SLENDER - A Brief History of Slenderman

I don’t want to be a dick, but I was crapping my pants over Slenderman before it was cool. Slenderman has a long and colourful history of making the bottom drop out of peoples’... bottoms, which extends far beyond his recent iteration in the indie game “Slender”.

Slender seems to have cropped up recently due to a number of prominent YouTubers picking it up as the perfect “Let’s Play” game. You spawn in first person, in a pitch black forest with only your torch to light your way. The game is almost completely silent other than your quiet breathing, and soft footfalls – both of which gradually get louder and more frantic as you progress through the game.

The idea is to collect pages from a notebook. These will be stapled to trees, abandoned cars and other landmarks across the map – eight in total. Each time you pick up a page the music will build to ramp-up the tension. Picking up pages or excessive running also alerts your presence to the antagonist of the piece – the eponymous Slenderman.

FLASHBACK: ARGH! Porcelain Bees!

The second in my flashback series takes me all the way back to 19th November 2010. Alternative Reality Games were a real passion of mine, and I know my interest in them lies dormant somewhere inside my psyche still. I moved away from talking about them on my blog, simply because I felt that I was trying to stretch my subject too thinly and in the long run it wouldn't have worked. But that doesn't mean I can't revisit the time every so often. So, enjoy!


I've mentioned in a number of my posts that I am an avid gamer. However, what I haven't mentioned is that I also like to indulge in a bit of ARG-y goodness now and again. ARGs or "Alternative Reality Games" are games in which the player can get totally involved, the story unfolds in front of them through a number of different mediums and more often than not the puzzles are solved through community collaboration. I've mentioned my interest in online communities and their composition, evolution and cohesion in previous blabberings.

One of the most widely known ARGs is the horror/thriller game Marble Hornets (although, it is often seen as more of a chaotic fiction). MH tells the story of a group of friends who are haunted by the ghostly figure of Slenderman, as well as a number of other unsettling characters. The story revolves around the character Jay who is given a bin bag full of old videos by his friend Alex and told to destroy them. Instead Jay watches the tapes, originally meant to be film from the budget movie they and a few friends were filming, and sees Alex's sanity unwind as his is stalked by Slendy.

The story is mostly told through youtube and Twitter (@marblehornets) posts, with updates coming in the form of "Entries" - beginning with The Introduction and culminating in Entry 26. I don't want to give too much of the story away, just in case you are interested in getting involved, but its certainly worth watching from the start - also keep an eye on the video responses!

The main reason for this post is that "Season 2" appears to be starting, with Jay's Twitter being updated with 3 new mysterious and cryptic pictures - the ARG forums are furiously attempting to decode them, check out the action on unFiction here. I would thoroughly suggest getting involved in the forum and contributing, they are all very friendly and the community spirit of solving each problem as a group is really rather thrilling. There are tonnes of other viral and grassroots ARGs to get involved in on the unfiction forums, it was a big part of my life in the early part of this year and I've lost contact with the group of late, I'm hoping to get back into it with the new season of Marble Hornets.

Just.. erm, watch your windows, do not start to film yourself and, whatever you do, don't go into the freaking woods...

Marble Hornets Entry #38

 It's a good'un.



It feels like we might be finally getting a grip on where the Slenderman has come from. I suppose the implication is that he is one of the unfortunate criminals to have been stretched out by the trees. It's a real and concrete move by Marble Hornets to explain their storyline; a lot of these YouTube series go for a long time surviving on scares and freaky imagery without providing any answers - it's brave of Troy and the guys to lay some of their cards on the table.

Plus, Troy has told us that the DVD is just around the corner (Warning: don't follow the link if you don't want to see OOG MH stuff). He released it with a pretty nifty jigsaw puzzle for us to solve and decipher - smart move, the guy knows his audience. The DVD will include (quoted directly from Troy Wagner's Blog Machine):

MARBLE HORNETS: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
--------------------------------------------------------
-Two discs!
-Includes Introduction, Entries 1-26 and their respective totheark responses.
-Commentary by me, Joseph (Alex), and Tim.
-Behind the scenes funstuff like bloopers and Tim being a constant, hilarious distraction.
-The tweets/twitpics
-Bios
-Festival trailer
--------------------------------------------------------


I'll be looking into getting a copy for myself as soon as poss. Should be good! I'm looking forward to seeing how they tie in all the Entries and convey all the stuff that went on between the YouTube videos (the Twitter trail to the Red Tower, for example).

This Is Not A Game

TINAG is the mantra of a good ARG player and a effective PuppetMaster. It binds the whole game together, keeps players involved and immersed and ensures that the PM can hide effectively behind the curtain pulling the strings at will. It stands for "This Is Not A Game" and essentially translates to that whilst we are "in-game" all characters, players and external game objects must act as if they exist in their own Universe - as if the whole charade is real. TINAG keeps the players in the Universe of the PM's creation, and keeps the PM safely hidden behind the "curtain", it allows the players to experience the game in its purest form, without constand reminders (at least from in-game sources) that it is, in fact, just a game.
UnFiction is strictly OOG (Out Of Game) and anything which is said there must have absolutely no bearing on the game in question, of course, there aren't ARG-police out there to enforce this rule and many a PM has encroached on uF's immunity by posting there as an in-game character (see the Slenderman Mythos board for several examples) or using information shared there by the players to drive their story:

• For example, say Player A finally cracks a puzzle which has been bugging the community for weeks - he posts his conclusions on unFiction to the delight of his peers, they share a flagon of Butterbeer and rejoice, but no-one posts the solution to any ingame source as they want to release the information carefully and get the best result possible. The PM, having seen that the players have solved the puzzle (after perusing the thread for their game on the forums) declares the puzzle solved and releases the next puzzle. Players would probably consider this a breach of the trust which goes with uFiction and be significantly displeased with the PM.
• Another example could be a single player given information by an in-game character and told "not to share it with a single living soul". It is perfectly within their right to release that information on unFiction if they choose to - theoretically, the in-game character could never know as unFiction doesn't exist in their Universe. If there are in-game ramifications for the player releasing the information on unFiction then again, the players would be rather miffed.

Thats not to say there can't be a back and forth between the PM and the players; I've interacted with a number of PMs whilst playing their games - sometimes for OOG hints and sometimes just to chat. The VA interview I did a few weeks ago allowed the players to see how Paul put the whole game together. It gave us a deeper understanding of the story which we might have missed (OK, lets be honest, we missed a LOT).

I've followed Troy's blog for a few months now and I feel its given me a greater understanding of the creative process behind the Marble Hornets series. Troy talks about managing his schedule with MH updates, school, filming, work and other such things and to be honest I'm incredibly impressed. The MH team drop some seriously high quality content every couple of weeks or so and manage to maintain a zealously loyal following of viewers across the Internet whilst simultaneously studying, working and, seemingly, going to Mardi Gras (see left). The MH game has never really been about player interaction. The closest we've come to actual puzzle solves are the cryptic TTA vids which crop up every so often. With this minimal interaction, there have been few chances for the players to get behind the "curtain" and see the cogs which drive the story. Troy's blog allows us not only to peek behind the curtain, but to leap out between the crack in the drapes and shout "Oi Oi boys!".

As a rule to go by, TINAG is a good one. But its not set in stone and it is changing. A while back I talked about Gaming and the Real World, and how Jane McGonigal hopes that through gaming we might influence real world change. It isn't difficult to fit TINAG into this conception - I suppose it only serves to truly emphasise the point: it really isn't a game if it has real world implications. It sounds like a brilliant idea in my opinion and I hope that as a medium gaming begins to gather credibility as a vehicle for change. I hope, however, that if we begin to see more and more games which seek to impress real world changes onto their players, that PMs will not forget that, deep down inside, we are all kids who want to play, we want to be sucked into a world without consequences and just escape for a while. I hope that PMs won't forget that, whatever we say... TIAG.

The Return of Tothecarp

The look which sparked a thousand FanFics

The archetypal "totheark" character has become a staple in most Slenderblogs nowadays - for EMH we have HABIT, for Tribe Twelve there is the mysterious package person, for Dark Harvest there is the Slender-impersonator...
But totheark himself is, obviously, the purist's favourite. He's up to his old tricks again with the new season, giving us a glimpse into his mind with the "Fragments" video from a couple of weeks ago - which included a torn up picture of Alex.
Yesterday he uploaded his second installment for this season: "broadcast" - 14 seconds of what appears to be the visions of a drowning person; watching their punisher from below the surface of the water. Its creepy stuff, amplified, of course, by the overlay of distorted audio. Currently, the theory is that the audio is something like "In time, you will suffer for what you did to me". Made all the more chilling due to the previous Entry of Marble Hornets depicting Alex caving Tim's head in with a rock.

This season is just hotting up.

Marble Hornets #34/35 - Aka - Why I need new Trousers

I haven't done a Marble Hornets post in a while, so I thought I'd update because things just hit the effin' roof.
Entry #34 sees us follow Jay to the return address for the package he received at the end of Season one. It seems to lead him to an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere - other than some rubble and bad graffiti, theres absolutely nothing to see. Until of course, you reach Entry #35.

Entry.Freaking.Thirty.Five. Watch it now. I demand it!


Now, without spoiling it for those not already clued up on what happened - what are the implications of this? How will Jay react to this news? Also, where the hell is Jay at the moment anyway?!

I'm still reeling, and so is the Marble Hornets community. Less than a day the thread on unFiction has almost 500 posts and is nearing 30 pages as I type this. As Jay says at the end of the video. This changes... everything.


ps. oh yeah and theres the TTA video "Fragments" with a cut up picture of Alex - but I guess we won't be seeing many of them anymore, right? WRONG! You forget, the contents of #35 are in the past. We have 2 options: TTA is someone else is still posting (and Tim is dead - although I suppose he could still be alive) or TTA was Tim all along and he somehow survived Alex's rock of doom.

Distilling January: A Review

I've taken inspiration from tagn.wordpress.com and I decided to take a look at what happened in my newly emerging blog over the course of the past month.

 Verydistilled has become a bit of an obsession of mine since I started in November last year, you'll notice I try to post daily on weekdays and stay in contact over Twitter most of the rest of the time.

My topics of conversation through Jan have ranged from creating evil penguin-eating monsters in LBP to attempting to murder my friends over New Year. I've read some really interesting articles over the past few weeks, from the heroism of Twitter defending its clients, tonnes of predictions for 2011 games and even some lore stuff for GW2 (yay for giant polar bear warriors!). Considered buying DC Universe Online; decided against it, bought LBP2.

The most popular posts for January 2011 were as follows:

1. Vanessa Atalanta Trilogy - Puppetmaster Interview
2. Guest Post: The Experience of Evil by time2pwnu
3. The Looking Glass Club
4. Waiting for my Blue Mace Lady
5. Marble Hornets Entry #33

Congrats to time2pwnu - in the short time its been up, his guest post has shot to near the top of my reader list. Nice one :D.

Top 10 Search Terms for January 2011

1. blue mace lady
2. marble hornets 33
3. "robert monroe" xkcd sickness
4. appleofoureye
5. everymanhybrid
6. inception ambiguity
7. marble hornets unfiction
8. segst
9. "an amphibious mammal swims in this sea"
10. "apple of our eye" slender man

Special mention to the person who found their way to my blog via the search term: little naked nude blogspot. Kudos horny midget blogspot adventurer - you are a king among men.

Video gaming wise my time has been split as follows:

50% Black Ops

25% Guild Wars

25% Little Big Planet 2

Black Ops: I'm now about halfway through my 5th prestige - not amazing by the real hardcore gamers' standards, but impressive for me, I think! I'd rate myself as semi-decent. Usually going positive when it comes to K/D ratio once the game ends (my overall K/D is currently 1.22). Each time I prestige I keep trying to use different guns, but inevitably I always end up falling back on the FAMAS - its a complete beast and I love it.

Guild Wars: I've been striving to finish the Elonian cartographer title by exploring the continent of Elona in its entirety (and so get Legendary cartographer by gaining the equivalent title for all continents), and also max my Luxon Allegiance title through grinding out some Alliance Battles and Jade Quarry after Jade Quarry battles. All the while, I've been chugging booze like there's no tomorrow - I will have GWAMM by the time GW2 is released!

Little Big Planet 2: Only recently got it, but if you've been reading my posts and following me on Twitter you'll know how much I've been enjoying this game. I think I'm on the final few levels now and its getting tough, I've heard the final boss is a complete bitch so I'm looking forward to that. I'll be making a level fairly soon, the Girl asked if I would make one on the subject of "how much I love her" - so she'll probably be eaten by Gobbler's mother. Who knows?

ARG-wise, the first part of my month was filled with 15 Days of Darkness stuff (what with the OOG discussion going on the 4th of Jan), subsequent to this we've got some interesting stuff happening in Marble Hornets and also some real developments from the smaller YouTube stories out there (such as Experience of Evil and Dark Harvest). Other games worthy of a mention:

Missing Wallace - brilliant story in this, uF poster Thunderwolf has just come in and blown the whole game apart, so its well worth getting involved if you fancy it.

The Wrach - interesting story, cryptic and twisting. Worth getting into if you've got the conviction.

Interesting blogs I've come across over the month:

Brit Chick Runs - Healthy living and running blog from a horse-mad oatmeal hoarder, lots of fun.

L'Épée Magique - RPG enthusiast and Dragon Age: Origins player. Debates tea and elvish custom.

Video Games Blogger - up to date gaming news, crashes when I load it at work - update IE systems admin! Curse you. 

Kill Ten Rats - MMORPG news, including lots of Guild Wars stuff. Love it.

So, its been an interesting month overall. Expect more stuff from Feb - notably, Guild Wars updates, Marble Hornets shenanigans, Black Ops pwnage, fluff, stuff, waffle and banter.

Marble Hornets Entry #33

I... I'm just... holy crap - just watch this.




I continue to be astounded by Season 2 guys. Muchos kudos, you do not disappoint.

Had a very busy day, my sister was taken to hospital earlier after fainting at work - considering her medical history and whats happened over the past year, its not been an easy night. Thankfully she has now recovered, but not without scaring the crap out of us all.

Marble Hornets: Entries #28-32

There are a couple of things I want to talk about re: Marble Hornets today, so I reckon this is probably going to be a long one - first I'm going to talk about the Entries #28 - #32, and second how a really well constructed narrative like Marble Hornets can affect your life/sanity/wardrobe. For your delectation, Entry #32:


So, #28-32. If you haven't seen them, head here for #28, #29, #30, #31, aaaand #32 - do it now - the story is just getting juicy and I like where they are going. Troy and the gang have resisted the temptation to jump straight back into the sequence of normal vid, slendy reveal, TTA response, normal vid. They are ramping up the tension and its not until #32 that the intrigue really kicks in. There are chekov's guns galore going on in the Entries up to #32 (the pills, the safe, the blood on the stones etc). Jessica, Jay's neighbour in the hotel, is slipped in as early as #27 as just a passer by, but its not until #31/#32 that you really get to grips with the role she's going to play in the story.
Talking of Jessica - the acting in the series so far is really top notch. Troy (on his blog) talks about how he's attended a really good acting class between the shooting of the previous series and this one and I believe its really payed off. In addition, watch #32 - Jessica's acting in that scene is excellent, she looks genuinely haggard and scared, desperate for Jay to affirm to her that she isn't going insane. There have been some complaints on unFiction that the smirk which comes in a little to the end is an acting tick, but I like to interpret it as a result of her relief that maybe Jay is in the same crazy ass boat as her.

#29 is an interesting one, seemingly showing Jay discovering the scene of some bloody massacre in a tunnel out in the wilderness. Its not clear yet whether this has occurred yet (as there are some thoughts as to whether Slenderman can manipulate time/space), or whether it happened in the 7 months between the two series. All I know is that when this happened, I crapped myself:

#30 shows Jay freaking Jess out by showing up at her door in the middle of the night with a camera. Smooth moves ex-lax. He feeds her some awkward lies, and retires to bed in a grump. #31 has Jay heading out to the nearest park to see if he can find the location from #29, he doesn't really find much more than a rolly-polly hoody dubbed "trailguy" by the community. #31 is actually very well shot, you really begin to feel Jay's paranoia as he darts through woody groves and goes prone in piles of leaves to try to lose this clearly confused rambler.

#32, well - I won't talk too much about it, just commend Jess's acting and the "tired eyes" make-up she had applied. The story is really hotting up now, I'm not sure whether they'll go down the dynamic duo route quite yet - but I'm very excited about where the story is going and I can't wait to see if TTA/Masky is going to make his grand entrance soon.

Click here to view the article on Entry #27

Activate my Starpower!

Post Christmas malaise. I knew Guitar Hero was a good idea, she'll be distracted for the next few months anyway:

*Hears the agonised cry of a girl who just lost her multiplier trying to activate star power from the next room*

Gotta go...

Also, just for those Marble Hornets fans out there:

Have a good one.