The 13th Labour...

Several months ago i discovered the world of ARG - Alternate Reality Games. This was initially through a free card I received in an order placed at Firebox. As a curious person I solved the card which gave me the phone number to a character in the game - Perplex City.

The resulting phone call led me to an online journal, and further down the rabbit hole. I am now an avid player and have participated in a live event in London, learnt some very interesting skills (such as solving ciphers) and generally met a whole host of like minded players and people through the ARG community and Unfiction

I am currently working with many of the players in attempting to solve the 13th Labour - an RC5 encrypted card which to this day remains unsolved. Many of us have got together and have started a project to decipher the encrypted message creating a grid computing project which can be downloaded from the web site I designed - 13th Labour.

Several of the players and even Mind Candy have put together a prize for the user who processes the work unit which cracks the code. When you run the client you are asked for a name and email address - provide this and you may be with a chance of winning. You could falsify these but then you probably won’t win anything.

The client, incidently, requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, but can be run outside of Windows using Mono, a Novell-backed project to allow applications written for the .NET Framework to run on other platforms. Indeed, if you’re using Mac OS X, all you need to do is download the Mac build, open it and run the installer. Then, when you want to run a program compiled for .NET, open a terminal, go into its working folder and type ‘mono [appname]’. At present this will only work for some .NET applications, namely those that work in console mode. It is a bit bizarre to be running .exe files on a Mac, though.

If you would like to help us please visit the site and download the client - Join the 13th Labour - and i hope this leads you to a world of fun :)