ARG developer finds out his email hint system doesn't work anymore because young people don't know how to use email

3 hours ago 2

(Image credit: Getty Images)

After Hours is an Augmented Reality Game, which means its puzzles have to be solved with information from outside the game—mostly from your web browser. One puzzle apparently involves combining Brownsville, New York's zip code with a phone number to find an ISBN code, which leads to a book you need to look at the back cover of on Amazon, all so you can find a password hidden there.

It's pretty tricky stuff. Fortunately, there's a hint system. Unfortunately, that hint system also exists outside the game. If you're stuck in After Hours you're supposed to send an email to Sarah, who is actually an automated Gmail address that will check your message for keywords and then reply with relevant hints.

At least, that's how it should work. As developer Petter Malmehed explained on the gamedev subreddit, a system that worked fine when the game was released has started failing thanks to younger players. "Turns out people don't know how to write emails anymore. The whole message is sent in the subject box, leaving the actual email empty. Because of that, no keywords were found, and no hint message from Sarah was sent out."

To me that sounds like classic boomer behavior. A whole message written in the subject field is how your grandparents send emails. Apparently it's gen alpha behavior too, because a generation who have grown up with instant-messaging and DMs have yet to learn how to write emails. I guess if you organize everything in Discord or WhatsApp, and you don't have a boss or a university professor who relies on it, you just don't use email. File this next to students not knowing what files or folders are.

After Hours is a remake of 128k – A Detective Game, which was originally released on Newgrounds. If you think you can handle alt-tabbing out of a game to open a web browser, and writing emails with correct formatting, you can get it from Steam for free.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.