These players phone it in

EVERYONE knows how to wear clothes. To put on a shirt, you slip your arms through the holes. To slide on shoes, you insert your feet.

But the shirts and accessories from Edoc Laundry are a little more complicated. They actually come with instructions -- not about wearing them, but how to interpret them -- because the new clothing line isn’t just clothing. It’s a game.

To the casual eye, the clothes’ graphics look like the latest in urban cool, but step a little closer and you’ll see words embedded in the designs. Each word translates into a secret code that when typed into the Edoc website (edoclaundry.com) unlocks a video that plays into a larger story. It’s a game -- piece together enough clues, and the players solve a murder mystery.

Landing in boutique stores and online outlets last week, Edoc’s shirts, caps, wallets, belts and backpacks are the newest permutation in alternate reality games, or ARGs -- games that blur boundaries between the virtual and real worlds using websites, blogs, instant messaging, e-mail, telephones, fax machines and more to bring players together in solving a multilayered puzzle. Conceived as marketing tools for movies, video games and other products, some ARGs are now becoming commercially viable in their own right.

It’s been five years since the first ARG sent players on a story-based scavenger hunt both on- and offline. Since then, thousands have joined in, and dozens of games have come and gone, doling out clues on the Web and sending players into the real world to pick up ringing pay phones, play poker in cemeteries and engage in acts of derring-do.

Take, for instance, the game Perplex City (www.perplexcity.com). The story is about a cube that’s been stolen from an alternate universe. The players’ job is to figure out who took it and where it is.

Two weeks ago, Colin Clark (a living, breathing 23-year-old in Long Beach) communicated via e-mail with a handful of fictional game characters, coordinating a campaign of crank e-mails and phone calls in Perplex City. The fictional city’s police department was hiding murder evidence, and the game’s players needed to put the cops on high alert so they could break into the department’s online file system.

Clark and his crew called using real telephones and real numbers. When the call connected, Clark heard a recording of a woman’s voice, stating in a British accent, “We apologize for the difficulty getting through. Extra staff have been assigned to take your call. Please try again.” The phone barrage was later reported in the game’s newspaper, the Perplex City Sentinel.

But the murder, the files, the police department and even the newspaper are merely constructs of the game. They exist only to the extent that the puppet masters, or creators of Perplex City, have created websites and other evidence.

As high-concept and involved as this all seems, it barely scratches the surface of what Perplex City has already done and plans to do. The game, which launched in England over the summer and arrived in the U.S. last month, has incorporated real planes flying over cities trailing banners with clues.

In the coming year or so, it will begin to blur the lines between the virtual and real worlds even more radically. A record label that exists online in the game will begin releasing albums that can be purchased in bricks-and-mortar stores. And a group of gamers who co-authored a book as part of gameplay will see their work published.

“All good storytellers are trying to make their worlds as deep and immersive as possible,” said Michael Smith, founder of London-based Mind Candy, which created Perplex City. “Tolkien was a great example. He not only created a wonderful story, but all the books reference one another. He had huge maps. He created fake languages, so in many ways that’s what an ARG is trying to do, but we can use the Internet to bind the different assets together.”

IT’S no coincidence that the main players of ARGs are tech-savvy 18- to 34-year-olds. ARGs began as viral marketing campaigns for products enjoyed by this age group -- starting with the first ARG, the Beast, unveiled in April 2001 to promote the Steven Spielberg film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”

Initially, the idea was to create a video game that would serve as an interactive sequel to the film. That changed when Jordan Weisman, the creative director of the project for Microsoft Games, read the script.

“I realized it was not a movie people were going to run out and say, ‘I can’t wait to play the game!’ It was a very personal story,” said Weisman, now chief creative executive of the ARG development firm 42 Entertainment.

Confronted with the dual objectives of telling the story of “A.I.” without giving away too much of the plot and also attracting females as well as males (who dominate the video game market), he and his creative team developed a story set 50 years in the future from “A.I.” They created all the evidence for the characters’ lives and actions, as if the story had actually taken place.

Then they threw out the story and hid the evidence in puzzles. The ARG was born.

Since then, some of the more popular ARGs have been run by other corporations -- including last year’s Art of the Heist game from Audi. Part of the game played out during the Coachella Music Festival, where players had to find a way past security guards to break inside a new Audi A4 and steal a memory chip that contained clues to the game’s puzzle. Also last year, the ARG Last Call Poker, promoting the video game Gun, had players meeting up around the country for late-night card games in cemeteries, including Hollywood Forever.

Before that, there was I Love Bees. Designed by 42 Entertainment to promote the video game Halo 2, the game started when its puppet masters sent a real jar of honey to the bricks-and-mortar address of the Alternate Reality Game Network fan site (ARGN.com). Only by pouring out the jar of honey could the site’s founder get to the letters floating in the goo. Unscrambling them yielded the words “I Love Bees,” which, on a hunch, he typed into his Web browser as the URL ilovebees.com, officially launching the game.

I Love Bees lasted about three months, during which players deconstructed the game’s website, downloading and dissecting corrupted photo files to find hidden messages written in the programming code. Players also translated GPS coordinates they found online into real-world locations that turned out to be pay phones.

Michelle “Hitshermark” Elbert, 31, was one of the players who, for two months, faithfully showed up at a pay phone each week to answer it when it rang. The first time, she said, “I picked it up and there was this crazy recording. It asked me a question, and I answered as best I could.... The very next week, some of the calls started to be live.”

It wasn’t a recording of one of the character’s voices, but an actor interacting in real time.

The pay phone Elbert picked up at UC Irvine was one of 50 across the country, and a different one of those pay phones would ring every 15 minutes.

Whoever answered would have to give a code word that had been relayed to them via cellphone -- like in a real, live game of telephone -- by whoever had been on duty at the previous location’s pay phone. Once that task was completed, another piece of the story was unlocked online.

Elbert knew I Love Bees had been launched as a promotional tool for Halo 2 -- a first-person shooter game -- but she was more a fan of adventure, puzzle and role-playing video games. Even so, she admits she was “the monkey.”

“Not only did I buy Halo 2, but I preordered the special collectors edition,” said Elbert, who lives in Irvine.

If she hadn’t played I Love Bees, she said she would only have rented the game, but she bought it because “I became invested in the world.”

It’s somewhat surprising that games developed as elaborate marketing tools inspire the level of devotion they do among a generation believed to be the most ad-weary of U.S. consumers, but it makes sense to ARG pioneer Weisman.

“Our society’s become increasingly adept at filtering out all the marketing messages they’re barraged with constantly,” said Weisman, whose company plans to branch out into non-product-pushing ARGs later this year. “Our premise was, maybe it’s time to whisper as opposed to scream. If you’re providing entertainment and they enjoy it, then they’ll seek it out as opposed to filter it out.”