Adrian Hon | |
---|---|
Born | August 1982 (age 40–41) England |
Occupation | Writer, game designer |
Education | Natural Sciences at University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of California, San Diego |
Notable works | Perplex City (2004), Zombies, Run! (2012) |
Website | |
mssv |
Adrian Hon (born August 1982 [1] ) is an English writer and game designer specializing in alternate reality games and transmedia storytelling. He is the CEO and founder of Six to Start, creator of the fitness game Zombies, Run!, and a non-fiction and sci-fi author.
Hon was lead producer and designer of the alternate reality game Perplex City at Mind Candy from 2004 to 2007. [2]
In 2001, at the age of 17, Hon delivered a TED talk on Mars exploration. [3] He cofounded youth outreach program Generation Mars, [4] served as the editor of the Mars Society's official online magazine and forum, [5] and in 2002, spent two weeks at the Mars Society Desert Research Station.
Hon became interested in alternate reality games in 2001 while working on a neuroscience degree at university.
In 2001, Hon was a co-moderator of the Cloudmakers, the discussion group for The Beast. At the end of the game, he wrote a 130-page walkthrough of The Beast and participated in the post-game debrief at Microsoft. [3]
In 2004, he joined Mind Candy as their director of play. [3] [6] He produced the alternate reality game Perplex City, which ran from April 2005 to February 2007. Players solved puzzle cards to uncover the mystery of a missing artifact known as "The Cube" and competed for a real-life £100,000 prize.
For his work on Perplex City, Hon received one of the 2005 Origins Award winners, the "Vanguard Innovative Game Award", with Michael Acton Smith.
In 2022, Hon was featured in an NHK documentary Finding Satoshi about a long-running puzzle, "Billion to One", which was solved in December 2020 by Tom-Lucas Säger and Laura E. Hall. [2] [7]
In 2007, Hon founded Six to Start with his brother Dan. [6]
In September 2011, the Six to Start team, with writer Naomi Alderman, launched a Kickstarter for mobile exergame Zombies, Run!, a running game and audio adventure that uses a phone's GPS and accelerometer. Zombies, Run! was funded by a Kickstarter campaign which raised more than five times what was expected, a total of $72,627 from 3,464 backers in October 2011. Zombies, Run! became the highest-grossing Health & Fitness app on Apple's App Store within two weeks of its initial release. [8]
Fast Company named Six to Start as one of their top 10 most innovative companies of 2013, describing Zombies, Run! as "one part audio book, one part video game, and one party sneaky personal trainer". [9]
Six to Start and Alderman also created The Walk, a similar game to encourage increased physical activity throughout the day. [10] [11] The app was sponsored by the UK's National Health Service and Department of Health [12] and was the first game to be funded so. [13] In 2018 The Walk was turned into a podcast and released through Panoply Media.
In March 2021, digital fitness lifestyle company OliveX acquired Six to Start. Hon was appointed chief innovation officer at OliveX and serves as executive director for Six to Start. [14]
From 2010 to 2013, Hon wrote a regular column for The Telegraph. As of 2022, Hon is a monthly columnist for the print edition of EDGE magazine.
In 2013, Hon wrote A History of the Future in 100 Objects, an alternate history science fiction book looking back on the 21st century from the perspective of the year 2084. [3] The book was the subject of a 2017 art exhibition for the Shanghai Project by artist Chen Xi, curated by Yongwoo Lee and Hans Ulrich Obrist. [15]
In 2020, MIT Press published a new edition of A History of the Future in 100 Objects with fifteen new chapters and three revised chapters. [16]
In 2020, Hon wrote a viral Twitter thread and follow-up post [17] [18] comparing conspiracy theory QAnon to a video game designed to hook consumers. [19] [20]
Hon released You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All in 2022, about the development and use of gamification. [21]
MSN is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95.
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
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Perplex City was an alternate reality game (ARG) created by Mind Candy, a London-based developer in 2005. Adrian Hon was the producer, designer and director of the game's first and only season, in which players searched for "The Receda Cube", an artifact of spiritual significance to the inhabitants of a fictional metropolis known as "Perplex City" and which has great scientific value. In the game, "The Cube" had been stolen and buried somewhere on Earth.
Glu Mobile LLC is an American developer and publisher of mobile games. It was founded as Sorrent in 2001 and acquired Macrospace in 2004. Both companies collectively rebranded as Glu Mobile in 2005. In April 2021, the company was acquired by Electronic Arts.
Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.
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Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users. This is generally accomplished through the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.
Andrea Phillips is an American transmedia game designer and writer. She has been active in the genres of transmedia storytelling and alternate reality games (ARGs), in a variety of roles, since 2001. She has written for, designed, or substantially participated in the creation of Perplex City, the BAFTA-nominated Routes, and The 2012 Experience, a marketing campaign for the film 2012.
A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on desktop computers, and web applications which run in mobile web browsers rather than directly on the mobile device.
Zombies, Run! is a 2012 mobile fitness game co-developed and published by British studio Six to Start and Naomi Alderman for iOS and Android platforms. Set around Abel Township, a small outpost trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, players act as the character "Runner 5" through a series of missions during which they run, collect items to help the town survive and listen to various audio narrations to uncover mysteries.
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Plants vs. Zombies 2 is a 2013 free tower defense video game developed by PopCap Games and published by Electronic Arts. It is the sequel to Plants vs. Zombies, and was released worldwide on Apple App Store on August 15, 2013, and Google Play on October 23, 2013. The player defends the lawn from zombies by placing a variety of plants. The player must battle the zombies in different time periods, including Ancient Egypt, the Golden Age of Piracy, the Wild West, the Last Ice Age, Mesoamerica, the future, the Early Middle Ages, the 1980s, the Jurassic Period, 1960s and the present.
Habitica, formerly HabitRPG, is an online task management application developed by HabitRPG, Inc. It was founded on January 30, 2013. The application uses the format of a role-playing game to organize tasks. Habitica is an open source project.
Cicada 3301 is a nickname given to three sets of puzzles posted under the name "3301" online between 2012 and 2014. This started on January 2, 2012 and ran for nearly a month. A second round of puzzles began one year later on January 4, 2013, and then a third round following the confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on January 4, 2014. The third puzzle has yet to be solved. The stated intent was to recruit "intelligent individuals" by presenting a series of puzzles to be solved; no new puzzles were published on January 4, 2015. A new clue was posted on Twitter on January 5, 2016. Cicada 3301 posted their last verified OpenPGP-signed message in April 2017, denying the validity of any unsigned puzzle.
A transreality game, sometimes written as trans-reality game, describes a type of video game or a mode of gameplay that combines playing a game in a virtual environment with game-related, physical experiences in the real world and vice versa. In this approach a player evolves and moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual stages, brought together in one unified game space. Alongside the rising trend of gamification, the application of game mechanics to tasks that are not traditionally associated with play, a transreality approach to gaming incorporates mechanics that extend over time and space, effectively playing through a players day-to-day interactions.
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Laura E. Hall is an American immersive artist, puzzle game designer, and writer. She has written several books about video games, immersive entertainment, and escape rooms.