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Project Vigiseq

Project Vigiseq was UWA’s first full-scale ARG (Alternate Reality Game) project, with digital screens, posters and stickers spanning from the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery all the way down to the Business School. The game lasted for a little over three weeks, and contained three distinct chapters. These included geolocation clues, cryptography content, individual designs and social media videos to match weekly themes. The game saw a high participation rate, with 34 participants registered as “Players” by the last game.

These individual games involved back-and-forth interactions between the tangible and virtual world, on campus and online.

chapter 1

Streaming of digital poster via UWA Guild

Preliminary designs and vision board (cr: Dorian Winter)

Chapter 1 was a vague introduction of the game, masked with flickering images and a selection of 20 posters and videos across campus. QR codes were subsequently scanned, and players were made to “register” their participation on Google Forms, unlocking a unique website.

chapter 2

Chapter 2 saw the emergence of geolocation clues, the first being the Sunken Garden where groups of random students crossed paths while uncovering the mystery of the game.

Players were lead from a simple QR code to an Instagram page and subsequently a website, where everything seemed to get even more confusing.

“I was walking around university and found an interesting looking sign, decided to photograph it and I spent the rest of the day looking into it and going down the rabbit hole. I was excited at the prospect of getting to play a well put together ARG (Alternate reality game) in person, though with little information on the day I found it, I was a little disappointed there wouldn’t be much to it.” – Nicolas, leaderboard player (Eyes of Ra

Chapter 3 was a week-long extravaganza themed around the phrase “The Early Bird Gets the Worm”, with related titles, posters, and locations. In one substage of this game, Chapter 3.2, handwritten letters were lodged inside the books of Reid Library, with worm-related titles to match. Many players loitered around campus, eager for the next clue to emerge.

chapter 3

Individualised letters written in code

Letter-finding and decoding

The first sightings of posters on campus

Letters hidden inside books

“Chapter 3 [was] so goated, running up and down Reid [library] and then someone finding it before us, then doing it again 2 more times before spending 2 hours straining over a cipher.” – Anonymous player

Clusters of posters on campus

Leaderboard animations shared on Instagram

chapter 4

The final round, Chapter 4, saw the newly formed cryptography teams struggle to win the crown. This round was held solely online after the chaos of letter and poster distribution that occurred in Chapter 3.

“At the start of the project I was so confused that I made a group chat with random people who I’d seen comment on Vigiseq’s Instagram posts, and this group chat became a team who ended up coming 2nd overall! And in the final challenge where we made puzzles for other teams, I loved watching another team attempt my puzzle and slowly uncover unlisted videos and a secret discord server.” – Libby

“[My favourite part was] coming together with the rest of my team, the Eyes of Ra, to solve puzzles together despite the fact we were total strangers who had only met each other at the start of the ARG.” – Nicolas

“[Project Vigiseq] was unique and exciting. It made my time at uni more fun. And I’ve made some friends from it.” – Noah

The final scoreboard

post-game interview

Post-Vigiseq, I was contacted by Pelican Magazine (UWA's student newspaper) to be interviewed as the solo gamemaster behind what was UWA's first campus-wide ARG.

You can read this interview here: