I’ve been fol­low­ing track­backs from the var­i­ous arti­cles men­tioned here. I found the one for Jack Mottram’s submit response blog. Is the story you get from the email sup­posed to be about what hap­pened to him at the station?

Then, later, this:

I cre­ated a twit­ter account to follow Jack Mottram…I hope this wouldn’t be con­sid­ered stalking….this is what his last post said:

Anyone else reading/playing We Tell Sto­ries? http://​tinyurl.​com/​2​vckou - http://​ican​haz.​com/​cluez

Won­der­ful! For a little while, I became a char­ac­ter in a game I’m play­ing myself!

I resisted the temp­ta­tion to play along, plac­ing myself inside the ARG as an unof­fi­cial hybrid player-​character. But only because I’m so easily iden­ti­fied as a real person, and most play­ers would instantly assume that Six To Start, thor­ough as they are, prob­a­bly wouldn’t write seven years’ worth of weblog posts or some­how insert a decade of jour­nal­ism into the press in order to create my backstory.

Though I wonder if this sort of trick been tried before? I’ve never fol­lowed any other ARGs, only read­ing about them after the fact, but it strikes me that recruit­ing demon­stra­bly real people to play char­ac­ters would be an inter­est­ing move, adding to the level of dif­fi­culty and longevity of the game.

As well as being six sto­ries by six Pen­guin authors, We Tell Sto­ries is an ARG, designed by Six To Start, set to be launched once the six inter­ac­tive fic­tions have all been pub­lished over the coming weeks. There are, though, already some little ARGish clues pep­pered through the map text of the first story: the addresses of con­tainer com­pa­nies, promi­nent men­tions of easily-​visited places (var­i­ous rooms in the Bal­moral Hotel, Edin­burgh for exam­ple), and a ‘phone number: 020 8133 8141.

I rang, and heard this:

Hello, Alice?

I’ve made a ter­ri­ble mis­take. I need your help.

I have a story to tell you, but it will only make sense in the right place.

If you stand face to face with the statue of John Bet­je­man in St. Pan­cras sta­tion, ring this number: 020 7193 3154.

Then I’ll be able to explain more.

As luck would have it, I’ll be in St. Pan­cras Sta­tion tomor­row morning…