Through the Looking Glass: The Story Behind
The Looking Glass Laboratories' Alternate Reality Game
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The Mind of a Critic
The Media Analysis was the most entertaining aspect of this, at least for us. Originally we planned to do only music, but we needed something to interject during the pauses (after all, a computer doesn't just stop thinking, does it?)

The original song list, before the game started, was:

  1. Mr. Roboto by Styx
  2. Least Complicated by Indigo Girls
  3. Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot (writing this up was the reason this ARG even exists)
  4. It's the End Of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M.
  5. American Pie by Don McLean
  6. We had no sixth song at the time
We don't remember who it was (we'd have to look back at the mails), but whoever suggested Nina Simone was a genius. That song went along with everything we were planning, and we had to use it.

Besides some changes to the above list, "Green Eggs and Ham" was the only entry that we knew we had to do from the start; everything else was based on user submissions. And we were going to do "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card, but because it factored in to the puzzles we didn't want to make it that easy.

Expected Perfection

When you have a character in the story that is a sentient artificial intelligence system, there are two inherent problems:

  1. He doesn't sleep and is always online. People are therefore expecting the AI to respond immediately, even if it's three in the morning on Palm Sunday. For that reason we had to throttle the questions and recommend the concept of moderation, so that we can get some sleep and not be answering questions all day and night.
  2. He doesn't make mistakes. "Green Eggs and Ham" was an error on our part – we miscounted. But then we saw that the posts on the forums seeing that as an inherent design flaw or a problem in Joshua itself; we decided to use that as part of the storyline. We made several other errors (spelling, using the wrong words, etc...), and that was just nature of the human condition; no amount of proofreading can find all of those mistakes, especially at the rate we were doing posts. And thank God for Firefox's spell check or it would have been a disaster.
And do you have any idea how hard it is to NOT use contractions? Maybe we're wrong, but I think we managed to successfully not use a single contraction in any communication supposedly written by Joshua, which was a major accomplishment.

The Infocom references


Happitec letter from Bureaucracy


Most. Unappreciated. Photoshop. Evar.
Here are ALL the Infocom references (well, the ones we remember anyway):

  • Joshua refers to his programmers as his "implementers", which is what the original creators of the Infocom series of games called themselves (although they spelled it as "implementors").
  • "Frotz" is the name of the spell to generate light, used in Enchanter, Sorcerer, Spellbreaker and several others.
  • "Boldly going where angels fear to tread" is the slogan on the mission patch for Stationfall (we still have ours).
  • "Omne ignotum pro magnifico" is the slogan for G.U.E. Tech, the university modeled after M.I.T. in The Lurking Horror.
  • Happitec is the name of the company that sends you a letter in Bureaucracy.
  • "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." Is one of the most famous lines in the Zork series.
  • The gossip rag "The National Inquisitor", the Inquisitor being a name from the Zork series.
  • The "magic" word, "XYZZY", is from the game Adventure, which is not directly Infocom but rather the precursor to the genre. But if you type it in to an Infocom game, you sometimes get the response of "A hollow voice says, ‘fool!'". If you ask JoshuaBot what the magic word is, JoshuaBot responds with something along the lines of "you like to be called the fool?"
Puzzle #1: Introducing the White Rabbit




The original "White Rabbit" intros
This was not the way the puzzle was originally planned. Originally we were going to have one image (shown to right), and the intention was to have the email address watermarked on one side only so that if you cut it in half, then stacked the two pieces and gave the topmost a negative filter, the email address would be visible.

We had the image ready, posted the blog entries and everything, then happily sent the images up to MySpace. MySpace then proceeded to tear the image to crap by re-generating the JPEG at a lower quality setting, making our watermark completely illegible.

So, if you were on for the 30 seconds that that image was up on MySpace, you would have gotten to see an image of two rabbits that meant absolutely nothing. This is also why Dwayne's MySpace blog has two separate entries minutes apart: there was only supposed to be one, but instead we have one "I'm gonna post the images!", followed minutes later by "here they are!".

Then we tried the single image, three channel approach, but MySpace still caused artifacts which blended in to the blue channel we wanted to use (image #2 to the right).

The only way we can do it is through three separate images. So, in order to get it working right, we reluctantly had to use three images and use noise to obscure them, then create a Flickr account. Made the images all the less cool.

Puzzle #2: Scrabble tiles

There were mixed opinions on how to handle this. Originally we were ONLY going to place the single Scrabble tiles embedded in the Flash, assuming that someone would undoubtedly disassemble them (when we participated as players in an ARG, we always did just that ourselves). But, after further review of the topic in various unFiction posts, we realized that we cannot expect players to do that. So we chose to simply add the link as a useless "param" tag to the Flash markup.

Then there was the issue of the stegged image. Apparently there has to be a certain ratio between the original image and the stegged image; the bigger the image you want to embed, the master image has to be tenfold in size. The image we wanted to embed was 45K, so we were forced to get a huge 350K JPEG to encase it.

Furthermore, originally the passphrase for the stegged image was to be provided by JoshuaBot, and the numbers were going to be the authorization code for the blog. But because of delays with JoshuaBot, and ultimately the extra space we had on the Rubik puzzle, we decided to move things around.

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