Robarts Library plays with conspiracy
Alternate-reality game uses landmark building to promote open access to information
If you couldn’t tell by the giant turkey, now you know. There are hidden (or not-so hidden) secrets in the Robarts Library.
The towering concrete structure some have associated with the bird is attracting online players from around the world as they try to crack a conspiracy theory. It is the setting of an interactive online and in-person “alternate-reality game” created for the University of Toronto’s Open Access Week, which promoted access to information.
The game hinges on three fictional secret societies within the library: one is trying to share information at the library; one wants to promote social change with that information and the third wants it secret to protect people.
Players follow (fake) employee Emmet Bacorn as he investigates redactions that were made to publications he wrote and other “weird” things happening at the institution.
Several U.S. universities have created alternate-reality games, but this was the University of Toronto’s first time dabbling with the style of game, which has been used as a way for patrons to interact with museums, schools and public libraries.
The game acted as an alternative to “lunches, brown bags and talks, which didn’t get a lot of interest from anybody,” during Open Access Week, said Bobby Glushko, head of scholarly communications and copyright at the library.
He enlisted Mark Foo and David Oxley, who had created a comic book together featuring Toronto’s brutalist buildings — 1970s-era architecture in which raw concrete figures heavily.
“It’s not as oppressive as I once thought it was, just from looking at it from the outside,” said Oxley, who was in charge of the game’s visual aspects, including props hidden inside the library for participants to find and decode puzzles that would lead them to a next level. “It really lent itself to a game that created a certain atmosphere.”
Oxley also designed the 3D-print- able file that participants who make it to the end receive.
Foo said the game’s website received 2,677 unique visitors last week, prompting the university to extend it another week.
“I think people think of libraries as boring. . . . The whole thing with this was that it’s something new and different,” he said.
The game has players decode images and explore the library’s website — and even the library itself, for those who are in town.
Eli Goodfriend wasn’t. The postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, near Berkeley, Calif., spotted the game in a tech magazine article online.
“I found that they did this really amazing job of making the remote experience really, really, really fun,” said Goodfriend, a fan of puzzle games and ARGs. “At the end, when it was revealed, I was like, that was beautiful and perfect.”
He said he wasn’t surprised that a library had created an ARG. “Libraries are such a great focal point for games like this because there’s so much information and things you can play with,” he said.
But for fellow American player Drew DePriest, from Chicago, “it was surprisingly challenging coming from a library.”
DePriest, an adjunct marketing professor at DePaul University, discovered it through a link on Twitter.
“I dug into it and a couple hours later, found the end of it,” he said. “It was interesting and just hard enough to keep coming back, but not (so) super hard that no one would bother.”
Glushko said the goal of hosting the game was for people to experience the library in a new way — “a way that they might not have expected they could have experienced a library: as living, breathing, rather than just a place to study.”
“Libraries are such a great focal point for games like this because there’s so much information and things you can play with.” ELI GOODFRIEND POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW