A Suspiciously Straightforward Treasure Hunt

Peter Frick-Wright (Host): This is the Outside Podcast

Peter: I’ve decided I have to tell you a story that I don’t want to tell you. Cause it’s embarrassing. A little bit funny haha embarrassing, but also deep scar, notice-the-ways-this-has-shaped-your-adult-life, embarrassing.

I was, I think, a junior in college. Just getting into journalism, in fact, currently taking the first journalism class I had ever taken, and writing for the school’s understaffed but arguably overachieving newspaper.

I went to Occidental College, in Pasadena, California. It’s small. Like, 1500 students. If you’ve heard of it, it’s probably because Obama went there. But you have almost certainly seen it in the background of a movie or TV show. Harvard has its ridiculous endowment, Occidental has Hollywood filming location fees.

And because of its proximity to Hollywood, we’d sometimes get minor and major celebrities showing up on campus. Michael Cera, Frankie Muniz, Ben Affleck.

So one day, a flier goes up that Zach Braff is going to be a guest in a philosophy class and anyone who is interested is welcome to come. This is Zach Braff at the peak of his fame; Scrubs is in its goofy prime; I think Garden State had come out the summer before, so, people were interested. I get dispatched to write an article for the newspaper about it, I go to the classroom on the date and time—and it’s packed.

Part of the reason it’s packed is because it’s Zach Braff.

The other reason it’s packed is because they booked a normal-sized classroom. Something for like 30 people, not a big lecture hall.

By 9 am or whatever it was supposed to be, all the desks and seats are full but students are still pushing their way in to find a space. Also, there is no sign of Zach Braff. Or any kind of professor, or teacher. Or any sign that a philosophy class USUALLY takes place in this space at this time.

We waited a pretty long time. Like, 15 maybe 20 minutes, and then five, maybe six people came in and one of them had a ball of string. And at a school of 1500 people, you sort of know everyone. These weren’t my friends, but I recognized them. I had other classes with them.

And what they did next was spread out across the room, and wordlessly start tossing this ball of string to each other. And everytime someone new caught the ball of string, they would wrap it around something solid—a desk, a person, something on the wall—and then toss it again. Let’s say they did this 50 times. It could have been double that. It went on for a while.

At this point some people were still like, “...uhh, when is Zach getting here?” Others, however, have connected the dots: philosophy class, small space, huge celebrity, a spider-web of string slowly trapping us. Punishing us for our attention.

It was Art.

I would like to tell you that I was in this second group of self- and situationally-aware attendees who recognized both the significance and the symbolism of the event as it was happening. But the truth is, I was somewhere in the middle. “Did Zach tell you to do this?” “Did you have to get his permission?”

These were some of the questions I had for my acquaintances who’d gotten us all tangled together.

I hope it’s obvious that Zach was never coming. The string-along was a Happening—a kind of experiential performance art that their philosophy class was talking about. It was big in the 50s and 60s. It came out of the Dada movement and surrealism.

Some of this was explained to me in the interview I did with the group afterwards. The whole thing was art. I could take its meaning any way I wanted. But during our interview, the art project continued. They sprinkled their answers… with bullshit. Made up a fake backstory about being an artist collective from Belgium, claimed a real connection to, and a last minute cancellation by, Zach Braff. This was pretty much the first interview I had ever done, and they were peppering it with increasingly outrageous lies.

I was just getting a handle on the fundamentals in journalism class. We were still hammering accuracy, getting the facts right, not messing up people’s quotes, stuff like that. So I remember I took very accurate notes and dutifully reprinted everything they said. I didn’t think: wait does any of this make sense? for one, single, stupid, second.

So the article comes out on a Wednesday, and no one says anything to me about it at all. And then Friday comes and the quote-unquote “artist collective” gathers at an apartment off-campus to celebrate. It’s the loudest party at that apartment in a long time. They howl with laughter about the stuff they got me to print. They read quotes from the piece louder and louder until they are screaming my words at each other out on their ground floor back patio.

I know this because I lived on the second floor of that apartment. My room was directly above their back patio. And I was home that night.

This was nearly 20 years ago now, and I’ve never told that story before. There is just nowhere to hide once you say the words Zach Braff. I got tricked. I was dumb.

But I felt like I had to share it so you could understand my skepticism and caution a couple weeks ago, when I got a text from a friend about a project that he said I was particularly well-suited to write about, from one of the great artists of our time.

Jason Rohrer: So actually hold on just a second. I'm just going to get a little bit more comfortable. Just a second. Okay.

Peter (Interview): Okay.

Peter: Jason Rohrer is a video game artist. Not a visual artist that works on video games—the mechanics of the games themselves are his medium. But video games themselves are not something that people usually think of as “art.”

Jason: You know, it's like, if you think back to the Nintendo entertainment system, when I was a kid, it was like, you go to Toys R Us and you buy this plastic thing and you stick it into this box in front of your TV.

And who knows who made it or how it got to be. Right. But you go buy it. It's like a toy.

Peter: Jason’s games are not toys. Many of them are fun, but most are also interested in stuff that’s bigger, more complicated than fun. They feel like the games a poet would make. Or a philosopher. Even though he came to video games after dropping out of a computer science PhD program.

Jason:  I was just like, yeah, maybe I'll try making a video game and cause I'm a, I'm a good programmer now. And I, there's basically no, you know, no looking back from that point. And I started submitting my stuff to festivals and started getting accepted. And, and then, you know, I was right at this like prime moment where video games were pretty big commercially.

But they were mostly just kind of mindless entertainment, blockbuster-y kinds of things. You know, like big muscular guys shooting aliens was the sort of stereotype at the time. And, um,  and a lot of people were starting to ask, you know, uh, questions about what else video games could be used for, could they be used for a sort of artistic expression or more mature kinds of explorations of the human condition or whatever.

Peter: His game “Cultivation” is a social simulation about a community of gardeners. His game “Immortality” has you trying to figure out ways to end your video game life. His game “Police Brutality” asks you to figure out how to organize an unarmed resistance.

Patrick Jagoda: His 2008 game, Gravitation, explores the emotional challenges that come with work life balance as an artist. So, how do you balance flights of inspiration and time with your loved ones?

Peter: Patrick Jagoda is a professor at the University of Chicago. He co-authored a book about Jason.

Patrick: Um, he created a 2 person story generator called sleep is death. He created a nesting doll game that. Could not be completed in a single human lifetime, which is called Inside a Star Filled Sky.

In other words, his games have been very, very high concept.

Peter: His most famous game, Passage, is a five-minute-long meditation on the beauty of life and the inevitability of death. In it, you play a character progressing through life, collecting points and treasure along the way. Want to get married? Points are double, but you’re not as quick or agile. There’s also no way to win the game; No matter what you decide, what moves you make, you and your partner both eventually die in a way that is really quite moving.

Jason: Could a game make you cry? It was the big question that we were kind of toying with at the time.

Um, Could be more than just a rollercoaster ride, right? Could make you think about yourself and, and, uh, and your place in your family or your role in the world or whatever, leave you with sort of self reflection the way a great film or a great novel or a great piece of music might.

So I was sort of the,  for lack of a better expression, sort of the poster  child for that kind of thing.

Peter: In 2016, an exhibit entirely about his work called The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer was presented at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

“Passage” is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

And I like a good museum, but I am not particularly well-suited to write about any of this. I’ve played a couple of video games. A handful of times I’ve gotten sucked in deep enough that I felt real, emotional pain when my avatars faced the digital consequences of their actions. But I haven’t done that often enough to have anything to say about it.

I am, however, perhaps one of the fifteen or twenty most knowledgeable people in the world about something that sort of sounds like a video game. The Forrest Fenn Treasure hunt was a 10-year-long search for about a million dollars in gold and treasure hidden by an art dealer from Santa Fe, New Mexico that ended in 2020. I wrote about it for Outside, did an entire podcast series about it for Apple. And Jason, it turns out, just launched something kinda similar.

Project Skydrop Narrator: Perhaps there's a feeling deep down inside of you, almost forgotten. A kind of longing, a hunger for mystery, for adventure, and most importantly, for treasure.

Peter: This is an explainer video that Jason made for Project Skydrop. A treasure hunt somewhere in New England that reads like a 21st century children’s book.

Project Skydrop Narrator: But unlike those childhood stories, this treasure is real. And it's just sitting there, somewhere on the forest floor.

Peter: Jason’s treasure is a sculpture he made from about $23,000 worth of gold. But finding it might be worth a lot more than that. Every searcher pays $20 for access to the clues. Half that money goes into a Bitcoin account, and on the bottom of the sculpture, there’s a Bitcoin passphrase that allows the winner to claim the whole pot.

Jason: Um, like I cannot afford to go, uh, put a million dollars in the woods, but if a hundred thousand people join project SkyDrop.

The winner will get a million dollars.

Peter (Interview): Right. Yeah.

Jason: a hundred thousand people, isn't that many people, right. Um, in, in the, in the grand scheme of things

Peter: The clues that this entry fee gets you are photographs of the treasure that start very close to the ground, where the treasure is sitting, and get progressively farther away. There’s also a circle on a map that contains the location of the treasure. The idea is that you’re looking for features in the pictures within the circle on the map.

Project Skydrop Narrator: Each day, the circle shrinks. By the end of three weeks, it will be so tiny that it will barely contain the treasure itself. But my goodness. You certainly shouldn't wait until then. You see, by the end, everyone will know where it is and you won't stand a chance.

Peter: It is all, seemingly, for real. The treasure exists, the clues are a visual puzzle. The official launch date is tomorrow, September 19, 2024. What is not as clear, is what it all means.

Peter (Interview): do you consider this treasure hunt to be sort of part of the artistic expression that you were exploring with the video games early on?

Jason: Um, I mean, yeah, a little bit…

Peter: Almost as soon as I heard about Jason’s treasure hunt, I started hunting for the hidden agenda, the deeper meaning, the artistic project. Jason has spent 20 years making art that has been celebrated for finding new ways to access and explore the human condition. Art that is trying to show us something about ourselves, or technology. Yet, this treasure hunt is simple. Find the location of a set of pictures on a map and go get the treasure before anyone else. Is that all there was to it?

Patrick: I actually, Take him at his word in terms of the primary focus of the game. I'm not sure that I'd take him at his word about this being a straightforward treasure hunt. My guess is that along the way you find different kinds of clues, maybe there will be different kinds of game mechanics, but I can't imagine that it's a single hint that leads to a single drop

Peter: Almost everyone I talked to, from the mutual friend who introduced me to Jason to the guy who wrote a book about him said, “there’s something else going on beneath the surface here.” The question is, what is it?

Patrick: It is possible that he made a treasure hunt and that's it, full stop.

But based on the 20 or so games that he's made in the past, I bet you there are layers of meaning to what this thing is.

Peter: After the break, what’s Jason up to?

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Peter: The idea of putting a treasure in the woods and asking people to go find it is a cool idea, but it’s not exactly a new idea. Forrest Fenn did it with his poem in 2010, but based on when he says he came up with his plan, and how similar the two hunts are, he was most likely inspired by a treasure hunt called The Secret, by Byron Preiss, which started in 1982.

The Secret consists of 12 poems and 12 illustrations which you have to pair up and decipher if you want to find the 12 different treasures, buried in cities around the US. But that hunt owes a debt to the very first armchair treasure hunt that I’m aware of: an illustrated search for a golden rabbit that started in 1979—Masquerade.

There have been more, over the years, but these are the big ones. And, according to Jason at least, they all have something in common.

Jason: it's like, okay, treasure hunts.  That have occurred, haven't really worked that well, like the ones I've run in the past and the ones that these other people have run kind of,  kind of fundamentally break in one way or the other

Peter: Forrest Fenn’s treasure took ten years to find, five people died, searchers ended up stalking Fenn, threatening his family, getting arrested. Some people thought it was all a big joke, or a trick—that he never put the treasure out there in the first place… it was a mess.

In The Secret, only three of the twelve treasures hidden by Byron Preiss have ever been found. And he died in 2005. That hunt was too hard.

Masquerade was a scandal. The winner cheated. He was a friend of a friend of the creator’s ex-girlfriend, and got inside information that led him to the right spot.

Jason himself has created treasure hunts before. But they also haven’t quite worked.

Patrick: So when I think of the key precursor to Rohrer's current treasure hunt, it's his A Game for Someone.

Peter: A Game for Someone was the result of a design challenge at the 2013 Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco. And it was actually a grand challenge–the competitors were the previous ten winners of the annual design challenge. The prompt was to come up with “humanity’s last game.”

Jason: And so this time I was like, okay, how do I make the last game? Humanity will ever play. It has to be in the form of some kind of time capsule-ish type thing that kind of, uh, you know, isn't played until humanity is gone. Or, you know, I, I set this date of like 2000 years into the future.

Patrick: So in order to create a game that could remain hidden for thousands of years, he created the 18 inch Board and pieces out of titanium.

Peter: It was a simple, strategy board game, designed to be indestructible, and before the conference, Jason generated a million unique GPS coordinates on public land in the state of Nevada, picked one at random, and went there and buried the game.

Jason: the idea was that, uh, With these million coordinates,  I split them up into, uh, a thousand envelopes with a thousand coordinates each on pieces of paper and put them under every seat in the auditorium where I was giving the presentation.

So everybody in the auditorium had an envelope with unique coordinates on it. Um, and one person somewhere in the audience had the correct coordinate somewhere on their sheet, right?

Peter (Interview): Mm hmm.

Jason: So of course that caused a crazy frenzy during the presentation and, uh, and people were thrilled with his idea. Uh, the idea being, if you go visit one coordinate a day, uh, You know, in 2000 years, you're going to be guaranteed to find the treasurer.

Peter: A Game for Someone was a massive success. It won the design challenge. No one has found the board game he buried. But the hunt for a treasure that’s not supposed to be found for 2000 years is basically just an already-broken treasure hunt.

So, a few years later, Jason tried again. This time, inside a multiplayer survival game, called One Hour, One Life.

Jason: one hour in life is a game where you're born. It's a helpless baby to another player. Who's your mother. And every minute that goes by as a year of your life. And eventually you have babies of your own in the form of other players joining the game, eventually get old and die and say goodbye to your children and grandchildren.

So you pass civilization onto the next generation to continue on the projects that you were working on during your brief lifetime.

Peter: It’s human existence shrunk down to a playable segment of time. It’s his most commercially successful game, ever.

So, one year on Halloween he created a real-life treasure hunt for players of his digital-life game. Players ran around as the Headless Horseman, chopping off heads. Every head chopped revealed a letter and a number of this 300-character poem—so F 135 meant that the 135th letter of the poem was “F”. Jason figured it would take players quite a while to collect all the letters they needed to write out the poem, much less figure out what the riddle meant. But he was wrong.

Jason: But they all work together like crazy over the two days that the contest ran and they.  Made this Google doc that they were all sharing all these members of the community, piecing together the poem letter by letter. So they got the whole poem,

Peter: Once they got the poem, things moved even faster.

Jason: And the poem, just like Forrest Fenn, it was kind of a riddle that would lead you to a place somewhere in New Hampshire where I had hidden this box of, um, you know, 3, 000 ish worth of, uh, antique silver coins in the civil war era box, just sitting in the woods behind a tree someplace.

And the poem kind of led you through with very cryptic kind of rhyming stuff, just like Forrest Fenn.  Um, but people, after they got the poem, some guy figured out the riddle in the poem the next day and went there the next morning and got it,

Peter (Interview): Oh.

Um, and so that sucks. Right. So it's like, uh, 10 years is too long. 24 hours is too short.  And with this format of having some kind of riddle or some kind of puzzle. It's really hard to know how hard that puzzle is going to be.

Peter: What previous treasure hunts have done, Jason says, is expose a set of design challenges. How do you make a puzzle just hard enough? Make a hunt last just long enough? How much should a treasure be worth to make people interested but avoid chaos?

Jason: So project Skydrop tries to solve all of those problems together. Right. As a designer, I sat down, I was like, wow, my treasure hunt sucked. You know, can I do something better? How do I fix these problems? Um, And so, uh, you know, could we control a dramatic arc and actually have it go out over a reasonable time span that keeps everybody interested and gets more and more dramatic over like, well, how about three weeks?

That sounds like about a good amount of time.

Peter: The answer Jason came up with is a shrinking circle on a map, and a widening set of aerial photographs.

Jason: So with these aerial photographs that go along with the shrinking circle in Project SkyDrop, those, those things kind of work together in a way that I can really control, you know, like exactly, I don't know exactly when it's going to become solvable, but I know it's not gonna be solvable on day one,  and I know it's definitely going to be solvable on day 21.

Peter: Where other treasure hunts rely on poetry and clues to lead people to the treasure, this one harnesses technology. Aerial photographs and satellite maps. By the end of the hunt, the search area will be so small, the treasure will be unmissable. But what about the prospect of chaos and violence once the treasure is found? What’s keeping a Headless Horseman—so to speak—from taking the treasure for themselves? Jason’s answer to this question is straight out of The Hunger Games.

Jason: So 24, seven people will be able to watch, um, uh, an image taken every five minutes. And then one of the other cameras is motion activated. So every time something's moving, a series of images, every few seconds gets taken and sent to the website.

Peter: Everyone who pays the entry fee will be able to watch the hunt online, via cameras mounted in the trees around the treasure that upload to Project Skydrop.com

The idea is that, if the online hunt community is able to see what happens in the moments leading up to someone finding the treasure, that will hopefully also make the game theft and violence-proof—there will be a record of exactly who found the treasure and when.

But more than that, everyone will get to see the moment.  The instant that someone realizes they’ve found a treasure.

Which is cool.

But is it cool enough to be “the thing”—the deeper layer of meaning—that Jason’s going for?

Peter (Interview): On some level, I'm expecting there to be more to this  than the explainer video or more to meets the eye or just like, you know, I think, I think one of the things that kind of  haunted Forrest Fenn's treasure hunt was, you know,  people were saying like, you know, it's a poem and, uh, you know, quote unquote, million ish dollars worth of treasure hidden out somewhere, but it's like, it's got to be more than that.

Right. Um, like it's got to be, he's got to be some kooky mastermind that came up with something and like the whole treasure thing is just sort of a red herring or a misdirection and, and  like, you know, that…

Jason: if it was that, I wouldn't be telling you, right?

Peter (Interview): yeah, I know, I know, I know exactly. Well, but here I am trying to, you know, suss out between the lines if something, if something more is going on.

Peter: As far as I can tell, despite Jason’s history and everything everyone has told me about him, it seems like what he has created here is pretty transparent and straightforward. The hard part about trusting that read is that Jason is a kooky mastermind. He’s tried to think of everything. And searchers just have to take him at his word that we won’t end up sitting in a spider-web of string, feeling stupid.

But I don’t think you will.

Because where Jason’s other games have been noteworthy for the novel ways that they explore digital space and video games as an artistic medium capable of reflecting human life and man’s place in the universe back at us, this treasure hunt, I think, is a reflection of Jason—of the experience of making video games for the last 20 years.

It’s a reaction to what it’s been like to be the curator of all that screen time.

Jason: Also, when I just reflect on like my audience for a game, like one hour in life, and, um, it's like, yes, there are a bunch of these people who have played the game 5, 000 hours for whom something like one hour in life is, uh, basically a center point of their life really. Right. Uh, where, you know, um, they've been playing it for years.

They're part of the community. Uh, they think about One Hour in Life all the time and so on, and I'm not entirely comfortable with that.  Uh,

It's a strange, it's like, I, I'm pretty sure it's like, I, and maybe there'd be other things that would be kind of just fill in the gap there if one hour on life didn't exist, but it's like there, there's certain people for whom it seems like they're kind of using one hour on life to essentially destroy themselves or ruin their own lives.

Right. Um, You know, when the game first came out, um, and I was looking at statistics and stuff, there are a number of players who played it 10 hours a day, seven days a week for like 11 months.

Peter (Interview): When you say a number, is that, is that like two or three or is that like,

Jason: uh, I, yeah, I don't remember. Yeah, but it was, it was, it was not, it was not zero, uh, but, uh, uh, yeah, it was, it was, it was maybe 10 or something.

Right. You know, and it was like, okay, so who are, yeah, I don't know exactly, but it was, it was, it was, it was, uh, some number and I was like, who are these people who have 10 hours a day? To play and it's not 10 hours a day, you know, like a lot of games, if, as long as you have them on the title screen or something, they're still logging hours, one hour life.

The stats I have are like people actually living a life, right? Where they live a full life and you can't just pause the game or anything during that. It's not a live server. And so those, those, uh, 10 hours a day were spent actively playing the game, like literally running around eating and living and having babies and everything else that happens in the game, building things and whatever.

Um,  and so it's like, who is, and this is, this is someone who's playing it, you know, seven days a week, you know, so I was like, okay, well, this isn't a, most likely a child who's like in school or whatever. And, you know, not probably not, uh, is this a, you know, adult who's got a job, another thing? No, probably not.

And then I, you know, I've interacted with a number of members of this community and, you know, a lot of them are like 25,  something years old. Uh, living at their parents house still, spending all day playing video games, uh, receiving disability payments. Alright? And there's this whole, there's this whole class of, of people who are kind of in that camp.

Uh, and then the video games, you know, video games kind of become their whole world. Um, And the most important thing in their lives, because it's like, and some of these people, you know, some of the interactions I've had have been pretty heartbreaking. Right. It's like, I know that I'll never have a family of my own.

And the only way I get to feel like the joy of parenthood is through your game. Thank you, Jason.  It was like, Oh, these poor people, you know, so I, you know, I don't know. I feel like, you know,  I don't know, like I want to make something that kind of lifts them up out of that and gets them out kind of like  kind of energizes them or something or gets them up off, gets them out of their chair or get some,  it's like, it's like, I don't know, like yesterday I climbed to the top of mountain top of a mountain with my wife and two younger children and our dog.

And a family friend of ours as well. And we picked wild blueberries up at the top of the mountain. And then it was a really hot day. And once we got down to the bottom of the mountain that these beautiful cascading, crystal clear waterfalls that we swam in, right.

Peter (Interview): Mm.

Jason: It was like, that felt like living to me.

Right. Um, that felt like I wasn't, you know, I was kind of, uh,  taking, taking a big bite out of the apple of life.  And, uh, the days I spend sitting around playing video games, uh, have never, Really felt like that to me, right. For the most part.

Peter: Find more information and sign up at Project Skydrop.com.

If you do end up going out on the hunt, record yourself out there looking with a voice memo and send it in to [email protected]. Describe what you see and hear, let us know what it’s like and how things change throughout the hunt. We may use it in a follow up episode.

This episode was written and produced by me, Peter Frick-Wright, with editing and sound design by Robbie Carver.

The Outside Podcast is made possible by our Outside Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.