Fans of Fox’s television series Touch won’t have to wait until next year to learn more about the power of numbers featured in the drama. Showrunner Tim Kring has paired up with AT&T to produce Daybreak 2012, a transmedia webseries designed to delve deeper into the show’s mythos.

By Celina Beach, originally posted at ARGNet

A van is careening down a winding road, followed in close pursuit by a police car, sirens blaring. The passenger of the van, Ben Wilkins, urgently questioned by the driver (not named in the chapter but later on we find out his name is “Charles”),  swears he doesn’t know why they’re chasing him or what  they want, but mentions “a package” back at his apartment. Charles tells Ben to connect his phone to the laptop in the van, where he’ll give Ben “a Jack app” to buy him time to get back to his place and grab the package, and so that he can contact Ben afterwards. A policeman leans out of the police cruiser’s passenger window and starts to shoot at the van…

Daybreak 2012, a transmedia webseries by Tim Kring (Heroes, Conspiracy for Good), launched on May 31st with the release of the first of 5 weekly chapters of the webseries on Daybreak2012.com. Along with the Daybreak 2012 website, the Jack Boxers app was also released for both the iPhone and Android smartphones, along with an accompanying website, We Are The Jack Boxers. The purpose of both the app and the website is to enlist help for the cause of the Jack Boxers, who are fighting the forces of darkness and bringing the Truth to light.

The Truth, according to the Jack Boxers, is essential to many things – sacred geometry, energy and vibration, the works of Fibonacci and Tesla – but most importantly, the dodecahedron. In the final few episodes of Touch, the dodecahedron (or “doda”) played a major role in the mythology of the show, and that mythology is carried over into Daybreak. However, while both Daybreak and Touch exist in the same “universe”, the doda is the only common thread between the two stories.

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On Martin Luther King Day weekend, hundreds of puzzle solvers converged on the MIT campus to tackle the annual mystery hunt, designed by the previous year’s winning team, Codex Alimentarius. Alex Calhoun, one of the members of Team Codex, recounts the process of designing puzzles for such a large audience.

By Alex Calhoun, originally posted at ARGNet

The 2012 Mystery Hunt closing ceremonies. Image: Chris Ball

“A dim witted love god.”

I was gazing at the dense, tall pine trees around us, a refreshing change from the dry brown and yellow landscape we had already driven past. My wife and I, both Boston natives, were driving south from San Francisco for a wedding, and entertaining ourselves with one of our regular puzzle games. The first person provides a simple description, and the other must answer in the form of a rhyming adjective and noun pairing.

“Stupid Cupid,” I stated rather than asking, confident in my answer. It’s not a tough game, especially when you’ve played it together before as much as we have. That was in September of last year, and that drive inspired us to evolve our casual game into a much more challenging form: a puzzle for the 2012 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Last year our team Codex won the 2011 Hunt, which is held in January over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend. It’s a team-based puzzle solving competition that draws over a thousand diverse fans every year. The victors’ prizes are well-earned respect, and the responsibility of writing and organizing the following year’s Hunt. Each Hunt has a theme, ostensibly to provide a reason for solving all the puzzles. 2011′s Hunt led by the team Metaphysical Plant, had a theme centered around video games. For 2012, Codex chose to focus on musical theater, specifically The Producers.

For the past eight years I competed in the Hunt and even wrote a handful of puzzles for friends, but none had the level of complexity and polish usually found during the Hunt. Every long-time Hunter has a list of puzzle ideas they would like to write someday if they given the opportunity. Translating those ideas into over a hundred working, solvable puzzles takes many thousands of man hours. As our team quickly recognized, years of solving puzzles doesn’t immediately translate to creating puzzles and organizing a live event for hundreds of people. Thankfully, Codex’s team of leaders and editors provided a framework for both novice and experienced writers to participate in the process.

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USA Network is bringing back its legal drama Suits for a second season this Thursday, featuring the colorful cast of characters at the Pearson Hardman law firm. The network is welcoming fans back from the show’s hiatus with the chance to work as interns for the fictional firm on a pending lawsuit with an online story-game, Suits Recruits, that offers a very real $50,000 bonus to two lucky players.

By Michael Andersen, originally posted at ARGNet

On Thursday, June 14th, USA Network’s legal drama Suits comes back for its second season. For some fans, however, the season started early with an application for an unpaid internship at Pearson Hardman, one of Manhattan’s most elite law firms and the setting for Suits. Over the next five weeks, interns will work as paralegals and interns supporting the cast of Suits on a pending lawsuit in Suits Recruits, an interactive story-game running in parallel with the television show. Two interns will even receive a $50,000 bonus after the successful completion of their time at Pearson Hardman, embracing a compensation plan that’s quixotic even for “big law.”

The experience starts with your job interview at Pearson Hardman, where Donna (Sarah Rafferty) asks if you want to join up as an assistant or paralegal. Assistants are exposed more to office gossip and politics, while paralegals may find themselves parsing through the details of the lawsuit. Most of the game’s action is conducted over the company’s intranet, with characters from the show periodically asking questions to seek advice, gauge how well you’ve been paying attention, or even test your pop culture knowledge. Players are then assigned their first case, a lawsuit ripped from the headlines, with a former intern suing his former employer for unpaid wages a month before the company’s stock goes public. Your goal is to assist the Pearson Hardman team in representing the company…and while getting questions wrong won’t derail the investigation, missing too many questions might result in losing your chance at the $50,000 bonus.

Jesse Redniss, SVP of Digital at USA Networks, explains that Suits Recruits is designed to “bring the intrigue and excitement of working at a law firm to life . . . [and to] simulate that team experience you get when working in a law office.” Accordingly, in order to rise to the top of the internship pool, paralegals will need to share information with their assistant counterparts either by enlisting a friend to join the fun, or at the Water Cooler. As 30 Ninjas’s Julina Tatlock explains, “the two different roles work as a narrative fugue.”

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YouTubers Bernie Su and Hank Green are releasing a modernized spin on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as told through a series of vlog entries in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. With the main thread of the story playing out from Lizzie Bennet’s perspective, other characters are turning to social media to fill in the details.

By Michael Andersen, originally posted at ARGNet

Lizzie Bennet’s mother wants the best for her three daughters. Unfortunately for Lizzie, her mother’s antiquated impression of what is best involves settling Lizzie and her two sisters down with the first rich, eligible bachelors to come along. She even printed out a motivational tshirt for poor Lizzie, broadcasting that “[i]t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” As a graduate student living at home and pursuing a Masters degree in Mass Communications, Lizzie is taking out her frustrations at her mother’s overt attempts to control her life over social media for a class project she’s calling The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, with a little help from her best friend Charlotte Lu. Sound familiar? No? Maybe this will help: the Bennet family’s new neighbor, Bing Lee, is best friends with an abrasive socialite named William Darcy.

That’s right, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, with a modern twist. Lizzie unabashedly assumes the role of unreliable narrator in the video blog (“vlog”) series recounting her various adventures that serves as the crux of the experience. While Charlotte and her sisters occasionally take over the vlog, the cast is purposefully minimal, forcing Lizzie, Charlotte, and her sisters to don over-the-top costumes while mimicking their parents, William Darcy, and even each other in a format that should be very familiar to frequent YouTube viewers. These videos offer a powerful platform for the sisters’ disparate personalities to shine through, allowing the plot to serve as a pleasant afterthought supporting a steady stream of sisterly bickering.

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To be a pop star in the 1980s you needed two things: a good set of chops and a whole lotta hair mousse. Actually, the chops might have been optional. See if you can identify these ’80s singers by their impressive tresses.

Mouse over just to the right of each number to reveal the name of each singer.

Puzzle by Jeffrey Marman and Mike Selinker
Illustration: Kelsey Dake

Also in this issue

• How to be a Geekdad
• Why Next-Gen Videogames Will Rock Your World