Reddit and ARG's

Users of Reddit are often referred to as a community. I don't go on the site a lot myself but a friend is always telling me about what incredible problem solvers the users are. He told me about one post he'd been following where a someone had admitted to incest with a young girl. I'm hazy on the details but from what I remember, the anonymous blogger had uploaded a picture of a room for some reason. Within less then an hour, the Reddit community had tracked the guy down. Firstly someone identified a toy mascot and asked others whether they recognised it. Sure enough, someone did and a Reddit user who went to the school contacted the school.
Interestingly, Reddit has a whole section for people to help out with solving problems called The RBI- Reddit Bureau of Investigation (http://www.reddit.com/r/RBI).
Here, an online community attempts to solve problem from stolen phones to missing people. Surely the reward is more satisfying then the Eureka moment discussed in the lecture since a lot of the time, these problems are not fictional. People use specialist knowledge (often of technology) to help out free of charge.
I've also come across a user's attempt at ARG. Under the title Possible murder confession on Reddit, the blogger reflected on his experience of creating the story.
"Honestly the whole thing was starting to creep me out. Writing the story wasn't too bad, but interacting with other redditors while in character as a remorseless killer--well, it made my flesh crawl."

Unlike some of the games talked about in class, the man behind the fictional story was in direct contact with people trying to solve the problem. It obviously took it's toll on the guy.
It appears Reddit has the ideal community to create a really good ARG, yet it would be difficult to make it sufficiently challenging.

Lloyd Thomason (2691650)
Word count: 311
This week I contributed to the 'sound design in video games' post