So far, nobody on the various ARG game boards I checked seems to know exactly what this ARG is for, but the Aquatic Thought Foundation is one part of the cheekily-named Jejune Institute, a group which supposedly dates back to a group of professors in the early 1960s (shades of Dharma Institute). They do "socio-reengineering," and invite you to come be "inducted" at a local downtown office building in San Francisco. Here's a video from their founder.

What stands out about this ARG is that it's incredibly sly and well-observed. These game designers know exactly what these new agey para-cult organizations sound like, and have mixed in a lot of hilarious 1970s iconography. All the "products" of Jejune are just a little too nutty to be real, but are almost believable and therefore hilarious. I utterly love the long explanation they have for why their "thought recording" equipment has to use VHS tape. Check out the gallery of fliers below to see some of their other great stuff, like a device that uses some kind of thought energy to protect your crotch.

According to people who have been playing the ARG over the past couple of months, the Jejune Institute has rented out an office in downtown San Francisco and paid a staff person to sit in the reception area and take anyone who shows up asking for induction to a room where they watch a really strange video for an hour or so. People have recorded this process and posted it on YouTube. If you want to experiment with the induction yourself, the address is on the flyers and the Jejune website.

Another wrinkle in the Jejune ARG, which apparently is taking place partly via flyers posted in San Francisco and Berkeley, is that now a counter-Jejune group has surfaced. They're posting flyers accusing the Jejune people of breaking into houses and fetishistically massaging people's feet while they sleep. Holy crap I love this freakin ARG.

Plus they have a Yelp entry.

If any of you have this ARG figured out, please tell us!

The Jejune Institute [ARG main page]

First off, though, let's consider your motivations. Why are you building a world? Is it just for yourself, while you are bored at lunch? Or do you want to use it for the backdrop of a story or game you'll share with others? These questions help you consider what to put in that world. After all, if the world is just for you, why not have it populated with masturbating alien slave men? But if you're planning to invite other people into your world, you might not want to overshare your fantasies quite so much (unless you're John Norman, and that, as they say, is another post).

1. Do a little research.
Every cool fake world is based on an interesting real one. Want a world with lots of machines? Look to contemporary Japan or nineteenth century England for inspiration. Want a world that's sparsely populated and devoted to farming? Read up on Northern Russia, and find out what kinds of dwellings and cultures exist there. Since this is a quick and dirty worldbuilding exercise, don't spend too long with the research. This is a fake world, so you don't have to be accurate. You just need a few models to base your creativity on. If you like, you can just chuck reality altogether and create a world that's based on dreams, City of Lost Children-style. Or a world based on computer-induced hallucinations like The Matrix. And hey, if you're feeling generous, you can even hire a researcher to do some of this work for you, just like Neal Stephenson did with his Baroque Cycle.

2. Have a few rules.
There is nothing more annoying than an alternate reality where anything goes. That's one of the reasons why the mental landscapes in The Cell were so annoying: When our psychologist in that flick used her special machines to enter the mind of the serial killer, suddenly they were in "mind space" and nothing made sense. Sure it looked pretty, but who wants to hang around just looking at crap if there are no ground rules at all? Even if your rule in "mind space" were just something simple like "If you die in mind space you die in reality" (a typical rule) that goes a long way toward making the action in your world more exciting. Rules create problems, and solving problems is exactly what people like to do in a world.

3. Don't obsess over consistency.
Look, we're worldbuilding on the fly here, so don't worry about being insanely consistent. That's why you want to have just a few rules rather than twenty gazillion. Otherwise there will be so many problems for your characters to deal with that walking across the street will be like filing a legal brief. You do want a few things to remain consistent, however, so spend five or ten minutes making a list of the most important constants in your world. These could be things like the names of countries and characters, or the capabilities of special technologies. It could even be a list of laws or ideologies perpetuated by an oppressive government, 1984 style.

4. Consider what's good and what's bad about your world.
Let's say you're whipping up a completely awful world like the one in Hellraiser or the post-apocalyptic Earth in the Terminator series. It's great to show us a bunch of crushed skulls and people with pins in their faces, but nobody is going to stick around for a pure torture world unless they are Matthew Barney fans. There's got to be something cool, fun, or intriguing about your universe. In Terminator, for example, the cool part of the sucktastic world is the human resistance and its ability to seize control of some of the Terminators. Of course, you have to consider the opposite as well. If you create a paradise-like world where everybody lives in peace and has biotech that cures all diseases, you need to invent something problematic or wrong to set stories in motion. Even if the problematic thing is just a bad love affair. In Octavia Butler's trilogy Lilith's Brood, we are treated to a world where aliens with complete power over their genomes live without war and cruise through the universe in eco-harmony. Sounds perfect, right? Unfortunately, they only way they can reproduce is by swallowing planets and assimilating other species' DNA into their genomes. And the human population of Earth is their new object of assimilation into the happy peaceful ecotopia. Doesn't sound so peaceful anymore, does it?

5. Create characters who are plausibly the products of your world.
Not all worldbuilding has to have characters, but usually it does. Even if you don't have characters, you're likely to have ecosystems, and this rule can apply to those too. Either way, you want the life in your world to make sense. Obviously an agrarian culture won't produce a computer whiz, since it will be devoted to farming rather than information technology. A technical whiz from an agrarian world might invent something like the cotton gin, however. By the same token, a highly technological and urban world probably wouldn't be conducive to warriors who fight with crossbows on horseback. Sure you could invent some convoluted rules to make that happen, like in Rebecca Rowe's novel Forbidden Cargo where an extremely high-tech society stages elaborate samurai battles in virtual reality. But this is quick and dirty worldbuilding, so I'm going to say you should stick with Occam's Razor as a defining principle for your characters: Go with the simplest explanation for their origins, and make things complicated later.

Alright, you've got a few rules. Now start building. I expect to see some seriously cool alternate realities by nightfall.

There are very few things in the world that I hate. Eating shrimp. Being attacked by pigeons or zombies. And going to the dentist is a big one. I hate the taste of all that nasty chemical shit they put in your mouth. I hate the high-pitched sound of the really thin drill and the shuddering thuds of the thicker one. I hate drooling. Being in a dentist chair is my equivalent of Ludovico-esque torture, except I don't have a criminal record or a movie made about me. For twenty-nine years, I've had to go at least once a year to the dentist because of candy-induced cavities as a kid, and later, because I've had to do all the shitty dental work I had done as a kid redone.

If the receptionist at Dr. Wong's office sensed my fear, she certainly didn't show it. "Hello Lisa," she said. "You are here today for a root canal, post, and crown. You owe us thousands and thousands of dollars. Your torture chamber is the second chair to your left." I handed her my credit card and walked in.

Dr. Wong has a thoughtful office with little touches that attempt to calm the human soul. He has scented candles in the waiting room, raspberry hand sanitizer and lotion in his bathroom, and a gentle, friendly smile. One time, when I drooled all over my right arm, he gave me a warm lavender-infused towel to put next to my bib. Another time, he gave me a pillow for my neck after he noticed me cracking it nervously while he stuck needles in my gums. But all these human niceties really don't do much to assuage my preternatural fear of the screechy drill. I needed something that would take me out of this world.

Earlier that day, my boyfriend had equipped me with a pair of Zeiss Cinemizer glasses and an iPod. "Take these and put them on when the drilling starts," he had said.

I sat down in the torture chair and fished the glasses out of my messenger bag. They had bulging blue alien eyes and a sleek white body. I slipped the buds over my ear canals, and adjusted the volume on my iPod so it was high enough to drown out everything. "If you need me," I said loudly to Dr. Wong and his assistant, "just tap my shoulder. I won't here you or see you for the next two hours. Good bye. Happy drilling."

The parallel universe that the Cinemizer took me to that day was not too far away—San Francisco, circa 2002, courtesy of the chick flick The Sweetest Thing featuring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair. The penis song kept me so entertained that I didn't even realize I was being smothered in dental dam. While his assistant sucked up my excessive saliva, I laughed my ass off as Cameron Diaz got blasted in the face with water from a glory hole. Pretty soon I forgot that my mouth was propped open and that I had two people staring intently into my mouth the entire time. It didn't matter—I wasn't really there in that dentist chair anymore. I was in a nightclub dancing with Thomas Jane. I was watching Selma Blair have sex with an elephant at work.

Technology was taking my worst experience and transforming into pure pleasure. I could have been staring at these blinding lights the whole time, but I hardly noticed them. The Cinemizer made me feel like a cyborg in a movie theater, not a torturee. I was in a parallel universe that had nothing to do with the reality of getting a major dental procedure done. The alien glasses took me away from my dystopia and into a fantasy world where best girl friends partied all night and chased guys and walked around town in their underwear. Meanwhile, Dr. Wong was left to his own devices to work on my root canal.

At the end of the movie, Diaz' character overcomes her fear of commitment and ends up dating a hottie she met at a club. Me? I had overcome a major fear too, with the help of these glasses. I hopped off the chair, gladly accepted the Vicodin prescription the doctor gave me, and made an appointment for two weeks later.

Say the artists:

The fabrication processes used to make the natural brown surfaces are in the lineage of those Gehry employed in his legendary "Easy Edges" line of furniture in the 1970's. Expanding on this knowledge enabled us to create architecturally scaled cardboard structures and introduce double curvature. We used the properties and limitations of the material - determined through building full scaled mock-ups during development combined with a parametric digital interface - to shape the cardboard "ribbons." The project required laminating over 20,000 strips (weighing approximately eight tons) of curved, industrially die-cut corrugated cardboard in twelve days. Incredibly strong and capable of supporting the weight of several people, the cardboard laminates operate as semi-monocoques with an intermediary plywood armature.

Rice Canyon [Ball-Nogues Studio]

What does it mean? Why are those robots chasing everybody? Will San Francisco really be reduced to a pile of rubble? Maybe if the Sarah Connor Chronicles is renewed, we'll find out.

Sarah Connor Chronicles ARG [BB TV]

This film sounds like Terminator meets Stephen King's The Long Walk, combined with alternate reality elements from The Matrix. In Japan, "onigokko" is a version of the game of tag, with a players chasing down others. Of course, in this movie it's cyborgbots with creepy heads, red vision, and some strange weapons chasing down poor Sato. If he evades his pursuers for a certain number of hours each day, then he gets various wishes granted. Although it looks like everything starts over the next day, so good luck wishing for the nightmare to end... or an unlimited number of wishes.

The film opened on February 2nd in Japan, and with any luck will be finding its way over here on a DVD platter.