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A review by skylarkblue1
The Jump by Brittney Morris
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Content Warnings: Racism, Police Brutality, Trapped in a Burning Building , Sensory overstimulation/overload
So this is less of a normal review and more half-a-rant.
To start, I think it's a great book. However it's a horrible portrayal of ARGs and clearly shows a severe lack of even a surface level understanding of them. For one, it's constantly mentioned that just phoning any random number you find is fair game when in reality that's the number 1 rule for any solving group that you really REALLY shouldn't do..
I should have known something was fishy when the 2 "scavenger hunts" for this book were just "Go to page. Click link. Yey you won" and "read the embossed link that's mirrored on the front cover. Grats you solved it"
Which.. if you're going through the effort of physically putting a hidden trailhead on your book cover.. it needs some amount of effort gone into it :/
Were the characters great? Yes, I loved them all so much. Was the diversity great? Yes, so much good representation scattered throughout in a good way.
It's just the portrayal of ARGs and our community with that. ARGs are not mentioned by name, it's just "cryptology" which… while not entirely wrong isn't also not correct. What's portrayed in this book is ARGs (Alternative Reality Games), cryptology is a part of these but it's not the whole thing.
ARGs are generally not competitive like this with prizes, 99% of the time they're heavily community focused with a goal of bringing people together.
The author's note mentioning this was heavily inspired by Cicada 3301 was concerning but made everything make sense suddenly. Cicada is known within the ARG community as a joke. It's horrendously made, an absolute clusterfuck and it's a meme. Using that as your basis to what seemed to be an attempt at serious representation of our community is… disappointing honestly.
I would love a book around ARGs and such. If you’re even slightly interested in the concepts of this book, please join us in solving some! Currently there’s an ARG going on for Watsky - the rapper - which is incredibly high quality. Just look up the Watsky subreddit and look for the ARG posts! Bungie’s newly announced game - Marathon - also has a fantastic ARG but that’s currently on hiatus.
I would still recommend this book, but please if you wish to join in with solving ARGs look up ARG etiquette and join a group. r/ARG isn’t the best source for ARG information either - they’ve got a very bad rep in the overall community. Game Detectives has a whole wiki’s worth of information on multiple past and current ARGs, an FAQ detailing a lot of ARG information - and they’ve even created the “Academy” which serves you teach you basic cryptology skills and more that’s commonly used in ARGs. Just keep in mind that we’re not nearly as competitive as what’s shown in this book, even for the competitions where it *is* everyone competing against each other, we’re still a community at the end of the day and people still work together! Newbies are very much welcome as well as they learn the ropes and can even just watch what happens ^^
So this is less of a normal review and more half-a-rant.
To start, I think it's a great book. However it's a horrible portrayal of ARGs and clearly shows a severe lack of even a surface level understanding of them. For one, it's constantly mentioned that just phoning any random number you find is fair game when in reality that's the number 1 rule for any solving group that you really REALLY shouldn't do..
I should have known something was fishy when the 2 "scavenger hunts" for this book were just "Go to page. Click link. Yey you won" and "read the embossed link that's mirrored on the front cover. Grats you solved it"
Which.. if you're going through the effort of physically putting a hidden trailhead on your book cover.. it needs some amount of effort gone into it :/
Were the characters great? Yes, I loved them all so much. Was the diversity great? Yes, so much good representation scattered throughout in a good way.
It's just the portrayal of ARGs and our community with that. ARGs are not mentioned by name, it's just "cryptology" which… while not entirely wrong isn't also not correct. What's portrayed in this book is ARGs (Alternative Reality Games), cryptology is a part of these but it's not the whole thing.
ARGs are generally not competitive like this with prizes, 99% of the time they're heavily community focused with a goal of bringing people together.
The author's note mentioning this was heavily inspired by Cicada 3301 was concerning but made everything make sense suddenly. Cicada is known within the ARG community as a joke. It's horrendously made, an absolute clusterfuck and it's a meme. Using that as your basis to what seemed to be an attempt at serious representation of our community is… disappointing honestly.
I would love a book around ARGs and such. If you’re even slightly interested in the concepts of this book, please join us in solving some! Currently there’s an ARG going on for Watsky - the rapper - which is incredibly high quality. Just look up the Watsky subreddit and look for the ARG posts! Bungie’s newly announced game - Marathon - also has a fantastic ARG but that’s currently on hiatus.
I would still recommend this book, but please if you wish to join in with solving ARGs look up ARG etiquette and join a group. r/ARG isn’t the best source for ARG information either - they’ve got a very bad rep in the overall community. Game Detectives has a whole wiki’s worth of information on multiple past and current ARGs, an FAQ detailing a lot of ARG information - and they’ve even created the “Academy” which serves you teach you basic cryptology skills and more that’s commonly used in ARGs. Just keep in mind that we’re not nearly as competitive as what’s shown in this book, even for the competitions where it *is* everyone competing against each other, we’re still a community at the end of the day and people still work together! Newbies are very much welcome as well as they learn the ropes and can even just watch what happens ^^
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Police brutality, and Fire/Fire injury
Moderate: Alcoholism and Gun violence