As most regular readers know, for the past several months I've been working with Alice Liddell on a new YouTube channel that we launched called The A.L.I.C.E. Files. While I give more details in older posts like The A.L.I.C.E. Files Is Launching Soon (A Sci Fi Reimagining of Alice in Wonderland on YouTube), the general gist is that it's an ongoing audio drama with two separate stories going on. The first are the files themselves, which are narrated pieces of stand-alone fiction taken from the archives of the mysterious Carroll Institute, and which can be enjoyed on their own like any other fiction anthology. The other story, though, follows "Alice" and her position within the Carroll Institute as she meets her coworkers, learns things about this bizarre place she now works at, and realizes she is in the center of a far bigger web than she ever anticipated.
However, with the 7th episode Hearts and Tarts dropping, we're putting a little more gas into the show, and revving up the mystery elements with some actual clues in the videos and scripts themselves for viewers to really sink their teeth into so you can all delve deeper into the story as it unfolds, while coming up with your own theories about what's going on in this truly bizarre place!
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| And the deeper you go, the more there is to explore! |
Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!
Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!
Is This A Budding ARG?
An ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a jumping off point, and which employs transmedia technologies to tell its story. That all sounds pretty technical, but if you've ever been over to the YouTube channel Game Theory, you've come across several examples of this. Suffice to say, this is a fancy term for when creators set up a mystery for people watching their show, reading their book, playing their game, etc. to solve that extends beyond the actual piece of media itself. It's when you end up playing a video game, finding a clue that makes no sense in the game itself, but then you follow that clue to a private YouTube channel, it gives you a video, and in the video there are other clues for you to follow, deepening the mystery as it stretches across platforms.
Full disclosure, we aren't going quite that big with The A.L.I.C.E. Files (at this point, anyway). However, there have been subtle clues going back to the trailer about some of what's been building in the background... it's in Hearts and Tarts, though, that we decided to open the door and really invite people to put their theorizing caps on, though.
Without giving anything away, I wanted to invite folks who enjoy these kinds of games to at the very least check out this episode, but it will make more sense if you go back to the beginning of the series and start with The A.L.I.C.E. Files Trailer, working your way forward. Though the one clue I will give you is that the files Alice has witnessed so far are not clues, in and of themselves. However, the information mentioned in the dossiers and write-ups that she mentioned may contain some references, Easter eggs, and possible starting points for building your own theories.
So, if this is the kind of thing you enjoy digging into, consider sharing what you think is a clue, and what you think they all mean, in the comment sections of our videos! We're hoping to get our community invested in figuring out exactly what's happening, and what is waiting for Alice in her uncertain future... especially now that she's had contact with [REDACTED]!
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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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