I am interested in using Drupal as the platform for an alternate reality game (ARG), where people are asked to complete narrative-related missions (e.g. completing mobile-phone-aided scavenger hunts, decrypting mysterious notes, creating zany steampunk inventions in answer to a prompt and posting photographs of their work).
In terms of automating the reward/badge systems for large-scale game sites, I see a lot of work done toward rewarding "typical" Drupal site actions; for example, you can link up the user badges module and the voting API and automatically award site users badges for adding to a wiki, commenting on someone's post, or starting a forum thread. What I haven't been able to figure out is how to automate awards for more specific actions such as having a player decrypt a code, then if they provide the site with the correct decryption phrase they automatically receive a badge. I've tried to do this by linking the Quiz module with Rules and User Badges, but as much as this looks like it should work it doesn't (each quiz provides a drop-down menu of actions for the quiz to trigger, but these work regardless of whether the quiz was completed correctly and also only for the author of the quiz, as far as I can tell). The quiz/rules/badges approach is something I could see working for someone with a bit more coding experience/time...
What I'm wondering is if anyone has any ideas about how to automatically award game badges to visitors who provide something like a specific word, phrase, or image that matches the specifications the game-makers have set? Are there any modules or hacking ideas that might help with this sort of behavior?
Thank you for your thoughts!