Injecting Magic: How I built an alternate reality game
For years, I’ve been obsessed with ARGs (Alternate Reality Games). These games are similar to a scavenger hunt but use real-world and virtual locations to tell a story driven by players’ actions. Almost anything could be part of the game and I’m in love with that concept of “injecting magic” into life. Done right, these games can enable people to enter an alternate world where bars are transformed into taverns where you can find your next quest, bookstores hold secret messages, and a stranger on the street could be a spy or an ally! Some famous examples include I Love Bees, Year Zero, and Cicada 3301.
For my 30th birthday, I built my own ARG: a one-night-only performance/game for thirty of my closest friends. I wondered how deep I could go if I created something intimate, without trying to figure out how to scale, make money, or go viral. Here’s how the game worked, the behind-the-scenes on how I built it, and what I learned!
The Game
About two weeks before the night of the party, I sent out mailed invitations. The invitation said that the party would happen at 7pm on July 26th in the East Village but gave no exact address. To set the tone, I included foil tarot cards and sealed the envelopes with a wax stamp.
The day before the party, I sent out a text with a riddle hinting that there was invisible ink on the back of the letter that could be revealed once exposed to fire. The resulting message was the address of a bar that would serve as the initial meetup point.
For the invisible ink, I used a combination of 1:1 baking soda and water applied with a q-tip. I tried lemon juice initially but it didn’t work nearly as well. Definitely use heavyweight paper if you’d like to attempt this yourself!
At 7pm, I met everyone at the bar and split them into 4 groups of 8 people each to keep things more intimate. Trying not to reveal too much, I gave each group an envelope containing part of the story and a riddle to the next location.
I had created 4 “stations” scattered across the east village and rotated the groups through the stations. Each station would take approximately 20 minutes and I had set up a method for them to receive a new envelope at the end of each station. This also prevented groups from running into each other: if everything went according to plan, each group would leave their station at exactly the same time and rotate clockwise to the next station.
Here’s what happened at each station:
The Record Store
I rented out a record store for the night and hid a custom vinyl record in one of the racks. I made it a bit more fun by digging up high school photos of my friends on Facebook and putting them on the record sleeve!
Once my friends arrived at the store, the clerk handed them another envelope with a riddle that pointed to where the record was in the shop. After finding it, they gave the record to the clerk to play on the store’s sound system. The only track was my voice over my favorite song, Innerbloom, reflecting on all the music we’ve shared at concerts, festivals, and jazz bars, and inviting them to listen to one more song together. As the message ended, the record began to skip and then stopped. Right on cue, a musician entered the store with a guitar and played a 10 minute set!
Behind the scenes
I ordered the custom record off of Etsy, it was a bit staticky but not too bad.
To find the musician, I asked a few musical friends and one of them agreed to do it! Huge shoutout to Dilip for helping out and doing a great job playing 4 incredible sets throughout the night :)
Finding a record store to rent for this was tricky, mostly because I had to describe what I was doing without sounding completely unhinged. Since I wanted everything to be walking distance in the East Village, I just walked into every record store in the village explaining the concept until I found a shop owner who was willing to entertain the idea. Huge shoutout to Richard at Manhattan45, please check out the shop if you like electronic records.
The Coffee Shop
I rented out a coffee shop for the night and hired two actresses, one as a barista and one as a normal patron working on her laptop to make the coffee shop seem real. The riddle directing my friends to the shop told them to order a specific drink, the “Black Bloom”. When they came in and ordered that drink, the actresses flicked the lights off and started chanting. Then, the barista pulled out a tarot deck and started doing readings for the group.
I had an additional twist planned for one person in each group. At the end of that reading, the actress paused and said “I’m getting a feeling… that someone close to you… perhaps your mother… really misses you.” And then she handed them a real handwritten letter from their mom!
This was my favorite part of the night. The moment that person realized it was actually a letter from their mom, dad, or sister was absolutely priceless!
Behind the Scenes
Renting the coffee shop was easier than the record store - a lot of coffee shops are available to be rented out on Peerspace (think Airbnb for event spaces). I still had to explain what I wanted to do and convince the owners of the shop to let the actress go behind the counter and pretend to be a barista but it wasn’t too bad.
It was slightly harder to find actresses, especially someone who could do tarot readings reasonably well. I put out an ask to a few communities I’m part of plus asked some actor friends to see if they knew anyone and finally found Ananya who did a terrific job as the barista/tarot reader plus Maddie who did an amazing job as the coffee shop patron/cult member!
Lastly, getting handwritten letters from family members was just a lot of trial and error. I sent approximately 15-20 instagram and linkedin messages to family members of friends before I hit my goal of 5 people who were down to write a letter (one for each group plus a buffer in case a letter didn’t arrive or someone got sick). I was a little scared of the ask since it seemed a bit weird but everyone was super nice about it and the only reason that the other 10-15 messages didn’t work out is likely that those people did not see them (I never got a no from anyone!).
The Time Travel Agency
I reserved half of my favorite bar’s backyard for the evening and hired an actor to facilitate a “time travel agency.” The concept was that each group would be able to make a time capsule for me that I could open at a time of each group’s choosing (such as my wedding day). They would have 15 minutes to use a casette tape recorder, polaroid camera, and markers and paper to create whatever they wanted for me.
After they sealed their time capsule for me, the facilitator informed them that I had prepared time capsules for them! I bought some vintage postcards and wrote a message to each person about how much our friendship meant to me and included a little memento from our past - usually a polaroid or concert ticket. For example, I met one of my best friends on the train to Tomorrowland 8 years ago and he got emotional when he opened his letter to find the Tomorrowland festival wristband I had saved!
Behind the Scenes
This one was the simplest stop to organize. The bar was super happy to help and I just had to hit a minimum to reserve the backyard for the night. I bought most of the supplies for the time capsules on Amazon. I am naturally a mini-hoarder of little mementos so I already had a small trove of things to hand out, plus I have an instax mini link to print out polaroids of photos that were not originally polaroids.
The actor, Brando, was super enthusiastic about helping out and fully committed - he really made the time travel agency come to life!
The Arcade
I saved the best (and hardest) for last. I installed a custom-built arcade machine inside Barcade.
I also got an actress to hand out comedy flyers outside Barcade and when each of the groups arrived she made sure they took a flyer that had a secret code to get past the “Out of Order” screen on the machine.
Each code was specific to each group so once they got past the subway-themed frogger level, the real game began. First I started by telling the group that there was a traitor who’s been trying to sabotage them from the beginning, and asked them to name the traitor. There wasn’t really a traitor but I held off on telling them that till after they pick someone! Then we moved on to some trolley problems concerning members of the group, and finally ended with some cherished memories.
Behind the Scenes
Really, I have to give most of the credit here to my friend Greg who when I told him about this ARG idea years ago went out and bought a whole arcade game kit on Etsy and then assembled it, commissioned art, and set it up (the screen is just a mounted monitor, the game is a javascript game in a full-screen browser and it’s running on a little windows machine stored in the back). He also made the subway-themed frogger game and I just added in the fun secret level stuff afterwards.
Convincing Barcade took some back and forth over email but we eventually landed on them agreeing to do it for a small fee if I agreed to get it setup by 2pm day of and get it out by 2pm the day after. I had some great conversations with people on the street when we brought the arcade game in/out :)
Lastly, huge shoutout to the actress, Andrea, who was willing to hand out flyers for hours outside Barcade.
Finally, after all four stops, the groups received a final clue taking them to the afterparty where they finally saw me again! Certainly one of my favorite nights in recent memory :)
What I learned building this
You can just do things and you shouldn’t be afraid of being weird
One of the biggest mental barriers in building this was the imagined conversations I had in my head about how I could possibly explain this to venue owners, actors, and friend’s parents (when I asked for the handwritten letters). It seemed extremely daunting walking into record stores, coffee shops, bars, and arcades and trying to get them to understand what I was trying to build. I thought everyone would understandably believe I was completely crazy and laugh me out the door.
That was not at all the case. Every single person I talked to actually thought the idea was really cool and the people who were not interested in participating had real practical concerns rather than thinking I was a weirdo they didn’t want to be associated with.
If you have a crazy idea and one of the biggest barriers that is holding you back is that you’re a little scared of being seen as weird, I suggest you just do it - most likely, everyone will think it’s cool and the ones who don’t don’t matter anyways!
Directing is really hard
The most unexpected hard thing I encountered when building this was directing the actors. To be clear, the actors were all really great but I had never actually worked with actors before and so just kind of thought they would immediately understand what was in my head with minimal further instruction. I recruited most of them with a 5 minute phone call of what I was imagining for their respective stop and when they agreed to do it, I assumed that we were all set. And then about a week before, every single one of them was like “…. so what am I actually doing and saying?”
It took quite a bit of back and forth to get enough details but thankfully my PM skills came in handy and I ended up producing a lengthy google doc outlining all the details for each stop (here’s the one for the “time travel agency”).
And then the day of, as we were setting up each stop, I needed to walk each actor through what I expected again. This seems obvious in retrospect but everything seemed so crystal clear in my head that I totally missed that no one else could see my vision unless I described it to them in very elaborate detail.
Creating delight and going the extra mile is really, really fun
One of my favorite quotes is from Teller (as in Penn & Teller), “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time than anyone else might reasonably expect.” This perspective on magic really resonates with me, that it’s almost an act of love more than anything else.
A lot of my friends asked me what I was doing the whole time while everyone was going through all the different stations. I was at a bar nearby monitoring the situation: watching people on Find My to make sure they were going in the right direction, texting the actors for updates, and sweating bullets that at any moment everything would fall apart. While this may not sound like the best way to spend a birthday, it was actually the most fun I’ve had in ages. I imagine what I felt when building this was what Disney’s imagineers feel like when they’re designing a new ride or experience at Disneyland. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face when imagining the look on my friends’ faces when they got an expected letter from their mom, or a live musician suddenly starts playing for them, or realized there’s a secret level in a “real” arcade game.
There was a moment one group encountered when a limo pulled up to them as they were walking between stops and the driver asked them if he could take them to their next stop. Thankfully, they eventually realized that the limo was not in fact part of the experience before getting in, but for a brief moment they really believed that it could be, because anything could be a part of it. When I was a kid, every alley contained a dark mystery, a mythical beast was behind every boulder, and every door was a portal to a new adventure. I wanted to bring back that sense of wonder, at least for an evening, and I’m really proud of the fact that I succeeded.
What’s Next?
This project made me realize how much I love designing these kinds of experiences. The response from my friends was overwhelming, and now I’m starting to figure out how to bring something like this to the public in a bigger, weirder way!
If you’ve got any ideas (or especially if you own/work at a venue in nyc that would like to be a part of it), drop me a line :)
Sounds extremely fun!
Best night ever.