An instance of CYCLOPS will be launched at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) in Hamburg from December 27-30.
Attend or stream Trevor Paglen’s keynote at 16:00 on December 27th (Hamburg time) for registration codes.
You can stream the talk here.
The game will end at 2pm Hamburg time on December 30th.
Three prizes will be granted to the first people at Congress to complete the game. An additional 25 smaller prizes will be given to the runners-up. If you are playing remotely, you must find someone locally at CCC to collect your prize if you win.
The awards ceremony will be held at the House of Tea at 37C3 at 3pm Hamburg time on Dec. 30.
CYCLOPS is a journey through a world of mind-control experiments, psychological operations, and unexplained historical anomalies.
Featuring historical documents, games, films, and other media produced between the 1950s and early 1970s, CYCLOPS requires active engagement and participation. Players are tasked with reconstructing events, deciphering codes, conducting open-source intelligence investigations, and analyzing music, literature, and poetry to move through a work that is part treasure hunt, part unfiction, and part cybersecurity challenge.
The entry point for CYCLOPS is an emulated server containing a series of audio recordings. Some recordings are musical compositions, others are filled with voices reading letters and counting numbers, and others resemble static noise. Each track contains hidden puzzles leading to the interactive narrative on the CYCLOPS mainframe.
Through interactions with the mainframe and recordings, users reconstruct some of the most bizarre and disturbing projects in Cold War history and compete for a collection of prizes.