I’ve been an ObieGame player three years running, and I still don’t know how to answer the question, “What is ObieGame?” How do you respond to that question?

The way that I’ve described it most frequently over the years is that it’s a treasure hunt with a plot. And secondarily, I think I’ve described it as an interactive story. Do those do full justice to it? I don’t know. … Technically it fits into a genre of activity called “alternate reality games.” But that’s sort of an amorphous term and one that’s in some ways fallen out of vogue. I would say that treasure hunt with a plot fits best, especially because it’s geographically and population-focused.

How did ObieGame get its start?

Spring of ’04, I was coming back to town from a job in California and was planning on only stopping through for a little bit. And before I’d left California, I stumbled across an alternate reality game called “The Hire”, which was associated with BMW, and was one of the early games I looked at. I had no idea what it was; there was no vocabulary on it at the time. So I started e-mailing back and forth with a friend who I knew I’d be seeing, Tony Forbes, class of ’05, I said, “Hey, there’s this thing. Want to do something like it? We’ll write some riddles and whatever.”

From there, because we had fun planning it and because we saw various people having fun playing it, we decided to do it again and we got a few more friends, usually seniors and random alums, there was a Feve bartender who helped out for a while. … It grew from there and became more plot-driven.

What is the process of constructing the game look like from your side?

Despite having done this now for years and having had various alums help out on a consistent basis, I’m still trying to figure out how to best explain to and train [new game planners] in the process. It winds up being a bit different every year; I’d say that at this point, what we’ve generally settled towards is finding a plot that interests us and then finding the way to tell that story from the player’s perspective. Sometimes we’ll wind up attacking it from multiple different angles. Somebody will have a particular riddle or a particular centerpiece idea, like “wouldn’t it be really cool if we could do x?,” and then you’ll start morphing the story or the plot or riddles to match that.

It winds up being much less science and much more art than perhaps we’d like, especially for everybody’s schedules.

Are there themes that ObieGame deals with consistently? I know that government conspiracy has come up a few times…

[Laughs] That winds up being almost our fallback “boogeyman” kind of thing, you know, just put someone in a dark suit and have them relay something to the players or show up to the player’s doors. So, that trope probably comes up a lot, either of a government agency of some kind or perhaps an evil corporation. So this year … it wound up being a military cover-up of alien experimentation; last year it was a doomsday cult scenario; the year before that it was basically a murder mystery noir, except here with an environmental destruction sub-theme.

We’ve had secret societies, we’ve had the Illuminati, we’ve had rampant artificial intelligence … Usually, and actually we’ve gotten away from it over the last couple years, but usually the line was always, “Okay, and then they save the world.”

Have you ever actually played the game?

I had an ObieGame sprung on me, by a couple of people who played — who are now friends of mine and who then helped plan a couple of later games. … So, a couple people from the class of ’06, ’07 put this thing together. I was working in the development office at the time so I got this mysterious note in my office mailbox, which led me to an e-mail address and eventually I’m traipsing off with another planner, who I roped into helping me find something in Westwood Cemetery and by the war memorial, all these things. It was lots of fun. It was really exciting, really cool.

So that was tons of fun and it was cool because it helped me remember a little better how clues will get read and misread by players and therefore, if you want them to get from point A to point B, there might have to be different ways that you present that material or clue.

So I obviously left this question until the end, but to what extent is it antithetical to the essence of ObieGame to do an interview about ObieGame? What role does “secrecy” play in the game?

For a while our unofficial motto was essentially, “If you have to ask, you haven’t played.” And that also neatly sidesteps your earlier question about how to explain ObieGame. … But generally speaking, secrecy certainly adds something, especially because there’s a real world component to all games.

I realize I forgot to ask, but why do you do this?

It’s an extracurricular. It’s fun. You’d asked if there are recurring themes and not really, but most of the ObieGame story lines could pretty easily be turned into a good movie … probably an action or a thriller. And I like those kinds of movies, and I like heist movies and puzzles and riddles and that sort of thing. So if every year I get to write another one of those with a bunch of other people and then, especially, see at the end 50 students thrilled about the 20 minutes they just spent sneaking their way through Mudd, deactivating a nerve toxin device and avoiding contact with aliens. And seeing the people who showed up to be aliens to lean out and growl at someone and everyone’s having a great time. Why wouldn’t I keep doing this? As long as it’s fun for everybody involved, it’s certainly fun for me.