This quote embodies a phenomenon in today’s entertainment media culture: the Alternate Reality Game, or ARG. These ARGs aim to bring the audience deeper into the product experience, to rev up the hype. The game’s producers build an elaborate web of interconnected “plot points,” for lack of a better term. These plot points are not overt, not communicated outright. The audience has to dig for it by picking up clues and solving puzzles that lead to the next, and so on.

A recent entry into the world of ARGs is Blizzard Entertainment’s new game, Overwatch – a game whose players are very interested in information about the next character planned for release. It started with a list of character names on a piece of paper seen in the game, with one exception. That started the rumors that this could be the next character to be revealed. Next, Blizzard released a couple of videos on YouTube where a seemingly innocuous blip (below left), actually turned out to be an image; the colors had to be enhanced to reveal a series of numbers (below right). A member of the community converted the hex values to ASCII, and XOR’ed them with the number 23, converting the result back to hexadecimal and mapping to readable letters…which turned out to be a phrase written in Spanish.

Another clue puzzle was solved when a similar strange anomaly appeared in another video. It was a series of images that looked like the color patterns you used to see on a TV station late at night after they stopped broadcasting. One of the other images was a series of horizontal black and white lines. One player took those lines, turned them 90 degrees, and read them via a bar code reader. The result was, of course, more hex values, which were converted into binary. Through some form of applied computer science, taking the binary code into pixels where 1s were black and 0s were white ultimately revealed a QR code. What did the code reveal? “Was that easy? Now that I have your attention, let’s make things more difficult.” As of the writing of this blog, the ARG is still alive and well, with more pieces being revealed regularly.

Where Does PLM Come In?

So why is this story in a PLM Insights blog? Well, I’ve seen many companies treat their design and engineering data like an ARG – meaning that lots of people are interested in it, it’s all over the place, and only a few (smart and creative) people really know how to find it. Whether it’s the “smart” part naming scheme from the late 80s that needs some kind of secret decoder ring, or the folder naming conventions where names serve as some sort of obscure meta data for the files contained in them.

An example part file (the names and numbers have been changed to protect the innocent):

S:\22648 COMP-LOGISTICS TAILCROSSER BG-F813\Units Designed By ABC\22648-9399 OP 30 Backup ASM Fixture reworked (same as 22648-9899) See XYZ Folder for new Op80 design\OP80 reworked 4-16-08 same as 22648-9899\Libraries\OP30\Purchase\Stndrd\fd65645_2

Here we have used just about every bit of the Windows character limit (which is 260, for those interested: 3 for the volume designation, 256 for path and file name with extension, and a null terminating character). Anyone that can manage files this way is clearly a talented individual. Much more impressive is that they were part of a 23-person design team that did all of their projects this way. I couldn’t imagine the frustrations of their new hires trying to find anything in this kind of environment.

The benefits of searching for data are pretty clear (see Google). Yet to this day, companies are still using antiquated methods because they think it’s “cheaper” than implementing a PLM system. Our PLM Analytics benchmark and impact analyses have proven otherwise, and that doesn’t include the myriad other benefits a PLM system offers. Let us know if you’re done playing the engineering and design ARG!

FYI, there is no ARG in this post…or is there?