A collaboration with TorGame and over 30 volunteers, Waking City was a massive 14-day cross-media experience for 120 players, spread throughout venues across all of Toronto. Players pounded the pavement, solving fiendish puzzles, uncovering Toronto’s secret history, and interacting with the agents of a vast and ancient conspiracy.
Waking City’s gameplay took players through six Toronto neighbourhoods. In each, they collected materials, solved puzzles, and interacted with story characters online, over the phone, in person and via snail mail. Puzzles were designed to encourage exploration of these neighbourhoods. Players frequently visited participating local businesses in order to collect clues. A huge amount of physical and online media was created for the game: dozens of handcrafted maps, doctored newspaper articles, plastic ciphers, encrypted websites, scripted IM conversations, leaked memos, and more.
Most of the time, teams played according to their own schedules. In a few instances, teams congregrated in a public space for a live event, where a team of actors brought the story alive and presented a variety of unique challenges: racing through the subway system, hunting down suspicious payphones in the busy financial district, or defusing a tense situation between characters.
Waking City received a substantial amount of media attention, with articles in all major national newspapers, interviews on three radio stations, two segments on Global TV News, and mentions throughout the blogosphere.
Apparatus
Documentation
