The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has put out a challenge. Try to find ten 8-foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States and then report their locations. This challenge has started a bit of a buzz in the ARG community and has led a number of influential figures to call for the gathering of the kinds of collective problem solving groups that appeared during The Beast and ilovebees. Groups, like The Cloudmakers, who solved the ARG The Beast, were able to sift through clues located throughout the web, solve puzzles presented in those clues and ultimately finish the game. The ARG community has long believed that they could deal with real world problems and approach them in ways that were quicker and more innovative than traditional approaches. If this latest call to action is taken up they might finally have a chance to prove it.
The idea that ARG players could deal with real-world problems isn’t new. The things that happened during game play started to get a few people interested in what an organized and motivated group of people could do with a real world problem. The Rand Corporation was just one of many who speculated about what could happen. Their 2004 report, Out of the Ordinary: Finding Hidden Threats by Analyzing Unusual Behavior, examined how a dynamic network of information in the hands of an ARG-like group could be used to identify a threat. They believed the same behaviour used by self-organizing ARG players could be used to sift through real information. The result would be patterns and meaning that would not be readily apparent otherwise.
I’ll be watching the chatter back on forth in the community to see where this goes in the next few weeks. It would be very interesting if the community took up the challenge and were able to step out of the world of alternate and into the pure reality.
We have a winner! And it is MIT so they are the ones that end up holding a giant $40,000 cheque. It appears that a formally organized institution was the most successful in taking up the challenge. There were some smaller groups that got up to 7 balloons and even some individuals who took on the challenge by themselves. It would have been nice to see a de-brief about HOW they actually found all those balloons but perhaps they are hanging onto those secrets for next time.
