myf's website

Perplex City is no longer running - it was announced at the start of June 07 that Season 2 was suspended indefinitely. Once more news comes out, I might revise the rest of this page. At the moment, I'm just going to leave it as it is.

October 07 addition - On a happy note, Shuffled was finally solved. Alas, not by me, but one of the mighty remaining Silver cards was eventually toppled.

Sadly, the distributed computing effort to crack the 13th Labour card stalled:
I guess it looks like that one will remain unsolved, along with Riemann. So the most likely to still be solved is the finding Satoshi one, and I think most of the oomph has gone out of that effort too.

Mind Candy did recently make an announcement that the rest of the Season 2 waves will be released some time in 2008. I don't think I'm going to hold my breath for that though. I think they should have released them both by now, and been done with it. Most people have moved on to other things now.

My current obsession. It's what is known as an ARG, or Alternate Reality Game - a kind of treasure hunt, I suppose. I got interested because I thought it sounded somewhat similar to The Stone. It is, in a way, but it's also much more than that. I've got more and more into it as time has gone on.


There are puzzles, on cards, which you buy. There are various levels of difficulty - some can be solved just by looking at the card, doing some simple maths, or looking things up on the internet. Others need collaboration between players - if you're not terribly hot on cracking codes and ciphers, for example, there are forums for discussing the puzzles. You can solve the puzzlecards, and enter the answers on the website. You get points for getting them right, and you are ranked on the leaderboard.


But there are all sorts of other puzzles too - on websites, in magazines, all over the place. In February 2006, there were events in London and New York, where players could go and take part in a variety of challenges. I was lucky enough to get into a team for the London event, and had a mad day running around all over the place! In August, Mind Candy (the company behind Perplex City) held an event in San Fransisco which had online participants as well as those "on the ground".


If you're interested in it, the best place to start is the website, Perplex City, which has a walk-through, a "story so far" section, podcasts, and all sorts of information about the hunt for the Receda Cube (which is the whole point of the game). There are also forums on the site, although the ones at Unfiction seem to be more popular (at least, they seem to cover a wider range of stuff relating to the game). Read up on what's happened so far, and dive in.


The entire thing generally seems to have a great sense of community. And a whole host of (unofficial) sites have sprung up all over the place:

• To read about the pre-game, Project Syzygy, and find out how the whole thing got started, there's a timeline here;
• For a brief overview of the game, you can read Perplex City in 60 seconds (I don't know how up-to-date it is, but it's a good starting point);
• There is a wiki, filled with details of practically everything, everyone, and everywhere in Perplex City;
• You can find forums and IRC chat at and at Jan 08 - Perplexorum closed it's doors to new posts in November 07, though it can still be read. You can find the announcement here;
• Based on Google Maps, there's the Perplex City map;
• There's a , listing the details of every card;
• For card trading, there's the site - I have some Season 2 cards for trade listed on my profile Jan 08 - Perplex City Trades is another fan site that seems to have shut down;
• To help with trading, and keeping track of the cards you've already got, you can download the ;
• You can find various quotes (mostly from players), and vote on them, at the Perplex City quote database;
• You can download Post-It Note type pictures with some Perplex City quotes from here;
• And there's the (somewhat) infamous Jan 08 - as mentioned above, the client sadly ground to a halt without cracking the code;
• There are two sites trying to solve another puzzle card, billion2one & Have You Seen Him?;
• If you're in the US and want to spread the world, you might want to join the Perplex City street team;
• To see what some of the players have been getting up to, you can visit the #syzygy Flickr group

 
When you're not busy trying to solve puzzle cards, you may find yourself:

• running round London counting things, looking for stuff, racing through the National Gallery, squeezing into phone boxes, stacking biscuits, gathering strangers to help sing a song in Leicester Square, forming a conga line in Trafalgar Square, and many other wondrous and varied things (all of these things happened at the London PCAG event in February 2006);
• creating pieces of artwork (in my case, of dubious merit). For example, here is my offering for a conceptual art assessment on the theme of "The Mind In Torment", which I called "With Apologies To MC Escher":

• coming up with ideas for an entry in the Perplex City Video Competition. You can watch my effort by pressing the play button on the magic box below, and you can have a look at all the entries by visiting the YouTube Perplexcity group.
  
  
  
  
  
• helping to try and crack codes - visit to find out how to help with that particular problem;
• loitering in a chat room for hours on end, whilst people on Earth direct people in Perplex City round abandoned mines (nearly getting them killed in the process);
• emailing everyone you can think of and posting in various forums to ask them to visit billion2one or Have You Seen Him? to find a man in a photo;
• solving clues on a website to activate a new link to Perplex City - this was part of the San Fransisco Connection event;
• and whatever other cunning things people think up for Cube Hunters to do!

I've made a couple of userbars to spread word of the game. They're not very good, but I guess if people want to use them, they can:






I also made a couple of avatars for myself. They need a bit of work though: