"ohne internet ist das leben übrigens scheiße, das weiß ich jetzt." schreibt mir Freund M., als nach einigen Tagen der unfreiwilligen Netz-Askese sein Hunger nach Wikis und Blog-Feeds endlich wieder gestillt ist.
Das Netz, allgegenwärtiges Fenster zur Welt, ist bereits so Teil von unseres Alltags und unserer Wahrnehmung geworden, dass wir es in fast alle Lebensbereiche mit einbeziehen. So natürlich auch in die große Welt der Spielkultur.
Real life games
Wir reden hier aber ausnahmsweise bewusst nicht von digitalen Games, sondern von Spielen in der echten Welt. Schnitzeljagden zum Beispiel, wo man sich von Rätsel zu Rätsel zu Schatz vortastet.
Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts betreibt man Schnitzeljagden allerdings nicht mehr mit Papierschnipsel und angemalten Steinen, sondern eben mit Hilfe der neuen Medien: Internet, GPS-Empfänger, Handy-Netz dienen zum Lösen der diversen Aufgaben. "Alternate Reality Games" heißt das dann. Dabei wird die echte Welt - das real life - mit fiktiven Geschichten und abstrusen Aufträgen vermengt.
Perplex City
Der Game-Designer Adrian Hon hat vor zwei Jahren Perplex City, eines der erfolgreichsten Alternate Reality Games, ins Leben gerufen. Anlässlich seines kürzlich stattgefundenen Vortrags im Wiener SUBOTRON Shop habe ich mich mit ihm näher über das Wesen und die Faszination von Alternate Reality Games unterhalten.
What are Alternate Reality Games?
Adrian Hon: In general, the best way to look at them are games that take place over multiple media. So you might have a game that sends you e-mails and you get phone calls and you have live events of actors. You look up webpages and you solve puzzles.
Within an Alternate Reality Game, is it all linked together or is it just puzzles that stand for themselves?
Adrian Hon: In good Alternate Reality Games, it's all linked together. It's much more interesting, it's much more entertaining if it feels like it fits together. Because, if you think about the real world: You never actually see puzzles. But then again, you do have mysteries, like crime mysteries, where you try to find out, for instance, where this business card comes from. You got traditional puzzles like crosswords and codes and riddles but you also got challenges where you have to be a detective and figure things out.
What were some of the more complex puzzles within 'Perplex City'?
Adrian Hon: A lot of the puzzles in 'Perplex City' were very easy and you could solve them on your own very quickly. But we created some extremely difficult puzzles where we wanted the community to work together on. One was a puzzle called 'The 13th Labour'. We put this extremely complicated encryption on this puzzle. And after a few months, people worked out what the encryption was: It was RC5 - it's a sort of code that you would use to encrypt your credit card numbers as it go over the internet - extremely secure. And one of the players worked out that it would take 4.000 years for one person to go and solve this code if he/she used a very fast computer. But rather than taking 4.000 years for one computer you can go and network 4.000 computers together and it would only take one year. So, that's what they did.
Another very interesting puzzle we had, was a bit more creative: There was one part in the game, in the story, where the lead character had to go and fetch a very rare book from a library. And she wasn't allowed in because she wasn't a published author or a researcher. One group of the players thought: Well, if all it takes for her to get into the library is to be a published author, surely the easiest thing to do would be to just go and write a book for her. So, over the next three weeks about 30 people got together on the internet and wrote a 300 page book, published it and by that they solved the puzzle.
Wien | 5.12.2007 | 21:10 
