For Big Games, Adam Parrish, Ruth, Jeff, and I are creating a mystery game played in the streets of lower Manhattan (see above!), based on the unsolved murder of Mary Rogers, made famous in Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Mystery of Marie Roget. We borrowed some gameplay mechanics from the board game Clue, but what we’ve ended up with owes just as much to the narrative construction mechanics of alternate reality games: players visit locations, make suggestions about possible suspects at that location, and receive information back about actual evidence from the case, which they use to narrow down the who and where of the murder. (The “what” is handled differently, using props which the players must trade amongst themselves throughout the game until they can determine which one is missing.) Since the case is still unsolved, we’re assigning the solution to the crime randomly, by simply leaving out what information we give to the players. We’ve taken a couple of other artistic liberties, which we intend to make fully clear in the booklets we’re producing which document the locations, suspects, and murder weapons.

We’re using Asterisk as the interface, so users will call in with a code hidden at each location, enter a number for a person, and receive back part of the story regarding that evidence. When they think they’ve solved the crime, they’ll call in and do a full report, which will end the game if they’re correct, and call the other players back to the starting point for the big reveal.

So here’s one more IA diagram! This is my logic for how the Asterisk system will work:

The center column is the player experience, with the blue boxes representing their actions and the green capsules representing the audio feedback they receive. The white ovals on the sides are my notes on what Asterisk will be doing while this is going on. I was initially thinking of writing the whole thing in the dialplan, but now that I’m becoming more comfortable with AGI scripting, I think PHP’s variable manipulation is going to prove useful.

By the end of this week I’m going to have such high ranking Asterisk-fu.