Lost ARG 2008 - Part 11

It starts with this video. . .



This video was really, I guess, a means of encouraging the gamers along but was really a vehicle for introducing the subversive elements. Mention of the "Black Swan" by Hans Van Eeghen in the video is particularly ironic given that the video itself appears to have been hacked. . . You may have noticed some of the little glitches and slips. Some of those images freeze-framed reveal some interesting things. Such as:


The Black Swan here, kind of like the signature of the hacker. I guess this is 'RuckusGuy', or maybe it's that Dan Bronson guy, or maybe it's neither of them. There's that many intangible mysteries being generated that I don't really have the energy to deal with it. Anyway, after this there are a couple of other glitches with information contained with. Such as:


In this image there is a number 40 on display, but subsequent images reveal the full list of images hidden in the film are:

Black Swan

40

60

The letter B

The letter P

The letter M

So that's that for now. 40-60 BPM. Beats per minute. This comes into play for Test 3.

Test 3


Dexterity and Attentiveness Evaluation

I'll get onto the clues and how they link into the cheat in a little while. The truth of the matter is I had to go and look them up anyway, so what happened for me was I just played the game as I saw it and took it as it came.

The game itself was basically me controlling a small Dharma symbol that I could move araound within a larger space using my mouse. Also within that space with my symbol where four spheres, bouncing around. The aim was simple: Don't touch the sides and don't let the spheres touch my symbol until the timer counted up to 1oo. Failure to do so ended something like this:

It was a reasonably amusing game, but not one that's going to have Nintendo losing sleep at nights. Anyway, as a result of lacklustre efforts at the game (the 9 is not my score, by the way - I did do better than THAT!) I then went and checked my progress and discovered I had been put into a group called Enceladus.

A little researching around the web has informed me that I could have found myself in one of the following groups: Antaeus, Enceladus, Tityos and Otus. These are all linked in to Greek Mythology for reasons that I, frankly, cannot be bothered relaying here. I'm unconvinced such knowledge will ever amount to anything.

So, what was the deal with the 40-60 BPM. Well, basically, it stems back from one of the sentences in the information for the game.

"To assess adroitness within an increasingly unpredictable environment."

Apparently the 'adroitness' is formed from the French phrase 'a droit' meaning 'to the right'. And this meant pressing right-click on the mouse opened up options that basically allowed you to pause the game, speed up the timer, stuff like that, to ensure you got the timer fully to 100.

I've not done it, by the way. Couldn't be bothered. I did the test. I got assigned a group. That's good enough. Bring on the next one, Mr. Eeghen!




No comments: