A Journal in Jade: The ‘ARCANA’ Diaries — Week One

ARCANA, the latest alternate reality game (ARG) from the team that created All of Them Witches, kicked off on May 6. Each week, NoPro’s Laura Hess, Blake Weil, and Kevin Gossett will be offering their thoughts on Jade’s story, the brain-bending puzzles, and any other creepy goings-on.

Week 1

Laura

Despite my enthusiasm, I am not a clairvoyant-esque participant of themed games. I am not a person that, 10 minutes into a horror film, identifies the killer with casual ease. I have simultaneously and confidently mismatched the weapon, location, and the murderer in Clue.

ARCANA has not been a huge departure for me in this regard. Created by the team from All of Them Witches as a “part murder mystery, part heartbreak novella,” ARCANA is free to the public and “unfolds over a series of weeks, inviting players to dive into darkness and emerge once they find the light.” Utilizing Instagram as the game’s medium, there were 21 posts and a few Stories during its inaugural week. These introduced us to our protagonist Jade and dropped us into her narrative: a newly single, young artist suddenly living alone in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic while she navigates heartache from her recent breakup with Robin, a fellow artist.

Supernatural elements infuse the story, first in the form of nightmares. In her departure for Oregon, Robin left behind art supplies and miscellaneous possessions, haphazardly discarded around the house, mostly in boxes in the attic. Recycling some of these materials, Jade channels the fear and anxiety from her nightmares into art therapy, creating visual representations of her terrors. Clues abound in these art projects and in general posts about Jade’s life. I, however, often noticed only the most obvious plants: dismembered doll parts, for starters. I also deeply and erroneously considered innocuous objects, such as a glue gun; to me, that could legitimately pose as a threatening weapon within this context. I admit my suspension of disbelief can go overboard and so I sought support from fellow participants by way of the posts’ comments.

Relying on these comments has its advantages: it’s an immediately available hints section (some commenters appear to be in-game hint-facilitators, positing questions and depositing details ranging from nuanced to transparent), while also providing supplemental entertainment. Since Robin left, Jade mentioned she’s grateful to have plants as her only friendly company. A follower asked if she’s named them. Although Jade hasn’t, that follower volunteered they have a cactus named Satan, which gets bonus points for being thematically on-brand. Another follower-Jade exchange was an excited “I need that lamp!” which generated an equally stoked response of “Ikea!”.

So far, Jade has had three increasingly disturbing nightmares, inspiring three corresponding art pieces. I floundered at identifying core clues within the first two (which expose hidden words) and was only able to draw up the third clue from its artwork due to reveals for the two previous clues. Jade requests we directly message her about the artworks’ meanings, rather than leaving public comments as we do for the other posts.

This has been my favorite part of the game thus far: one-on-one interactivity amplifies the intimacy of the game, especially with a current follower count of more than 1,600 people. An unintentional benefit of failing to see the embedded clues was that Jade continued to chat with me, coaxing me along to unlock the hidden meanings. Later on, while rereading these messages with newfound knowledge, I clearly see her efforts to corrall me back onto the game’s path; there is some hilarity in my eager and misguided attempts at insight, which included an Inception reference, a Russian nesting dolls metaphor, and checkered psychological probes.

As the game progresses, I’ve noticed my own paranoia increasing within the game’s parameters: who am I actually interacting with? The actress playing Jade is naturally charming. I like her. I am rooting for her. And I want to be interacting with her. But who is behind the Instagram account — and does it actually matter as long as “our” relationship feels authentic? When I correctly cited the third hidden clue and also reworked a puzzle presented as a scrambled poem, Jade responded minimally, curtly confirming that my attempts were successful. I was disappointed. I preferred the previous combination of my failed detective work and more individual engagement with Jade; I felt ever so slightly special, even if it wasn’t true.

Blake

What kills me is that I got the same response after a super warm series of interactions. What could be more quarantine 2020-apt than in-character discussions of Tiger King? I actually quite liked the sudden clipped response, at the end of week one’s “act.” It said to me that something terrible had taken hold of dear, sweet Jade.

The fun and freaky side of this is trying to guess who or what is causing these changes. The week climaxed with the revelation that all these messages are connected to the murder of Marion Parker by William Edward Hickman. A kidnapping/dismemberment, it was one of the media sensation trials of the 1920s.

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After the icky feeling of realizing this is (maybe a tiny bit tastelessly) based on a real murder, it becomes a fun research game. The information is out there, and now that characters in the game are quoting the ransom notes and dolls are showing up with each of their hacked off limbs bearing a letter of Marion’s name, it gives a whole new base of clues to play with. The game has an organic growth that I’m really loving.

Which brings us back to Jade: she saw herself as the monster in those dreams. And now that her art includes references to the murders, and (in a very secret message I’ll admit a friend had to help me solve), we’ve introduced implications that either she is trapped in an attic or, seemingly more likely, that one of her victims is.

What I’m dying for is to see the world continue to expand. While the two Instagram pages the story has so far taken place on (marked as in-universe, which in tandem with an out-of-universe contact line, ARCANA gets major props for ARG safety) are nice, I’m eager to see the boundaries of the world expand, giving us knew riddles to uncover and characters to connect with.

ARCANA has hit its stride a week in — I’m hoping it can use that momentum to lift off in the coming week.

Kevin

I think Blake and Laura have covered a lot of what’s made this game so fun in its first week, so I wanted to hone in on the way the game has been playing out and how well that’s built into the medium they’ve chosen to tell it in.

As Laura mentioned, the game is taking place mostly on Instagram, but even before we got there the website for ARCANA explained the rules and how the game would work. First up, and most important for our current times, you wouldn’t need to leave the house and you would not need to break any CDC rules. Perhaps it’s basic and obvious, but I appreciate how clearly it was laid out. From there, it touched on the adult content and how to contact the game masters with both “in-world” and “out-of-world” options. There was also an explainer about how you wouldn’t need to solve the puzzles to follow the story.

I think the best part of the guidelines is the explanation of when the in-game characters will be available to participants. It’s a nice bit of expectation setting but it also tells you up front that you won’t need to be on all the time to participate.

Finally, it tells you to follow Jade on Instagram. Once you get there, Jade is clearly marked as a character in this specific ARG. It’s a necessary piece of information that clearly demarcates the field of play for ARCANA and was especially thoughtful when stumbling onto the second character. The extra layer behind this is that you only really have to see the notice once. You learn Jade (and any other accounts) are in-game, you follow them, and then they’re in your feed without the notification.

Clearly establishing the safety of the game actually makes it easier to buy into Jade (as a person and her story) because you don’t need to worry that you’re ever heading out of bounds.

I’ve also been impressed by how well the game is actually structured on Instagram. Jade makes a post to kick off the day, usually with a piece of the story (you know the game is on now). She’ll drop something and ask you to explain what it could mean to her in a DM (there’s a puzzle to solve and then send Jade the solution). You send her your answer in a DM and her personality comes out a bit more while you work through the answer (are you right or wrong? Is there more to do?). And then, typically, she adds something to her story that she’s going to bed or needs a break (the game is over for the day).

When it came time for the first week of the game to end, the day followed a similar format to the previous ones until some scary stuff went down for Jade. She signed off until Wednesday. We were left to wait and worry.

ARCANA is free-to-play and also accepting donations via PayPal. Arcana is a creation of AOTW: Eva Anderson; Mali Elfman; Eric Hoff; Tommy Honton; and E3W Productions (Aaron Keeling, Austin Keeling and Natalie Jones).

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