New Suicide Girls, and Mur Endorses Personal Effects: Dark Art

My new Suicide Girls column is live, it’s about getting into Alternate Reality Games.

I finally heard about ARGs in 2007 and became fascinated by the idea. See, an alternate reality game is a game that claims it is not a game, but has a central narrative, often on a website or within a novel, with a paths, or ‘rabbit holes’ that lead elsewhere: other websites, phone numbers to call, even places to visit for messages. Each path will offer more information, a puzzle, or a clue. ARGs can have hundreds of pieces of extra content to discover, and it’s as immersive as you can make it. The first successful ARGs were devised as marketing material for existing licenses or products (The Beast was connected to the film AI: Artificial Intelligence), but they’ve expanded since then.

And speaking of ARGs, this past weekend I picked up JC Hutchins’ first print release, Personal Effects: Dark Art. I got a chance to read an advanced copy of it, and loved it. So I was thrilled when Hutch asked me to do one of his ground-breaking “vlurbs” – a video endorsement.

You can order the book, or if you’re curious about Hutchins’ work, check out his free podcasts (including one novella set in the PE:DA universe, called Sword of Blood) at his site.