The riddle of Owl City Arg Level 2 Explained

An Alternate Reality Game, commonly abbreviated as ARG, is a game with experience that uses the real world as a place or platform to describe the game to the participants.

Usually, this game will be filled with riddles, clues, or hints based on the real world to solve the case. Even though it is played online, but still the reference will be used from the real world.

One of the Arg games I've ever played was Project Void made by Hybrina Labs.

Here's a screenshot I took from the official Hybrina website:

In this game, there will be puzzles and from each puzzle, there is a solution that we must solve. To complete and find out the solution, we will be given hints.

Well, from these clues we will be brought to some references in the real world. Usually, it's related to history, morse code, or cipher to complete the mission.

Alright, enough for the Arg intro...

Now let's get back to the main topic explanation of the Owl City Arg level 2 riddle.

In the last few months, at the end of June 2022 based on Owl City Instagram post.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Owl City (@owlcityofficial)

From that post, Owl City is inviting its community/fans to play a game on the Internet based on real-world experiences that we called the Arg game.

I should have started this explanation from level 1 first, but it was already made for level 2.

If you haven't followed from the beginning of level 1, I suggest you read the article in this link.

Let's begin with the image clues that Owl City uploaded on his Instagram account below:

Image 1

Image 2

In image 1 there are 3 objects, such as 3 candies, a paper containing the clues/descriptions in image 2, and a USB cable.

Next in image 2, there's a word that says:

3 is to ___ as 1 is to ___

That missing word, we must find out what it means.

If we look carefully at the 3 it refers to a candy-like object because there are 3 candies in there (image 1), but it's not a common candy, it's called Toffee (a hard candy that combines the classic cooked sugar sweetness of caramel with the richness of butter).

Then 1 refers to Cable because clearly there is 1 thing that stands out, yes the USB cable itself. So, at first, the missing words were "Toffee Cable"

1.) 3 is to Toffee as 1 is to Cable

Then, take a look at the clues in the next sentence:

cool off the tea, and
swapsie when able

"cool off the tea" means that we focus on the word tea, so we separate the word tea first and change it to the letter T because tea is read the same as the letter T in English, and maybe cool off means to shorten/get rid of (in my opinion).

so, tea = T

Next, in the sentence "and swapsie when able", swap here means like shift, so swap/shift C (same as the previous way the word sie was changed to the letter C).

Swap the letter C if you can (when able). So, swap the letter C of the word Cable for the letter T of the word Toffee in step 1.

2.) tea = T

swapsie = swap C

Toffee Cable => Coffee Table

Then, let's see the next sentence:

space is not welcome;
two forced to one

It means no spaces are allowed in the words, the two words must be one.

So, we combine the words Coffee Table so that it becomes coffetable.

3.) Coffee Table => coffeetable

Next clue

You'll shoot your eye out kid,
with that Red Ryder gun

This quote came from the movie: A Christmas Story (1983), it can be seen in this YouTube video:

In the video, the child wants a gift like a gun for his Christmas present but his mother forbids it because it is dangerous, also his mother mentions BB guns in that video.

So, the Red Ryder gun in this context means the BB gun because it's kind of like an alias. I know it was a joke and the movie does have a Comedy genre, but I've never watched it hehe 😅

Next in image 2, there's a word twice but different, and it's not clearly seen.

From the word BB gun, we see if there are words that are the same two times (twice) but have different patterns.

If we look at the word BB, which has the same letter twice. From this BB, we can modify the pattern to Bb and then change it to B6, because the number 6 is similar to the letter b.

Actually, the point of this riddle is that we can try to look for the hidden patterns of each word, but in reality, I didn't think about it that way haha 😂.

4.) Red Ryder gun = BB gun

BB gun => Bb => B6

And we will save the word B6 for the next clue.

We continue to the next step, we are asked to look for clues on Facebook, there is a searching icon (magnifying glasses) and the word fb is crossed out.

Then there is the link and key icon which means a hint link. Of course, what is meant here is Facebook's fan page, Owl City.

From his FB post, Owl City has posted a link about the pin decoder and again this is a reference from the movie: A Christmas Story (1983). I think Adam Young likes this movie haha.

As we can see from the Owl City post above, there is a link that helps us to encode text messages.

https://vigrey.com/blog/analyzing-christmas-story-decoder-pin

From the link, it's explained what the function of the pin decoder in the movie: A Christmas Story is, the point is to send a secret message and decrypt it back to the original/plain text if the key is correct.

Well, for the key we can use B6 which we got earlier from the word BB gun.

Choose the Key B - and the number is 6, enter the text to encode/encrypt coffeetable that we also got earlier. Click Encode. It will get the result:

4 18 9 9 5 5 24 3 6 13 5

Delete the spaces on these numbers according to the rules (space is not welcome), then delete the number 9 because in the image 2 clues there is a number 9 that is crossed out.