Useful Resources

Here's a few resources to help understand ARGs. If you are new to ARGs or puzzle-solving in general, please consult the Game Detectives Academy here for some basic puzzle-solving tools. Good luck.

glossary

  • acrostic - a form of steganography where a message is spelled by the first letter of each line, word, or other segment

  • ASCII - the American Standard Computer Information Interchange; a common method of encoding characters into numeric representations. Numbers are encoded at points 48-57 (0x30-0x39), uppercase from 65-90 (0x41-0x5A), and lowercase from 97-122 (0x61-0x7A)

  • ARG - an "alternate reality game"; a game where events play out in the "real world".

  • anagram - a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another, such as cinema from iceman

  • binary - a number system consisting of only zeroes and ones; used as the basis for modern computing

  • base64 - a number system consisting of normal digits, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, "+", "/", and "=". An "=" can only appear at the end. Base64 can be used to encode text through a system like ASCII or other media (images, etc.) as a binary stream.

  • Caesar cipher - a cipher where each letter is shifted over by a set offset.

    • ROT13 - The most common version of a Caesar Cipher, rotating all letters by 13.

  • cipher - a method of modifying data to hide it from other people who don't know how to decipher it.

  • hexadecimal - a number system with 16 digits (0-9, A-F); used in computing as each character can represent four binary digits. Usually prefixed with 0x.

  • Morse code - an alphabet or code traditionally used by radio operators where characters are represented by dashes and dots (or long and short signals)

  • trailhead - the initial clue or event that starts an ARG. For example, one can type "!trailhead" into #bot-spam to get access to the rest of the ARG channels.

  • pigpen cipher - also known as a tic tac toe cipher, a simple substitution cipher in which letters are fragments of a grid

  • rabbit hole - an endless descent into the unknown, commonly referring to a combined stretch in logic

  • red herring - a "clue" with no purpose, meant to mislead the players of an ARG.

  • spectrogram - often abbreviated "spectro"; a graph of frequencies used in audio with respect to time

  • steganography - the act of concealing messages within another medium. Should not be confused with encryption or ciphertext.

  • substitution cipher - a family of ciphers involving monoalphabetic codes, where letters of the original ciphertext correspond to different letters or symbols.

  • Vigenère cipher - a Caesar-like cipher where the offset varies based on a keyword.

resources

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