Through the Looking Glass: The Story Behind
The Looking Glass Laboratories' Alternate Reality Game
- Valentine to Ender ("Ender's Game" pg. 313)
Why write this up?
'cause we don't have time for an online chat and we hate IRC.
If there is any question left unanswered, let us know and if need be we'll amend this document.
"But what does it DO?"
Many have asked why create a site like this. No, we're not part of Project However-You-Spell-It. No, we are not part of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. No, we are not part of Pixar's WALL-E. And, no, we're not part of WarGames 2.
When Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed Mt. Everest, his response was "because it's there." Great answer at the time, but you got to admit: having done that made him pretty successful from then on, no?
The official reasons as to why this ARG was created are:
- Because we CAN. Doing this was a challenge we could not resist.
- There are several friends and business associates that didn't understand the concept of an "alternate reality game." Some of these friends are prospective writers who did not understand the concept and how it can be used to portray a storyline. We hope we have expressed some of those possibilities.
- To see what it really is like on the other side of the curtain. You can never understand the amount of work and dedication a "puppetmaster" has to put in to a project until you become one; now having been one, we have more respect for PMs than you can possibly imagine.
- We wanted to see if we can create a BIG thread. We beat The Gardner Project, at least, but at the time of the writing of this we're still a good thirty or forty pages off from Project Obfuscated, or whatever it's called.
- Because it looks good on our resume.
First problem: where to locate it? We wanted to piggyback on Boca Raton's fame as IBM manufacturing headquarters a few decades ago (the IBM plant there has long since closed). We also feared that someone would take these addresses to be a "live event" and show up there, so we picked addresses that were CLEARLY "out of game".
So LGL's corporate address of "777 Glades Road" is actually the main address to Florida Atlantic University. The data center's address, "201 W. Palmetto Park Road", is actually Boca Raton City Hall.
The Cast of Characters
Sweet, sweet Judith...
We got amazingly lucky on their origins; we were expecting to field questions from Princeton, Stanford, Yale, etc... but thank God the only university we got direct questions about was the University of Miami; one of you Miami locals has a parent that's a professor there. Since that was our alma mater, we were able to defend ourselves and really appear to have gone there (by making references to Mark Light Stadium and the covered parking lot next to it, something only a local would know), but we were the class of 1991 and don't know any recent professors anyway. If anyone asked us anything about M.I.T., we would have been majorly screwed.
Dr. Jaquelin Linardi: We were wondering if, after Jaquelin's recommendation of "Galileo" by the Indigo Girls as a song, players were going to start questioning her sexual preference. Since there was no comment on that, we went ahead and established that she was married and had a son through internal mail communications with the players.
We were asked numerous questions about psychology, especially from those of you that also have that as your chosen major or profession. We are computer science and mathematics majors, so we don't even remember having taken ANY psychology course ever, much less being literate about it. We hope we were able to defend ourselves adequately ("go, go gadget Wikipedia!").
Our resident comic relief
Catherine Belmont: It was particularly fun to play the "queen bitch" Catherine Belmont. When we saw the picture on Getty, not only did we know we had to use it, but we knew HOW to use it.
Dr. Benjamin Falken: We never planned on using Benjamin much, but we needed an authority figure inside the development core so that (a) Catherine did not need to be technologically savvy, and (b) Russell did not have any management duties. He turned in to a character of importance at the endgame, mostly in response to player commentary.
Rebecca Williams: Rebecca was the closest thing we could get to stepping out from behind the curtain. She was there for the sole purpose of making it clear what not to do and to keep the Beta Testers in line.
The post she made about what not to expect Joshua to answer was based on fact: all of those questions, in one way or another, were in fact posted to Joshua through the Q&A system, the only difference being that the horse track asked by Beta Testers was Arlington Park and not Gulfstream Park in Broward County.
Russell Travers and Gordon Miller: Gordon specifically was the closest representation to ourselves in the entire cast of characters. He's a straight up programmer with a moderate sense of humor but doesn't go completely overboard with cultural references (that was Ivan's job). He and Russell just follow orders like the polite little soldiers that they are. They have no knowledge of the business dealings of the company, and are there only to be software level support for Joshua.
Joshua: Joshua was never intended to be the next SkyNet, or the next HAL 9000. He was never intended to go "rampant." Everybody else expected (or, in Catherine's case, wanted) him to, but no such luck. Admit it: as soon as you hear about a "sentient artificial intelligence" that learns, your first throught was "not again... he's going to blow up the world, isn't he?"
We wanted to do the complete opposite: create an innocent child trapped in a computer, and society expects him to be a threat. And Catherine wants him to be capable of that 'cause the Department of Defense, in their infinite wisdom (HA!), wants SkyNet. Right?
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