To start off this new decade, we at Alice & Smith have challenged ourselves to pursue a world where absolutely none of our players’ information is tracked. None!
Being an ARG Transmedia company makes this especially challenging, but here is some information on how we plan to change.
During the year, we will migrate our main authentication server and remove all user account creations. You are still going to be able to create or use your existing agent login nickname, but emails will not be used anymore. (No third party account anymore!)
We will delete all your email login data, and we will also purge all IP addresses and filter them in the future. We will update our Terms and Agreement and our Privacy Policy to not only allow Cloaking and VPN technology, but even encourage them.
Google Analytics and all other marketing tracking tools have already been removed from our site, and will be removed shortly from all our other touchpoints.
We are shutting down our newsletter and will delete all account history and tracking data.
We are reducing ingame playstream data to only gameplay and game mechanic optimisations by refactoring much of our code.
These changes WILL NOT impact your gameplay experience, your current progress, or your ability to keep your progress between multiple devices.
Our goal is to not remove the level of immersion you find in our games or projects. We still want you to receive a demonic phone call at 3 in the morning, and infiltrate the *real* website of shady heavy water vendors on the internet.
Green Level Missions, where an elected player is flown to a mystery city for a 48h immersive experience, will still require the same extensive medical and psychological evaluation. That said, we are working on a new project for our Red, Orange and Yellow clearance levels.
The concept of creating an ARG companion app is nothing new. Even in one of our earliest ARGs on Unfiction we were talking about having our own dedicated communication platform.
The Black Watchmen series became our pride along with the ARGs we have had the privilege to create for our incredible clients (Paradox Interactive, White Wolf, Hello Games, Funcom...). It is important for our work to find better ways of staying in connection with you while being able to create puzzles spanning outside the game that blend digital and physical storytelling.
Some of the features we will roll out as part of our companion app:
- ARG mission alerts
- A private secure email address (your-agent-name@arg.gg)
- Your own ARG burner phone number (VoIP real landline number)
- Chat integration with Google AI for puzzle help and hints
- Looking for Group (LFG) system for puzzle solving
- Geocaching, dead drop and live drop notifications (Google Map integration)
Although we are working on this app for our own needs, we plan to make it open for any ARG creators who wish to utilize it, but don’t have the infrastructure to run it.
If you’d like to follow the project, join our (new) Telegram channel here:
http://t.me/arg_app
There are many, many ways that are much more fun than email! :)
DISCORD ->
Our entire staff and more than 8,300 players are on discord and looking forward to chatting with you!
http://discord.gg/arg
TWITCH ->
Follow streamers from our community! Subscribe to our official stream category.
Nite Team 4 on Twitch
The Black Watchmen on Twitch
TWITTER ->
Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter.
@aliceandsmith
@niteteam4 - NITE Team 4
@division66 - The Black Watchmen
TELEGRAM ->
Join our fresh, newly created Telegram channel!
http://t.me/arg_world
Cheers!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/544390/NITE_Team_4__Military_Hacking_Division/
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