World Adventurer Creates New Alternative Reality Game

Feb. 29, 2008 - PRLog -- (SEATTLE, WA)—Video games have evolved quite abundantly over the past thirty years or so. From the production of the first Atari 2600 in 1977 to the Nintendo Wii, video gaming has expanded from sitting in front of your television, tied to the game system by wires, to cordless, free-moving interaction.  

The latest breakthrough in the video game world is alternative reality games (ARG)—interactive narrative games that use the real world as their backgrounds. ARGs often utilize multiple media to tell a story that can be affected by a player’s ideas or actions.

Gary Garner, world traveler and author of the new book Through the Eyes of Madness, has created an interesting twist on the ARG. Garner has broken into the video game world by creating a Website—www.ThroughtheEyesofMadness.com—that coincides with his book and introduces a code-breaking game similar to an ARG.

“Once people uncover the hidden elements in the book, they can go online and unlock the cryptic stones on my Website,” says Garner. “When readers are able to unlock a stone, they unearth new clues hidden in various forms of media, which will eventually point to physical clues I’ve planted throughout the world. It will take a community of extremely motivated, intelligent and pure-hearted people from around the world, working together, to find what I have hidden. Someday, I am sure my secret will be discovered.”

From beginning to end, Through the Eyes of Madness is laced with a visual and mathematical secret code. But, unlike its fictional cousins such as The Da Vinci Code, this book’s secret is very real.

For the past five years, Garner has literally been homeless and jobless, and more or less without material possessions. While roaming each of the seven continents in search of a simpler life, he experienced:
--Witnessing a brutal murder on the South China Sea
--The wrath of an angry mob in the midst of a Nepalese civil war
--His own near-death experience at the heights of Mt. Everest
--Being ambushed and robbed in Costa Rica by very unusual suspects
--Countless other harrowing escapes that illustrate valuable and moving life lessons

“These past few years have been so fantastical and life-altering that even I have trouble believing it,” admits Garner.  “But that’s why I kept the journals and constructed the book in the way that I did. Now, others can share in the adventure!”

To learn more about the breakout book critics are hailing as “the most ingenious and intriguing adventure book ever written”, visit www.ThroughTheEyesOfMadness.com.

(Through the Eyes of Madness by Gary Garner; ISBN: 0-9798687-9-3; illustrated; photos; $39.99; 398 pages; 8½” x 11½”; softcover; Integrated Technology Edge Corporation)