While the Dionaea house is not the trailhead for an online game, following a few links reminded me how much I love that stuff. I didn't even know it's a whole subgenre called "alternate reality gaming" now, but it seems to have started with that game the Cloudmakers were playing that went with the A.I. movie. I loved that game. I was in the Yahoo group, but I can't claim to have really played with them; once you get into web-techno stuff like viewing HTML sources and coding, you've lost me. I did better with the viral marketing sites Dreamworks put up for The Ring--it didn't form a game per se, but it was a lot of fun tracking new stuff down.
So... I guess what I'm saying is that I'm sort of a passive "player" when it comes to this sort of thing. I love following the stories, though, which is why I liked Dionaea House so much. There are certain kinds of puzzles I can solve (word puzzles, literary references, etc.), but the kind that most web games seem to use... well, once the Enigma code turned up in the original A.I. game, I knew I was in over my head. You know that Graeme Base children's book The Eleventh Hour? I couldn't even solve that--I cracked and read the solution at the back, because I suck. (Also, I was, like, eleven. Shut up.)
Anyway. I think what I love so much about a lot of the games or mysteries you can find online is that they frequently have sort of a psychological horror edge to them. I love Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft and all that kind of stuff. (By the way,
Also:
ETA: "I CANNOT believe that we were so willing to get right back into the cave after [plot point deleted]. We were just too eager to discover virgin cave passages. I now think it can be summed up with one word: testosterone!"
Uh... yeah. Remember what I said about Jack and his Freudian cave fixation on Lost the other night? Same goes here.