Project Architeuthis (link here) was an alternate reality game launched by the U.S Navy, as an online advertising campaign designed to identify and recruit potential candidates for their Cryptology branch. The game extended for 18 days, and consisted of puzzles such as coded messages, cyphers and pictograms uploaded to Facebook for followers of the page to solve. As our extension of the Judging by the Cover project (link here) relies on Facebook comments to shape a final, collaborative video, Project A serves as an important guide in creating engaging online content that encourages users to respond with their ideas.

Looking at the project, one of the things that kept people intrigued is the sense of community that developed around it. Most of the puzzles took some form of teamwork to solve and thus forums, Facebook groups and Twitter hashtags were quickly created to facilitate team efforts, discussing ideas, strategies and even communicating in code themselves. However as Judging by the Cover is intended to encourage highly individual and unique responses from contributors, creating these kinds of discussion groups wouldn’t have the same effectiveness. To create a sense of community, we’ve instead asked friends and family to be the first ones to like our Facebook page, as well as encouraged them to share it to others who may be interested. Being a small-scale project, having a group of people who are already familiar with each other should hopefully elicit more responses.

The other source of intrigue from Project A was the sense of progression and development it created in its players. Each puzzle solved would unlock a clue for the next day’s puzzle, helping to keep them interested in continuing. We thought the easiest way to replicate this ourselves would be to ensure our posts were kept on a regular schedule, hinting at the final video to give them a sense of purpose as well as progression.