I’m crouching in a seedy alleyway off Trafalgar Square, London, with my MacBook teetering on one knee. The heady reek of piss fills my nostrils. I’m hurriedly punching emoji into a dialog box in my web browser, which is prompting me for the answer to a puzzle. It’s day nine of Crypto: The Game.
CTG is an elimination game that takes place over 10 days, almost exclusively online. It’s a sort of mutant conglomeration of ideas from Survivor, Squid Game, The Hunger Games, and The Traitors, except everything is crypto-inflected in some way. Each of the 716 players that signed up for the third season, myself included, purchased an entry NFT for $200 in cryptocurrency. The last player standing would win the $140,000 pot.
I had raced to Trafalgar Square on that Tuesday afternoon—barreling through tourists like a shoplifter fleeing the law—following clues that promised a route back into the game. I had been voted out by my fellow players the previous night, but if I could solve the puzzle quickly, I might be “resurrected” and have another shot at victory.
A group of allied players and I had decoded an alphanumeric cipher to arrive at a second peculiar code. When I entered it into ChatGPT, it led to a text file that read, “Congratulations on decoding the clue! The treasure is hidden at coordinates 51.5074° N, 0.1278° W.” I was only five minutes away.
But when I arrived, panting, it was clear I had it wrong. ChatGPT had apparently hallucinated the coordinates. By the time the real answer—the string of emoji—was circulating in the chat, other players had beaten me to it. My game had come to an end.
