speculation would probably be based on that theory.
Anyway, the post is getting long, and I hope I have provided a useful summary of what the Portal ARG is.
Information, Engineering, Gaming and Blogging