Last night marked the end of my inaugural ARG, which I launched to a wave of muted perplexity during my talk at this year’s Develop. As you can see, the turn-out rather took me by surprise. In fact, it took me so much by surprise that I ended up at the back of the queue, couldn’t get in, and was an hour late for my own event.

Now, that would have been a disaster – well, actually, was a disaster – if that queue of people had all been there because of me. Obviously, they weren’t. They were there for one of London’s brilliant little secrets: the candle-lit tour of the extraordinary Sir John Soane’s Museum. The cunning plan for the end of my ARG was to send anyone who’d bothered to play to somewhere brilliant, so they were guaranteed a good time regardless of what else I managed to cook up, which in the end didn’t turn out to be anything much. This is what comes of designing live-event based games from scratch in 15 minutes at the middle of the night before a presentation. I also wasn’t really expecting anyone to play, or indeed anyone to actually show up, so the real surprise was that one of the people in that queue was a bonafide player, who won a bonafide bottle of champagne for his efforts and we had a jolly nice chat while we waited for an hour to actually get in. I did try to expedite our way up the queue by explaining to the commissionaire what was happening, but without success (‘I ran a competition to try encourage people to come to your museum.’ I said, winningly. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. It just makes it harder for all the real people.’ he said, disgustedly. Ouch.). That said, I’ve got no way of knowing if anyone else was there, having turned up two hours early and actually made it to the meeting point in time, and left in bitter disappointment when I was a no-show. If anyone did – my most sincere apologies. Let me know, and I’ll concoct some sort of Brilliant Prize of Intense Contrition.

 The slides for the talk are still here (giant pdf, sorry), if you fancy a bash at the unbelievably crude and heavy handed clue-trail. I’ll post a proper transcript shortly, to save you digging it all out of the slides. Thanks to everyone who did play, and who’s given  me feedback. It’s been brilliant experience, and I’ll be writing it up for the IGDA ARG SIG (proposed title: 15 Minutes Of Lame – What I learned from making every classic ARG mistake all at once).