The weekend before last saw the first live action instalment of Nokia-backed augmented reality game Conspiracy For Good. The brainchild of Heroes creator Tim Kring, it’s an umbrella project harnessing the power of technology and gaming that is as much about pushing the boundaries of interactive means of gameplay as it is an attempt to benefit disparate charities.

The gathering on Saturday by London’s Traitor’s Gate partly referenced volunteer efforts to clean up the river Thames, while on Saturday 24th July a further instalment of the adventure was prefaced by members donating new toys to charity Kids’ Company for donation at Christmas.

This first instalment saw existing Unmembers and newcomers come together to track ‘armed and dangerous’ hostage Nazirah along the Thames and help her evade capture on route to a safe house elsewhere in the city. Taking part was a matter of registering at the site and turning up on the day.

The mission

Kring himself took part in the action along with his son and was curious to learn first-hand from participants how they found the experience. Despite a few issues with delivery of the video footage – waiting around for the clip to buffer and then missing the important parts of the directions – there’s a lot to be said for the point-the-cameraphone, scan-the-tagged-item, view-the-video-clue and set-off-for-the-next-one format.

The history

The Conspiracy For Good underground movement first came to light in May last year when the then-undisclosed organisation began to make a series of revelations about private security firm Blackwell Briggs’ government remit to minitor citizens by networking the capital’s CCTV cameras.

Communicating via secret forums at iamnotamember.com, activists aghast at the privacy implications of Blackwell Briggs’ endeavours sought to expose their plans. Counter measures saw a number of high profile figures forced into public denial of membership of the unnamed pressure group, with the likes of Joss Stone and Ringo Starr making unwelcome appearances on The Pirate Bay.

The Unmember organisation was forced to regroup, re-emerging in spring 2010 under the guise Conspiracy For Good. The direct action group with laudable aims had arrived.

The game elements of Conspiracy For Good are played out via a series of websites and forums where secret messages are left as ‘drops’ for the next message. A similar premise is used for the live action version.

Nokia mobile phones with augmented reality video overlays were able to pick up predefined clues and video messages hidden in plaques and messageboards around London. By aiming the phone’s video scanning sensor at a tagged symbol or other trigger object, the Unmember was able to unlock the next clue and watch a video message detailing the pursuit by Blackwell Briggs.

Risky business

Following the trail was not without risk. Supporters had tagged parts of London with Conspiracy For Good symbols and anyone caught apparently following the trail was liable to apprehension by security personnel. We were apprehended on more than one occasion and narrowly escaped having our handsets confiscated. Unlike some of our more experienced co-conspirators, we weren’t able to sneakily take snapshots of the surveillance team and share their mugshots as a warning to others.

Luckily, we were able to talk our way out of the situation and double-back to the temporary safe house that had been set up. Here, we became initiates in the Conspiracy For Good movement. I can’t tell you more since shortly afterwards the safe house was stormed and we were subject to a gunpoint interrogation before being flung out on our ear.

How to get involved

If you want to know more you’ll have to head to conspiracyforgood.com and learn where to assemble for next week’s instalment.

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Last Saturday, the fourth season of Heroes finally finished on BBC2. Well, I say Saturday, it was actually the wee hours of Sunday, because they crammed the final two episodes into a double bill, then shoved them back in time, Hiro-style, due to the snooker over-running. It’s as if they don’t really care about this show anymore.

Which is a shame, as the latest season was possibly the best since the very first. Not to say it was perfect, as I’m not sure Heroes has ever  been that, but new character Emma was endearing, arch-villain Samuel was compelling and, most incredibly, Peter Petrelli was not annoying.

Since it started, Heroes has gloried in bringing superhero comic book story-telling to the masses, making it seem acceptable through the simple gimmick of ditching those stupid circus costumes. But as the years went by, the story-telling fell into many of the same traps as the comics: constant deaths and resurrections, self-indulgent plots exploring the backside of its own continuity and a needy over-attachment to the status quo.

But the new season established a few simple storylines and introduced new elements, rather than poking at the old ones. The pacing was solid and, for the first time, there was no flash forward to a dystopian future. Nor did they spend all season building a threat, only to boot it aside in the finale in favour of yet another fight with Sylar.

So it did something a bit different, whilst still keeping the essentials. So, yes, Claire whinged about her urge to be normal, Sylar agonised over his villain/hero/villain status, but those storylines showed signs of progressing. Meanwhile, a long-standing lead character died and appears to be remaining expired for once.

As ever, there’s room for improvement. For example, the writers seem to have mislaid the memo about giving sci-fi characters fictional diseases, so you can have them magically cured without making the audience feel uncomfortable. Although I love Hiro Nakamura, and will do so until I die of the Legacy Virus, his cancer storyline missed the mark.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the BBC who have stopped caring about Heroes. Ratings have dropped down the toilet, through the pipes and into the cess pit out back. As of this writing, there’s no word on whether a fifth year will happen. And I’d love to be able to say that this season provides an adequate finale, but it doesn’t. The finale ends on an enormous honking cliffhanger, setting up many possibilities for the future.

So I hope the flying boys and girls of Heroes come back for one last spin somehow, because with the quality of this year, they’ve earned the chance to wrap things up properly. They might look a bit dead right now, but that’s nothing they haven’t arbitrarily recovered from before.

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You used to be able to dip in and out of TV shows. Soaps aside, television writers were usually happy to helpfully navigate characters back to where they started by the end of an episode. And if you missed one, unless it was a two-parter, it made no difference whatsoever.

Now if you watch a programme, it’s like a relationship. There’s commitment involved. Lost and I split up after about six months because I didn’t think it had a clear life plan and was basically winging it. Heroes and I are still together, but we’re really just going through the motions at this point, with dead, dead eyes.

All of which is to say: will FlashForward betray you and break your heart?

Ideally, I’d now trigger a vision of myself six months in the future watching the finale to check whether or not I’m smacking myself repeatedly in the head in lieu of putting the remote through the telly. What with physics and all, that’s not really feasible.

So make your own mind up:

The good

• The premise is brilliant. Loosely based on a 1999 Robert J. Sawyer novel, the action kicks off when the entire human race blacks out for two minutes. During the blackout, everyone on Earth experiences two minutes of their own life, six months in the future. Then they wake back up. There’s mass death and global devastation, because cars and planes can’t drive themselves for two minutes. And everyone wants to know – will the visions come true? How do I get to where I saw myself – with a different partner, unexpectedly pregnant or just dead? And most importantly for our FBI protagonists: how did it happen and could it happen again?

• The execution of the premise is brilliant. Every episode so far has had some memorable apocalyptic visual, like an airport full of broken planes, a playground full of blacked-out children or hundreds of crows crashing earthwards at the same time. Basically, if they start floundering, they just need to get back to the central concept of the show – there’s so much potential depth there.

• Joseph Fiennes, Jack Davenport, John Cho and Courtney B. Vance, among other great regular cast members, can sell even the lousiest dialogue, of which there is much. And even the tiniest roles are filled by good, classy actors, like Alex Kingston, Gina Torres or Shoreh Aghdashloo.

• I think there’s actually a plan. The fact they’ve seeded actors like Kingston in meaningless roles early on suggests they’ll have key parts to play later, and that these have been thought through in advance. The creators have also said they’ll catch up to the flashforwards by the end of the first season, which helps keep the plot tight and contained, unlike Lost’s multi-season sprawl.

The bad

• I still know almost nothing about any of the characters. It’s like they took some actors they liked and assigned character traits and jobs to them. “Hi, Joseph Fiennes, you can be an FBI agent who’s a recovering alcoholic.” “Oh, okay. What drove me to drink?” “That’s not relevant. Just look pained when anyone offers you a beer.”

• Three episodes in, the investigation seems to be going pretty well. Bit concerned this will leave it susceptible to artificial, unlikely obstacles inserted to spin things out. Prison Break was particularly bad at this (“oh no, I’ve sustained third degree burns to the part of my breakout-plan tattoo that we need next – and I can’t remember what it said!!!”).

• I know they’ve said they’ll wrap things up this season, but let’s be realistic – if it’s a hit, there will be more seasons. Which means more flashforwards. Which means I suspect this season, and future ones, will end with them solving the case only to find it part of a much wider conspiracy. At some point someone will probably say “it’s just like peeling an onion”. Beyond one season, this might get a bit tiring.

FlashForward is on Five on Monday night

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