Made Zombies, Run! and Perplex City, wrote You've Been Played and A History of the Future in 100 Objects.
Associate Artist at the Traverse Theatre. Writing a book about immersive art.
Blog: mssv.net
Larp: strandfall.com
Video: youtube.com/adrianhon
Adrian Hon
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There is *no* other coverage of PayphoneGo that I could find, beyond this Guardian piece and Norris' own LinkedIn post from today mentioning that piece.
On the other hand, there's lots of coverage of Payphone Tag, an Australian game launched earlier this year (April?), by Alex Allchin.
Adrian Hon
Attention, Runners! We have a new promo out!
This is the first video we've released for Zombies, Run! in a really long time, and we're excited to share it.
Raise the gates!
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On which point, apparently Allchin's Payphone Tag *wasn't* inspired by Ingress, despite having similar ideas of territory capture and triangular areas.
Again, I can believe this – I don't think Ingress is very well-known, unlike Pokemon Go.
that’s my secret, cap: I’ve always thought Rutger Bregman was a talentless dick
Riley Walz is best known (to me) as the developer of Jmail, the Gmail-esque interface for Jeffrey Epstein's emails.
Anyway, I don't have a gotcha for this – people are allowed to be inspired by each other, or not!
Just occurred to me that with the gradual decline of the web, if one were to remake an ARG in the classic early 2000s style, it would now be a period piece - not that far off from when Backrooms was set.
Which is interesting and cool!
I can sense a book about ARGs in my future, especially since @mjandersen.bsky.social isn’t persuadable.
Not for a while! But ARGs have looped around from being cool to dead to cool again. Incredibly, they’ve entered common parlance and have completely reinvented themselves.
There’s a good case for saying they are the true web-native form of literature, and more broadly, the most vibrant form of experimental fiction. Certainly there’s still the link to epistolary fiction.
The Guardian has a charming article out today on an Australian payphone-based game called PayphoneGo by a 19 year old Kris Norris in Brisbane.
I was curious if the dev was influenced by earlier games (I Love Bees, Nike Grid, etc) but hit a brick wall...
Adrian Hon
Adrian Hon
Zombies, Run!
Adrian Hon
A real-world territory capture game using payphones. Dial in, enter your PIN, and claim payphones across Australia to build your turf.
What appears to have happened is that earlier this year, Riley Walz launched "Payphone Go" in California, which ended in March; Norris credits her own PayphoneGo was being inspired by Walz's game.
And maybe Payphone Tag was inspired by Walz, too? Hard to tell.
