The secret alternate reality game in Wonderland exhibition
The news that we won two GLAMis at the 2019 MuseWeb conference in Boston, US for the Wonderland exhibition was the nudge I needed to finish this post.
As part of ACMI’s successful Wonderland exhibition (4 April — 7 October 2018), now touring globally and currently at Art Science Museum in Singapore, we included a secret Alternate Reality Game (ARG). It was known internally as “the riddle” hidden in the Lost Map of Wonderland. The idea came from Seb Chan as one way to extend the visit for our audiences beyond the four walls of the exhibition and give the very curious something more.
History of ARG
ARGs have a long history with secrets hidden deep within literature dating back centuries, but came to mainstream prominence with Kit Williams book Masquerade in the 1970s. Masquerade was an illustrated children’s book with secret codes hidden in the illustrations leading to an actual buried treasure. There’s a whole other story about the scandal behind the ‘solving’ of Masquerade, but then ARGs didn’t appear in popular culture at any scale again until the early 2000s and the marketing campaign for Spielberg’s film AI. In that campaign designed by Microsoft, hidden secrets inside the trailers, posters, advertising and even phone calls, which took the curious into a maze of specially made websites. Later on, marketers would take advantage of the consumer’s new ability to pause/rewind and control time in the playback of advertising and narrative media hiding secrets inside — and many of the same team that made the game for AI worked again on iLoveBees which was part of the launch campaign for XBox game Halo 2. Sometimes these were solitary ‘Easter eggs’, and other times they were part of a much larger ‘game’ which burst out into the ‘real world’. Artists and makers also explored this space and with the arrival of GPS enabled smartphones and the mobile web, they blossomed in niche communities and are well established as part of locative game and transmedia storytelling practices.
In the very early weeks of the development of the exhibition in 2016, several of the team watched the documentary The Institute which follows the strange San Francisco-based ARG revolving around a real/fictional organisation called the Jejune Institute. With the influences of Lewis Carroll looming large over ARGs in general, it felt like a perfect opportunity to hide an ARG inside the exhibition and see what would happen.
The Lost Map of Wonderland
To understand how it worked you need a bit of context about the map.
“The Lost Map of Wonderland is the visitor’s companion device throughout the exhibition and has been designed to be integral to the exhibition experience — in-gallery and at home after your visit …
The map itself had to achieve a lot for the exhibition including additional information for deep divers, basic wayfinding, exhibition branding, a post-experience call to action, character representation, personalised projection triggering, visitor tracking and even a hidden riddle for the most curious to solve! Its primary purpose is to reveal ‘hidden’ animations throughout the exhibition. There’s also symbols to look out for to find character-specific content. And it is also the canvas for your creation in the activity space and the access key to your post-visit experience.”
(More in our Museums and the Web 2019 paper).
Designing The Riddle
We wanted visitors to take the map home so they would have ways to continue their experience of the exhibition. The riddle was one way. We were keen to get visitors back to the museum as part of the riddle so we could introduce them to more that we offer and also to be generous with this very engaged group.
Local interactive design firm Sandpit who conceived the Lost Map with us also designed the first stage of the riddle which is embedded in the map — and other riddles were hidden in the physical design of the exhibition.
We kept the ARG so secret that at the beginning not even our visitor services staff knew about it. This was not intended to be an experience for everyone, but was specifically designed to find out whether there were ‘superfans’ who would be looking for secrets — without being told that they existed in the first place.
If riddlers were clever enough to solve this they got to the next stage which took place on the Wonderland website (which also contained the post-visit website with all the additional exhibition-related content).
Once they passed the landing page (using special methods only revealed in the ARG) they were greeted by the character they were in the exhibition (there were four character maps) and asked to write and send a physical letter to ACMI to unlock the next stage of the riddle.
At opening of the exhibition we thought we had a bit of time to plan the next stage of the riddle. In the rush of exhibition opening the ARG had been put to one side. We thought it would take at least a week to get the first letter back from a visitor. How wrong we were. After just a few days we had our first letters in our letter box. By the end of the exhibition we had received 174 letters from fellow riddlers!
The first 90 riddlers were mailed special return letters and were invited back for a free ‘re-entry down the rabbit hole’ into the Wonderland exhibition. With their letter they got a (real) key to ‘unlock’ the next stage of the riddle.
Once they found what the key opened in the exhibition they solved a further riddle that directed them to the cafe. They were served their final clue with a special Wonderland cookie. And it was at the shop that they claimed their final prize.
We planned to send just 20 keys out but because of the unexpected response we kept sending them for as long as we could.
Back to the museum
With all these riddlers coming back to the museum we had to make sure our visitor services staff knew the drill. Prior to this there was a simple FAQ sheet with details about what to say if visitors in the museum or on the phone or email asked about the riddle or had trouble solving any stage of it. We needed to make sure that no one got any hints! It was very difficult to manage this and the visitor services team did a tremendous job even though it completely goes against their natural instinct to give visitors the answers!
46 visitors came back to the museum with their key to continue their journey. We had couples, family groups and individuals — all of them superfine. Our internal #visitor-feedback Slack channel kept us all across who had returned and at what stage they were in the building. It was a lot of fun identifying riddlers and observing their excitement and frustration.
Response from our riddlers
Response from visitors was much greater than we could have imagined. We heard from people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram on email and on the phones. Many asking how to solve the riddle, some saying they had not received the next clue in the post and others not able to get onto the website stage and thinking the website might be broken!
What we learnt and would we do it again?
Always plan for success
Because of the high engagement, the riddle became more time consuming than we thought it would be and although we were eager to keep the adventure for our riddlers going as long as possible, it was something that we couldn’t keep up with our visitors to continue to design and deliver new stages. We underestimated the interest and after the team working on the exhibition moved on to other projects it became difficult to maintain an energy around the ARG. In the future we would have a clearer idea of scope and who is responsible for which parts more clearly — and design it with the expectation of a sizeable take up from the start.
Don’t underestimate your audience
This experiment showed us the appetite of museum visitors for finding secrets and solving puzzles inside an exhibition world. This deep engagement in our content was far greater than we could have imagined. The enthusiasm by a small number of Wonderland fans was incredible and it’s definitely something we will continue to explore and experiment within the new permanent exhibition and future temporary exhibitions. It took visitors across the whole building and they loved it.
Big thanks to Dan Koerner and Sandpit, and curator Jess Bram, and all the visitor services staff who made this come alive.