I was planning to write a regular Sudoku this week, but with the warmer spring weather all the numbers decided to go outside to enjoy the sun. Solve the puzzle by finding a way to put them back into the grid (they haven’t traveled too far).

Rules: Enter a digit from 1 to 9 into each cell so that no digit repeats in any row, column or bold 3×3 region. The digits outside the grid must appear in one of the first three cells encountered from that edge of the grid (for example, a digit above the grid must be in one of the first three rows of the puzzle, in the same column as that clue number appears).

Pillow talk with Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg.
Photo: Mark Seliger

OK, sure, the Internet represents the largest paradigm shift since the Industrial Revolution. And it toppled totalitarian regimes, crippled the music business, and neutered the porn industry. But it has also completely changed the landscape of comedy.

The unceremonious pop that signified the end of the 1980s took with it dozens of televised stand-up shows, their brick backdrops crumbling into metaphoric rubble. In the ’90s, a comedian would tour, and if that person were lucky, he might get a deal for a sitcom that would either never get made or enjoy a swift cancellation.

And then: broadband. YouTube turned all of civilization into a reality show. I can barely remember a time before its voyeurism, nut shots, kitten yawns, and sad-larious shenanigans made the TV show I host, Web Soup, possible.

But it’s not just video. Like all comedians, I have a podcast. Mine is called the Nerdist, and starting it was my single best career decision ever. Doing a weekly show let me burrow into a niche and connect with like-minded nerds. Plus, it has done more to increase attendance at my live shows than all of my TV projects combined. Sketch comics, once constrained to Saturday Night Live, now have entire channels, entire sites, devoted to them. As a result, comedians, in addition to barely handling the pressures of being hilarious all the time, also have to understand marketing, delivery systems, and social media.

Few comics do this better than SNL’s Andy Samberg. His group, the Lonely Island (with Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone), has been making web videos since 2000—to the tune of 440 million YouTube views. If you’ve enjoyed the Chronic-WHAT-cles of Narnia, been On a Boat, or presented your Dick in a Box to a young lady, thank these guys.

Samberg and I sat down in New York for an in-depth discussion about comedy on the digital stage—and what it means when performers can become known commodities in a matter of hours. Get ready for serious talk about the business of web comedy (mainly because Wired made me cut out all the vagina jokes).

Hardwick: You guys really were pioneers on the Internet. The stats on your YouTube channel are insane: 65 videos, 894,000 subscribers, 440 million views. Jesus Christ!

Samberg: People like jokes about jizz.

Lonely Islanders: (from left) Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg, and Jorma Taccone.
Photo: Mark Seliger

Hardwick: Clearly. But do you actually make money with the YouTube channel, or is it more about awareness?

Samberg: We’re trying to make it more the former. So far it’s been really good for awareness.

Hardwick: Why do you think it’s so hard to spin YouTube into cash?

Samberg: Well, we started through NBC and SNL, and weirdly, when the stakes and production value get higher, it is less profitable. If you want to make YouTube your sole place to make money, you have to strike a balance between spending less and producing more. Because the more you produce, the more followers you gain. It’s a more intimate relationship between the creator and the viewers than on TV.

Hardwick: When I started doing my podcast a year ago, I said it just has to be consistent every week. But that’s harder when you’re making videos.

Samberg: It’s especially hard because we’re already making videos every week at SNL. And we can’t put those on YouTube, because NBC Universal has their deal with Hulu and NBC.com. For us it started when we did “Lazy Sunday” with Chris Parnell. It was on YouTube immediately, because no one had really heard of YouTube yet. It became a big thing, but then it got yanked off. When we did the one with Natalie Portman, the same thing happened. We did “Dick in a Box,” and the same thing happened. It got really frustrating, because we knew there was an audience beyond the show. So for our songs and music videos, with the involvement of Lorne Michaels and NBC, we struck the record deal. That’s why videos like “Jizz in My Pants” and “I’m on a Boat” live on YouTube and have those gigantic view counts.

Hardwick: When did you first think, oh, comedy is a thing I would like to do?

Samberg: I was 8 years old. I would sneak into the TV room and watch SNL.

Hardwick: Which cast?

Samberg: Lovitz, Carvey, Hartman, Jan Hooks—that era. The only time it ever dropped off a little for me was the beginning of the Ferrell-Oteri-Shannon era. But then I got into that really hot as well. It was just that, you know, in your first two years of college you stop watching SNL a little bit, because you’re going out, and there was no TiVo then. Akiva and I were recording SNL on VHS until 2004.

Hardwick: Wait, are you saying you weren’t able to just consume media whenever you wanted?

Samberg: That was the case. When we met Ferrell and Fred Armisen and Will Forte, we were like, “We watched your sketches on VHS over and over till we memorized them.” They said, “That was like last week.” All I could say was, “I know, but they weren’t online.”

Hardwick: OK, that’s one way the Internet has changed comedy: access. What else do you think has changed?

Samberg: I don’t think that the actual quality or content has changed. It’s just that now there’s another way for you to find it. Like one of SNL’s new cast members, Jay Pharoah, is a killer impressionist. And he was basically found on the Internet. I mean, I know he did stand-up and stuff, but they told us, like, “Oh yeah, they’re considering this guy. Take a look at his YouTube video.” It was literally just him in his bedroom doing a bunch of impressions. And he was super-talented. You can get discovered a new way now is really my only point. You know, one of the common misconceptions about the Lonely Island is that we were discovered on the Internet. We actually weren’t. A hand-off of a VHS tape is how we got agents, and working on the MTV Movie Awards with Jimmy Fallon and producers Mike Shoemaker and Steve Higgins is how we got recommended to SNL.

ndy Rubin needed a hit. It was January 2009, three years since Google had bought the company he cofounded, a little startup called Android.

Rubin had created a slick operating system for mobile phones that allowed customers to surf the web, send email, play music, and install apps. He had hoped that Google’s money and power would help turn Android into a major force in the burgeoning smartphone industry. Instead, Android had been a disappointment. Despite months of press buildup, the first phone to run the system, HTC’s T-Mobile G1, was greeted with tepid reviews and lackluster sales. Rubin had tried to find a bigger wireless carrier that would agree to partner with Android—he and his team, including Android cofounders Rich Miner and Nick Sears, had lobbied Verizon for the better part of a year—but without success. And then there was Android’s biggest competitor, the iPhone. Introduced in 2007, it had become an instant commercial and cultural phenomenon. Unless Rubin could come up with a breakthrough Android phone, and quick, he might have to concede the entire business to Steve Jobs.

Fortunately for Rubin, Sanjay Jha was in just as dire a position. Jha, the new co-CEO of Motorola, had been talking to Rubin for months, hoping to persuade him to let Motorola build the next Android phone. Once the dominant mobile device maker in the world, Motorola hadn’t had a major success since the Razr—in 2004. Jha had been hired in August 2008 to resurrect Motorola’s handset business, and he had pursued an all-or-nothing strategy, laying off thousands and betting Motorola’s future on his ability to build a hit Android phone.

Now Jha had come to Google headquarters to unveil his design—and it was impressive. Jha promised a device that would be far faster than any other smartphone. He said its touchscreen would have a higher resolution than the iPhone. He said it would come with a full keyboard, for customers who didn’t like the iPhone’s virtual keys. He promised a phone that was thin and sleek, one that could compete with the iPhone on pure aesthetics. And, thanks to his longstanding relationship with Verizon, he offered the potential of a partnership with the country’s then second-largest wireless carrier; in fact, Motorola and Verizon had already discussed building a smartphone together. “We were all kind of jazzed,” says Hiroshi Lockheimer, one of Rubin’s chief lieutenants, who was at the meeting. “I think we said OK on the spot.”

But that optimism faded a few months later, in the spring of 2009, when the first prototype arrived in the Android offices. To Rubin’s eyes, they looked nothing like the designs Jha had presented. Indeed, they were hideous. Yes, there is always a gap between a manufacturer’s sketches and the eventual prototype, but Rubin and his team had so much faith in Jha that they expected him to deliver a phone much closer to the one he had pitched. Despair set in. “It looked like a weapon. It was so sharp and jagged and full of hard lines. It looked like you could cut yourself on the edges,” says someone who saw the prototype. “We were really concerned. There were a lot of conversations where we asked, ‘Is this really the device we want to do? Should we try to talk Motorola out of it?’”

The implications of canceling the project were huge. Another dud, right on the heels of the disappointing G1, might cement the public’s perception of Android as a flop. Executives at Verizon, who had agreed to serve as the phone’s exclusive carrier, would look inept. They were still taking heat for passing on the iPhone. Apple had gone to AT&T instead, signing an exclusive deal and bringing the carrier millions of new customers. And a failure would likely mean the end of Motorola, the company that invented the cell phone. “There was a lot riding on it,” Rubin says. “I was betting my career on it.”

A sense of doom pervaded the whole summer. Google engineers worried the phone wouldn’t sell but still found themselves working weekends and holidays to develop the software. Jha spoke almost every day with John Stratton, Verizon Communications’ chief marketing officer at the time, trying to figure out a way to tweak the design without having to reengineer all the electronic components. Meanwhile, they were facing a November deadline.

And the phone still didn’t have a name. McCann, Verizon’s longtime ad agency, had come up with a list of possibilities—including Dynamite—that few liked. As late as Labor Day, the phone still went by its codename, Shoals. Feeling cornered, Stratton reached out to McGarry Bowen, a young ad agency known for its unconventional approach. “We told them they had a week,” said someone who was involved in the discussions. “A few days later, cofounder Gordon Bowen comes back and says, ‘What do you think when I say Droid?”

In retrospect, what the agency had done was simple: It turned the phone’s menacing looks into its biggest asset by marketing it as an anti-iPhone. The iPhone was smooth and refined, so they would pitch the Droid as rough and ready for work. The iPhone’s electronics and software were inaccessible, so they’d market the phone’s hackability. “If there had been a phone in the movie Black Hawk Down, it would have looked like the Droid,” Bowen told the executives.

A few weeks later, in early October 2009, Verizon and its new agency presented the Droid campaign to a group of 200 Android staffers. One ad featured stealth bombers dropping phones on a farm, in the woods, and by the side of a road. Another attacked the iPhone as a “digitally clueless beauty pageant queen.” A third listed all the things the Droid could do that the iPhone couldn’t. When they were over, the room erupted in applause. The Android team had been demoralized, but “when they decided they were going to do this full-on attack on the iPhone—that we were going to war—we got really excited,” says an Android employee.

Apparently you didn’t have to work at Google to love the campaign. When the Droid launched, on schedule, it was a tremendous hit, outpacing sales of the original iPhone in its first three months. Motorola started to make an amazing turnaround; today, thanks to the Droid, it is profitable again. Verizon started winning more new subscribers. It also improved its bargaining position with Apple. Less than two years later, when the two companies introduced the Verizon iPhone, the carrier managed to get a better deal from Apple than AT&T had.

Most important, the Droid halted Apple’s march toward smartphone dominance. In fact, it is by some measures outpacing its rival, powering 23 percent of all smartphones worldwide in 2010—more recent estimates are even higher—compared with the iPhone’s 16 percent. (Symbian still accounted for 38 percent of smartphones, on average, in 2010, while the BlackBerry OS accounted for 16 percent, but both were trending sharply downward.) Users activate more than 300,000 new Android devices every day; by comparison, as of October, combined iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch sales accounted for about 275,000 daily activations. Even Steve Jobs seems rattled; last October, he dropped in on an investors’ phone call to deliver a rant on what he sees as Android’s flaws.

Peter McGraw calls his benign violation theory “a parsimonious account of what makes things funny”—even Sarah Silverman.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

The writer E. B. White famously remarked that “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.” If that’s true, an amphibian genocide took place in San Antonio this past January. Academics from around the world gathered there for the first-ever comedy symposium cosponsored by the Mind Science Foundation.

The goal wasn’t to tell jokes but to assess exactly what a joke is, how it works, and what this thing called “funny” really is, in a neurological, sociological, and psychological sense. As Sean Guillory, a Dartmouth College neuroscience grad student who organized the event, says, “It’s the first time a roomful of empirical humor researchers have ever gotten together!”

The first speaker at the podium, University of Western Ontario professor Rod Martin, began with a lament over the lack of comedy scholarship. He pointed out that you could fill a library with analyses of subjects like mental illness or aggression. Meanwhile, the 1,700-plus-page Handbook of Social Psychology—the preeminent reference work in its field—mentions humor once.

The crux of Martin’s argument involves semantics. It takes issue with the imperfect terminology we use to describe the emotional state that humor triggers. Standardizing language would help humor studies earn the respect of related fields, like aggression research. Martin exhorted his audience to adopt his preferred word for the “pleasurable feeling, joy, gaiety of mind” that humor elicits. Happiness, elation, and even hilarity don’t quite fit, to his mind. The best word, he said, is mirth.

For those curious about the physiology of humor, Helmut Karl Lackner of the Medical University of Graz, Austria, presented his research on the relationship between humor, stress, and respiration. By tracking breathing cycles and heart rates, he has determined that social anxiety makes things less funny. (Fittingly, he seemed nervous as he read his paper in halting English.) Nina Strohminger, a researcher at the University of Michigan, explained how she’s been exposing test subjects to unpleasant odors. She extolled the virtues of a spray called Liquid Ass, which can be purchased at fine novelty stores everywhere. (Her conclusion: Farts make everything funnier.) The audience members take the subject of amusement very seriously, yet they couldn’t help but chuckle at this.

Other speakers peppered their talks with multivariate ANOVAs and mesolimbic reward systems. Some presented research on whether people with Asperger’s syndrome get jokes and how to determine the social consequences of put-downs. But as the sessions wound on, no one had addressed the underlying mechanism of comedy: What, exactly, makes things funny?

Photo: Andrew Hetherington

That question was the core of Peter McGraw’s lecture. A lanky 41-year-old professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, McGraw thinks he has found the answer, and it starts with a tickle. “Who here doesn’t like to be tickled?”

A good number of hands shot up. “Yet you laugh,” he said, flashing a goofy grin. “You experience some pleasurable reaction even as you resist and say you don’t like it.”

If you really stop to think about it, McGraw continued, it’s a complex and fascinating phenomenon. If someone touches you in certain places in a certain way, it prompts an involuntary but pleasurable physiological response. Except, of course, when it doesn’t. “When does tickling cease to be funny?” McGraw asked. “When you try to tickle yourself … Or if some stranger in a trench coat tickles you.” The audience cracked up. He was working the room like a stand-up comic.

Many would assert that this tickling conundrum is the perfect evidence that humor is utterly relative. There may be many types of humor, maybe as many kinds as there are variations in laughter, guffaws, hoots, and chortles. But McGraw doesn’t think so. He has devised a simple, Grand Unified Theory of humor—in his words, “a parsimonious account of what makes things funny.” McGraw calls it the benign violation theory, and he insists that it can explain the function of every imaginable type of humor. And not just what makes things funny, but why certain things aren’t funny. “My theory also explains nervous laughter, racist or sexist jokes, and toilet humor,” he told his fellow humor researchers.

Photo: Andrew Hetherington

Coming up with an essential description of comedy isn’t just an intellectual exercise. If the BVT actually is an unerring predictor of what’s funny, it could be invaluable. It could have warned Groupon that its Super Bowl ad making light of Tibetan injustices would bomb. The Love Guru could’ve been axed before production began. Podium banter at the Oscars could be less excruciating. If someone could crack the humor code, they could get very rich. Or at least tenure.

It’s a wintry February afternoon in Boulder and a 53-year-old tech worker named Kyle fires up a joint he obtained from a medical marijuana dispensary. After smoking his medicine and waiting 15 minutes for it to take effect, Kyle opens a 10-page printed questionnaire. He sees a Photoshopped image of a man picking his nose so vigorously that his finger pokes out of his eye socket. “To what extent is this picture funny?” the survey asks, inviting Kyle to rate the picture on a scale of 0 to 5. He gives it a 3.

Kyle is one of 50 or so marijuana aficionados who have volunteered to take part in a study run by McGraw’s laboratory at CU-Boulder—the Humor Research Lab, or HuRL for short. Founded in 2009, HuRL is unorthodox, to put it mildly, even for academia. But McGraw is doing serious enough work at HuRL to have earned two grants from the Marketing Science Institute, a nonprofit funded by respectable organizations like Bank of America, Pfizer, and IBM. The professor and a team of seven student researchers have been asking test subjects to gauge whether Hot Tub Time Machine is funnier if you sit close to the screen or far away. They show subjects a YouTube video of a guy driving a motorcycle into a fence over and over again to see when it ceases to be amusing.

This mutant pig fetus was collected near Chernobyl in 1988.
Photo: Guillaume Herbaut

The pine trees framing the entrance to the forest appear to be normal. Unremarkable. But the crackling dosimeter says otherwise. On this freezing February afternoon, about 2 miles from the concrete sarcophagus that now entombs the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Gennadi Milinevsky, a physicist from a university in Kiev, walks along a path carpeted with pine needles and patches of recent snow. The size of a transistor radio, the dosimeter emits a sharp click when it detects a radioactive particle. Milinevsky waves the instrument: Its digital readout indicates levels of radiation 120 times higher than normal. As he walks, the staccato popping gets faster as the levels climb to 250 times higher than normal. “It’s not good,” he says. He ventures toward a wide clearing littered with the trunks of dead trees. Milinevsky suggests stopping the tour here. On the far side of the clearing, he knows, the dosimeter will begin to make a sound no one wants to hear: a terrifying snowstorm of screeching white noise, indicating highly toxic levels of gamma radiation some 1,000 times above normal.

This is the poisoned heart of the Red Forest, nearly 4,000 acres of pine trees that were blanketed with radioactive isotopes of strontium, cesium, plutonium, and microscopic pieces of uranium that roiled from the blazing core of reactor number four over 10 days in April and May of 1986. The pines died in a matter of days, the russet needles marking the windblown path of the most deadly radioactivity to escape the burning reactor. Twenty-five years later, it remains one of the most contaminated ecosystems on earth.

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone now encompasses more than 1,600 square miles of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus, a ragged swatch of forests, marshes, lakes, and rivers. Cordoned off by a fence and armed guards soon after the accident, the perimeter was first drawn up according to airborne surveys of gamma radiation contamination conducted in the days after the explosions, and it has since been expanded more than once. The current zone extends up to 60 miles from the power plant, the main entrance on the Ukraine side blocked by a paramilitary checkpoint equipped with radiation screening tools. Deeper within the region, a 6-mile zone designates the most heavily contaminated areas around the plant.

In the months after the accident, Soviet authorities undertook drastic measures to deal with the catastrophe. Almost 1,000 acres of the Red Forest had perished, and nearly 4 square miles of topsoil around the sarcophagus was scraped away and buried as radioactive waste. Of the 250 settlements and villages in the zone that were evacuated, the most radioactive were bulldozed in their entirety and interred. Contaminated livestock were slaughtered, and abandoned pet dogs were shot by teams of local hunters. By the time the process of liquidation was finished, the land surrounding the reactor had been transformed into a sterile moonscape, a nightmarish post-nuclear wasteland flattened by machinery and sprayed with chemicals designed to trap radioactive particles close to the ground.

Today, wolves, lynx, and elk roam the area around the reactor.
Photo: Guillaume Herbaut

Since then, nature has slowly crept in. Once an area of heavy industry and collectivized agriculture, the zone is now nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. The forest has reclaimed long-abandoned villages and farmland; roads and buildings are being swallowed up by thickets of trees and shrubs. The natural process of radioactive decay has already removed some toxic particles from the environment. Those isotopes with short half-lives have already disappeared. Some longer-lived isotopes gradually leached into the soil and have been dispersed by wind, birds, and insects.

About a decade ago, the animal sightings began. Naturalists started to report signs of an apparently remarkable recovery in the ecology of the quarantined territory. They photographed the tracks of a brown bear and saw wolves and boar roaming the streets of the abandoned town of Pripyat. In 2002, a young eagle owl—one of only 100 thought to be living in all of Ukraine at the time—was seen dozing on an abandoned excavator near the sarcophagus. The following year, an endangered white-tailed eagle was captured and radio-tagged within 3 miles of the plant. By early 2005, a herd of 21 rare Przewalski’s horses that had escaped from captivity in the quarantined area six years earlier had bred successfully and expanded to 64. It seemed the disaster that had banished industry, agriculture, pesticides, cars, and hunting from Chernobyl had inadvertently created a sprawling wildlife park.

A 2006 report by the Chernobyl Forum—an international panel of 100 experts assembled by the UN, the World Health Organization, and the International Atomic Energy Agency—lent scientific weight to the evolving notion that the Exclusion Zone was turning into a haven for wildlife. The report, based on environmental, socioeconomic, and human health research, explained that levels of radioactivity in the zone had declined several-hundred-fold and took an optimistic view of the disaster’s aftermath, both for human beings and animals. While there was no denying that some central areas of the zone, including the Red Forest, remained acutely contaminated and potentially lethal, the authors stated that no adverse effects of low-level radiation had been reported in plants or animals in much of the area around the reactor. Rather, the size and diversity of the animal population had actually expanded in the absence of people. “The Exclusion Zone,” the authors concluded, “has paradoxically become a unique sanctuary for biodiversity.”

It was an amazing story—sinister wasteland transforms into blooming, post-nuclear Eden—and it became the subject of documentaries on Animal Planet and the BBC and a central theme of the book Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl. It was also used by Gaia theorist James Lovelock to argue that we could save the rain forests from the ravages of man by burying nuclear waste in them. This idea, of nature healing itself even in the face of the grievous wounds mankind can inflict, is as appealing as it is counterintuitive.

Close-up of anthrax DNA.
Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Ten years ago, letters laced with anthrax killed five people. The FBI says it traced the spores to a single U.S. scientist. But could the feds have gotten the wrong man?

Storyboard Podcast:
Episode 46

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That’s the question Noah Shachtman investigates in his story “The Strain,” featured in the April issue of Wired magazine.

“There are giant holes at the center of the case,” Shachtman says. Though the FBI claims to have unraveled the mystery, the agency still can’t say when, where, how or why its prime suspect, Bruce Ivins, would have cooked up and mailed the deadly spores. “As a reporter,” Shachtman says, “those are questions we’re trained to answer first, before we write anything.”

In this edition of the Storyboard podcast, Shachtman joins host Adam Rogers and articles editor Rob Capps to discuss the ins and outs of this epic story, the writing of which involved a 1,500-row spreadsheet and a whole team of fact-checkers. Did Ivins do it? Like we’d tell you here. Guess you better listen in.

I’m back for my normal prescriptions after a week off to become the voice of a new puzzle audiobook series. This week I’ve written one of my favorite sudoku variations, which adds in a small amount of math and a fair amount of new challenge. Here is an arrow sudoku that looks a bit like a spring flower. Enjoy!

Rules: Place a single digit from 1 to 9 into each cell so that no digit repeats in any row, column, or 3×3 bold region. Digits in the circled cells represent the sum of all digits along the path that the arrow travels, and can repeat within a sum provided they obey other sudoku rules.

By Luci Temple, originally posted at ARGNet

In America 2049, the former land of the free has degenerated into the Divided States of America, where sexuality, religion, speech and culture are all controlled and restricted. On the upside: the entire population is on a drug  that inhibits aggressive behavior called SerennAide, administered automatically through the water supply. This has led to a decrease in crime rates, an increase in the population’s happiness, and has purportedly helped people to rise above their worst impulses.

Depending on where you stand, this is either a Utopian dream or an Orwellian nightmare. And it is up to you to decide where you stand: alongside the Council for American Heritage (CAH), or with Divided We Fall (DWF).

America 2049 is an immersive 12-week episodic experience that will play out across a new social network as well as using video, fictional websites, and real life locations across the U.S. Once this alternate reality game (ARG) officially launches on April 4th, 2011 at 12am EST, you will be able to interact with characters and other players in real time as you uncover the story and clues. The game is designed to be replayed or revisited at any time, so players who join after launch don’t have to worry about falling too far behind. However, for those interested in a sneak peek, America 2049 has seeded quite a bit of content across a number of websites.

Initial assets for America 2049 point to a high production value for the project, and you’ll likely recognize several familiar faces amongst the game’s cast of characters: Harold Perrineau from Lost, Victor Garber from Eli Stone, Margaret Cho from Drop Dead Diva, Cherry Jones from 24, and Anthony Rapp from Rent all make an appearance in the game’s trailer.

Given the game’s subject matter, it comes as no surprise that Fuel, one of the organisations behind this ARG, has a mission statement focused on the protection of human rights. It is hinted that there will be multiple organisations hosting events year-round focusing on topics related to gameplay.

Game assets already released paint a bleak portrait of America’s future. Things started to go downhill in the year 2012, when Rachel Ng created SMRTTid (an injectible subdermal chip to replace keys, bank cards, ID cards, and so on) for increased convenience and security. This invention also enabled every business and government body to identify and track citizens and their private activities. As a result, many of the civil rights that Americans live by today were dismantled after an oppressive fundamentalist regime came into office.

Fast track to the year 2049: the Federal government is powerless, while individual states have remade societies in their own images, bringing back segregation, homophobia, anti-miscegenation laws, and restrictions against “foreign” cultures. With the nation divided, state against state, a new organisation called the Council on American Heritage (CAH) rose to power as a collaborative effort between private and regional government agencies. They’re “American as Apple Pie” and vigilant in their efforts to “protect the American way of life from anything and everything that might threaten it.”

Their key threat is Divided We Fall, an alleged domestic “terrorist” organisation led by a woman known only as M, fighting for civil rights and the reunification of the American States. Divided We Fall actively opposes the passage of the Abolition Ballot, which would cause the United States to dissolve into a collection of separate states. The political landscape has already deteriorated so far that China cut ties with America due to its “unstable government.”

Divided We Fall is allegedly responsible for a recent attack on a secure government facility, where at least five inmates were freed. This may or may not be connected to the escape of Ken Asaba, allegedly a foreign national who fled from a quarantine center outside of Portland and may be carrying the Namibian Plague. If I’m using the word “allegedly” a lot, it’s because it depends on who you believe – the CAH or DWF.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to see how this story parallels real world concerns about medicalization of human behaviour, privacy, civil rights, and privatization of government services. One thing that stands out is how the CAH does business with a web browser called Zooglio, whose stated mission is to “filter out the stuff that made the internet of the early 2000’s dangerous and misleading,” all the while spying on their users’ activity and passing the data onto business and government.

So, the question remains: what would you rather be: happy, or free? Your actions will decide the fate of the country.

You can apply for the position of Agent at CAH as advertised on LinkedIn, where your mission will be to uncover the domestic terrorist group DWF and to (allegedly) restore peace. Or hold off making the choice for now by signing up to play at America2049.com to be alerted once the game kicks into gear. Until then, explore the various trailhead websites for backstory and join the discussion at the Unfiction forums.

Are you ready for the zombie apocalypse?
Photo: pasukaru76/Flickr/Creative Commons

Disaster will strike: It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when — so you’d better get ready. That’s according to this week’s podcast guest, disaster-management guru Joseph Pred.

“Being prepared is a civic duty,” he says. But it doesn’t have to be hard or cost a lot. In this bonus episode of the Storyboard podcast, Pred sits down with regular host Adam Rogers to give you the straight scoop on what you’ll really want to have on hand when the next earthquake hits or the zombies attack.

Storyboard Podcast:
Episode 45

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http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/Storyboard/Storyboard_045.mp3

Best communication device? Ham radio. Tool left out of most lists? Wrench to turn off the gas line. Most overlooked common-sense strategy? Get to know your neighbors.

You can bet Pred knows his stuff. He’s head of emergency services at Burning Man, the annual art event and temporary community in the Nevada desert that he describes as “a recreational disaster — like planning for an earthquake, but more fun.”

He’s also got a book coming out in June called Show Me How to Survive, an illustrated guide to not dying.

If the podcast just isn’t enough for you, check out these links to some of Pred’s favorite disaster-related sites:

• Plan your go-bag with tips from 72hours.org.
• Make a safety map to keep in touch with loved ones.
• Learn all you need to know about ham radio.
• Calm your radiation paranoia with xkcd’s radiation dose chart and the banana equivalent dose.

Photo: pasukaru76/Flickr

By Brandie Minchew, ARGNet

Andrea Phillips has excellent qualifications to talk about ethics in transmedia. In addition to designing a number of transmedia narratives, she, or rather, one of her transmedia campaigns, has been condemned by NASA. In 2009, Sony Pictures launched a website for The Institute for Human Continuity promoting  2012, their disaster movie for the year. Soon after the website’s launch Dr. David Morrison of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute began receiving emails about the site from people who failed to notice the references to Sony Pictures and the film in both text and logos, leading him to declare the site to be “ethically wrong.”

This was not the first time Phillips encountered ethical quandaries in transmedia. Her interest in this issue began in 2001, after finishing an alternate reality game called The Beast. Shortly after the game ended, a smart, empowered, close-knit group of players behind who call themselves “Cloudmakers” were faced with the events of September 11. In the aftermath, some of the Cloudmakers discussed the possibility of combining their skills again, this time to track down the perpetrators of the attack in the real world. This was a source of concern for Phillips. Following a breadcrumb trail of clues in a game does not equate to the skills for dealing with global terrorism. She and other feared that people trying to “solve” 9/11 would in fact be placing themselves and others in danger.

Phillips prefaced her talk with the disclaimer that, while she intended to share some cautionary tales from the history of alternate reality games and transmedia campaigns, her intent was to highlight concerns, not call anyone out on their mistakes or cast aspersions on the campaigns or the industry in general.

So, what are the ethical concerns that today’s transmedia creators should keep in mind? In her talk, Phillips took the audience through some history of attempts at blurring the line along with more than a few war stories, focusing on the risks and consequences of excessive realism in transmedia campaigns. She followed this up with some suggested solutions.

Real vs. Not Real

The internet, which is an integral part of many transmedia campaigns, is a strange beast when it comes to reality, and the boundaries between real and not real in cyberspace can be nebulous. Phillips illustrated this by pointing to The Onion, a satire news site that has often been cited as real news, and the website for Landover Baptist Church, a satire of fundamentalist Christianity and religion in politics. She also pointed out the existence of a reference site dedicated to sorting out the real and not-real things on the internet: Snopes.com. This is something transmedia designers need to consider when creating the portions of their story-worlds that are housed on the internet.

Unexpected consequences resulting from fiction pretending to be reality is not a twenty-first century emergence. Anyone familiar with the history of radio dramas remembers the 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was presented in part as news bulletins, with reports from the novel read on the air as if a real alien invasion was taking place. Although each hour of the broadcast included a statement that the broadcast was, in fact, fiction, many people missed this announcement. Later, newspapers reported mass panic among the people who had believed the broadcast to be true. The true extent of public reaction to the broadcast is a subject of debate, but at the time, its aspirations to realism definitely caused a sensation.

Phillips took the audience through a brief history of real vs not-real in transmedia by way of The Blair Witch Project, lonelygirl15, and the case of Martin Aggett. Of particular interest was the comparison of the lonelygirl15 saga to the Martin Aggett story. Bree of lonelygirl15, Phillips noted, behaved like a real person with an internet presence – she posted videos, she commented on other videos and answered comments to her videos. She interacted with her growing fan base. However, as Bree’s story went on, it became more and more clear that her story was not “real.” In fact, there were subtle clues from the beginning that lonelygirl15 was fiction, such as the high production values of her videos. When lonelygirl15 was revealed to be fiction, some people felt duped, but a large part of the audience continued to follow the story.

By contrast, Martin Aggett, a fictional character created by Steve Diddle, also behaved like a person on the internet. Martin joined unFiction, participated in activities with the ARG community, and was generally well-liked. Diddle’s goal in creating Aggett was to make a “deep story,” something so immersive that people wouldn’t be aware of the game until they had been “playing” it for weeks. Where Bree’s audience mostly shrugged and either went on following the story or moved on to other things, Diddle’s revelation regarding the fictionality of Martin Aggett was met with disapproval and consternation among the Unfictioners whom he had befriended as his fictional construct.

Why did these two similar cases garner such different reactions? Phillips turned the question to the audience. Succinctly, one audience member answered that Unfiction specifically had rules against “characters” in games posting as real people; Unfiction was always understood to be “out of game” at all times. The fact that Diddle had violated that rule was one reason that the revelation that Martin Aggett was not real was ill-received.

Audience member TC Conway also added that Bree began as a public figure and developed personal connections after establishing her public persona, whereas Martin Aggett created close personal connections first, and would eventually have broken away from them to establish a public persona. Another fact to consider is that Bree had gathered a very large, diverse audience with minimal personal interaction, while Martin Aggett had developed very close personal ties to people within the ARG community.

Phillips followed this short discussion with the suggestion that people do not like to be “fooled” – they themselves want to be the ones to blur the lines between reality and fiction. The corollary is that people want to be in control of how far those lines are blurred.

Rabbit Holes

Phillips touched briefly and humorously on the subject of rabbit holes and starting points. Many games begin with anonymous mailings to people who have posted their addresses in places like Unfiction, hoping to receive trailheads or swag. She pointed out that transmedia people are not the only people who like to send anonymous packages, punctuating this statement with a picture of Ted Kaczynski. She added that anonymity does not give people incentive to participate; in fact, it is easier to reach an audience and generate greater interest by being upfront about the origin of a campaign.

Consequences & Risk of Harm: How Real Is Too Real?

But where is the harm in blurring the boundaries between “real” and “not real”? What is the worst that could happen? Phillips begins this section by introducing the case of Zona Incerta, a Brazilian ARG. Zona Incerta featured a video on YouTube in which the fictional CEO of Arkhos Biotech talks about buying the Amazon rainforests so that his company can raze a huge swath of it. Many people mistook the video as real, and word of it got around to a Brazilian senator, who then denounced Arkhos Biotechnology on the floor of the Brazilian senate. Fortunately for the makers and sponsors of Zona Incerta, the senator had a sense of humor and even suggested that Brazil honor a National ARG Day after discovering that Arkhos Biotech did not exist, and the video was part of a game.

The case of a Dell marketing stunt ended less happily. Earlier this year, two Dell employees were arrested when one of them donned a mask and appeared on the sales floor at a Dell campus in Round Rock, Texas, waving a metal object and directing everyone to the lobby. The ill-conceived stunt was meant to move everyone to the lobby for a new product announcement but became much more complicated when the police were called.

Toyota’s “practical joke” marketing campaign for their Matrix model also backfired spectacularly after a woman sued Toyota for causing her to believe she was being stalked. In the campaign, users were able to enter information about their friends (without their knowledge or consent) and input their personal information so that they would receive phone calls, texts, and emails from “virtual lunatics.” The explanation is still posted on the marketing campaign website, and reading the text should be enough to make anyone shake their head and say, “that’s a bad, bad idea.”

YourOtherYou is a unique interactive experience enabling consumers to play extravagant pranks. Simply input a little info about a friend (phone, address, etc.) and we’ll then use it, without their knowledge, to freak them out through a series of dynamically personalized phone calls, texts, emails and videos. First, one of five virtual lunatics will contact your friend. They will seem to know them intimately, and tell them that they are driving cross-country to visit. It all goes downhill from there. The Matrix integrates seamlessly into the experience and you can follow the progress of your prank in real-time online. Each piece of the campaign assures that the experience is as Google-proof as possible.

While working on the 2012 campaign that Phillips designed, she and her team put together a scientific abstract in pdf form that they planned to release through their website. One of the questions raised about this abstract was: “Is it too real? How can we make sure that this won’t be passed around the internet, that it won’t create a scare?” The answer: there was no way to ensure that it wouldn’t be passed on to the internet as a “real” scientific abstract. So the team made the decision not to include the abstract in the campaign.

Context is important. As demonstrated in the Dell incident noted above, when a game or campaign lacks the signals that communicate to an audience that events, situations, or artifacts are not real, the risk of harm increases. Plastering a college campus with fliers about a missing girl will not evoke curiosity; it is more likely to cause people to panic. Wearing a mask and waving a shiny metal object in an office building is not going to make the workday more fun – it’s going to make that hour a nightmare, and it’s certainly not going to attach warm fuzzy feelings to the product that the event is meant to promote.

Every designer should carefully consider the unintended consequences of each piece of a campaign, from websites to live events. Designers should ask themselves, “what is the worst that could happen?” What if people read information on a fake pharmaceutical company’s website and make medical decisions based on information that seems real? If a live kidnapping is staged, what will be the effect on the bystanders who witness this who are unaware that it is not a real kidnapping? If the game directs players to certain areas or gives them tasks to do in the real world, what are the consequences if instructions to players are miscommunicated or misunderstood?

One tragic example is the case of Bob Lord, a player in an invitation-only event called “The Game.” Designers of the game experience laid a path of clues that led their players into an abandoned mining complex with hundreds of mine openings. Although the instructions gave the exact number of the mine shaft where the next clue was hidden, the instructions were ambiguous, and the area was not well-marked. Bob Lord walked into the wrong mine shaft and fell thirty feet, a fall that shattered his vertebrae and left him with irreversible brain damage.

People, Phillips stated, can be hurt by designers who fail to consider the implications of the information they’re putting out to be discovered, or the instructions they give to players.

Unintended Consequences

Even when all implications are carefully considered, there is always the chance that unexpected events will scuttle the best-laid plans. In the Halo 2 promotional campaign, The Haunted Apiary (commonly known as I Love Bees), one Florida player was so dedicated to the game that they went out in the middle of a hurricane to answer a payphone, much to the dismay of the puppetmasters. Campaign designers should consider building a kill switch into their games so that, in case of unexpected events or unforeseen problems, they can halt the game.

Why Do We Want Realism, Anyway?

In the world of alternate reality games, there are many people who would argue that there is no such thing as “too real.” The phrase “This Is Not A Game” is well-known to all who follow the genre. But what does it really mean? Phillips asserted that perhaps the desire for authenticity and truth in stories has been mistaken for a desire for “reality.” We want to tell stories that are true, she stated. A story can be true, can be authentic, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be “real.”

She points to Meredith Woerner’s io9 article: Are Audiences Sick of Being Lied To?, in which Woerner analyzes media campaigns that pretend to be real and end up falling into the hoax category (or the hokey category). Writing about JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield campaign, Woerner states: “Instead of demanding that people believe their lie, they dreamt up a world people were desperate to be a part of.“ The ideal, Phillips stated, is to create worlds that are so amazing that people don’t care if they are real or not.

Potential Solutions

Phillips touched briefly on some proposed technical solutions to marking out a campaign as fiction. One is a “fiction tag”, a literal HTML tag (<fiction>Once Upon A Time</fiction>) that would display an icon on the browser marking the website as fiction (think of the little “lock” icon that appears while visiting a secure website.) An unfortunate drawback to this plan is that people don’t always pay attention to browser icons. Another suggestion is transmedia labeling which would lay out the parameters of the experience and tell players up-front what to expect. However, the drawback here is that it could cause players to lose a sense of discovery, or make the experience feel contrived. In lieu of technical solutions, Phillips suggests that designers can be clear about where the story is coming from, who is telling the story, and can do their best to consider the implications and consequences of the assets they build and the events they run in the course of the campaign.

The audio from Andrea Phillips’ SXSW presentation is available online for your listening pleasure.

Photo: Andrea Phillips (Brandie Minchew)