But with contestants who possess extraordinary technical skills, the studio has found itself playing
a technological leapfrog to make sure no one cheats.
"What they're supposed to be using skill for is solving the puzzle but instead they're hacking
the system," said Henri Poole, president of vivid studios,
which ran a similar event for TriStar Pictures' "Johnny Mnemonic" movie earlier this summer.
The episode illustrates the difficulty of holding a promotional contest in cyberspace, where things
like time and location can be manipulated by programming. It also shows how people with little or no
computer skills can be pushed aside in the electronic world.
Participants in The Rift are asked to solve several dozen clues to track down the Rift Surfer,
"an interdimensional entity" tearing apart the Internet. vivid decided to place the clues on
its Web site at random times, which would cause people to visit the game frequently.
But programmers at an electronic design firm in Orlando, Fla., created software to automatically
alert them to a new clue and then made it available to everyone who was playing.
"Our whole office got sucked into this Rift game," said Brian Clark of
GlobalMedia Design. "vivid is definitely the
premier studio for these kind of games and with a prize like a Silicon Graphics machine, every
time I turned around here, people had Rift up."
vivid began probing the skill of GlobalMedia's "clue robot" by changing the narration of the
game, not just the clue. The robot picked up those changes, resulting in mistaken notifications
of a new clue.
So GlobalMedia improved it. And then, vivid began changing the clue structure, beginning with a
narrative rather than a simple "Clue No.63."
"vivid was very responsive, teasing us, making changes people couldn't see in the page," Clark said.
[ . . . ]
