Alternate Reality Games, and the rabbit hole that never ends.

As you might have noticed, after my discovery of Age Of Rust, I've been a tad intermittent in my posts.

But it's been due to so much more than just Age Of Rust. I've discovered the entire Alternate Reality Game genre, and it's pretty impressive.

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. -- Wikipedia

Oh, I'd heard about ARG's in the past.

I'd heard the stories of hidden messages in games leading people to buried chests in the real world, of images appearing on forums with "solve me" notes...

But I'd never gone searching for them before.

Most are very elaborate. hiding information in images with steganography, encrypting information using cryptography, creating riddles and enigmas to solve, and sometimes even going into the real world to find objects or clues hidden there.
(the link above, about the treasure chests, will be solved in about 100 years, on the 1st of August, under the Eiffel tower, when one of the 5 keys discovered by players will open the box that will be brought there on that date. it is insane how such a puzzle can stretch over time !).

The image above is to Neon District, a cryptocard based RPG. It's got a detail more than the website does.

( I'll leave it to you to discover how to activate the terminal you see in the image. But better hurry. as you can se written in the terminal, the puzzle is nearly solved, and there's 15 ETH in the address at the other end of it ;) )

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I'd already explored cryptography and such once, a few years ago, with Ingress' passcodes, which are encrypted in several different ways in near-daily lore-based blogposts.

Example from yesterdays post. See something strange ? ;)

The Ingress lore is way more advanced than I'll ever be able to figure out, and it's a big challenge to solve even one of these encrypted passcodes, but it was fun to attempt it.

I used several tools trying my hand at it, from Dcode, a french website containing a lot of different cryptography tools, to decodeingress, a website specifically targeted to decoding these passcodes.

DecodeIngress' Basic functionality, with easy conversions between different formats

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I hope you have fun trying to solve Neon District's puzzle, at least partially (the little team I've become a part of is stuck at what is believed to be one of the final levels). If you want a hand to get started down this road, why not join their Discord channel.