Online Treasue Hunts

I tried out two Online Treasure Hunts this week. The first was the movie tie in with National Treasure. From what I could gather, the game is basically a bunch of mini flash games strung together to form the 'hunt'. Most of the games I saw were basically other flash games with a National Treasure logo stuck on. There was a hang man game (that relies on scores instead of hanging), a toggle switching game, a top down racing game, among others. Overall the standard was pretty low and unengaging. No single game held the attentention for as long as it took to play. I guess the games were aimed for a pretty young audience who would require less interaction, but they would likely have an even shorter attention span. A better strategy may have been to focus thier efforts on a single high quality game rather than trying to appeal to everyone. There are some high quality clue hunt / puzzle games out there and this probably would have been a little more interesting.

I also tried a couple of the Meusem Main online treasure hunts from www.museummania.com/treasure.htm. Generally the idea was to go to a particular page, seek out some info on that page and use it answer questions. The idea is pretty simple and easy to implement but gives a level of engagement roughly of the standard of the National Treasure games. This idea could be easily expanded to something more interesting though. Making the clues more cryptic or being less specific on the sources of the information could make for a much interesting game.

Years ago I played another online game based around 'hacking' (I couldn't find a link for it now). The idea was the player would have to hack thier way through the game by doing things such as looking at page source code, manually typing in URLs and figuring out codes. Although this was aimed at a much more specific audience than the above games, it was very popular at the time as well as (or because of) being quite clever and orginal. Prehaps the moral of the story is that if you make your activity too general it ends up not appealing to anyone.

In other news, Dog1 from AdoptMe.com is apparently annoyed at not being exercised or fed.