Over on the Army Of Zero pages, we have a little questionnaire where visitors can answer a few simple questions, and if they do that we’ll tell them which Army Of Zero character they are most like.

We’ve been running this questionnaire for about 9 months now - gosh, where does the time go? - and we thought it’d be interesting to look at the results, to find out who you’re all most like and also to get a picture of the type of visitors we’re getting.

So we counted up all the responses and we found out that the Army Of Zero character that you all most resemble is…

Thegn Rithalik!

Rithalik had a pretty good lead on his nearest rivals, but the next four were all very close to each other.

2 General Jihgeb	3 Thegn Uxcopple	4 Commander Johos

Other results that you might find interesting:

• 76% of you are male.
• 62% of you prefer reading to sport.
• 43% of you think of yourselves as leaders, 57% as followers.
• 63% of you prefer the night to the day.
• 18% of you are left-handed.
• 42% of you consider yourselves cheeky, rather than polite!
• 62% of you would rather eat fruit than vegetables.
• 54% of you are family types; the rest prefer to spend time with friends.
• 64% of you are thoughtful, the other 36% are impulsive.

Nice to see ToyNews magazine featuring Army Of Zero in its September issue.  ToyNews tends to have themed issues, and September’s had a whole section on Games and Puzzles.  The item is reproduced on the left - but then you can see that!

(Sorry it’s a scan - you can usually find a good quality reproduction online but for some reason it wasn’t on the ToyNews site when I went looking for it.)

I mentioned in an earlier post that the flyer we’ve been giving out at various shows has a clue in it, and we’ve been asked about it by people who can’t make the events.  So here it is.

Click either side for a bigger version.

It’s true that there’s a clue here, but it’s not a crucial clue.  You certainly don’t need this to solve the puzzle: everything you need to solve Army Of Zero is in the box.  What you can divine from the flyer doesn’t do much more than confirm something that’s significant.

Gah, sorry to be mysterious. “Isn’t that bizarre? Aren’t you just going, ooo?”

Readers of a certain vintage will remember Masquerade.  Quick summary for those who don’t: in 1979, artist Kit Williams wrote and illustrated a children’s book called Masquerade, which told the story of the journey of Jack Hare and how he lost a valuable treasure.

However, the treasure wasn’t entirely fictional.  Williams also created a real treasure, a hare-shaped pendant made of gold and jewels, and buried it in a secret location.  The reader of the book was invited to study the fifteen paintings within the book, to uncover the clues, and thus to reveal the location of the hare.

Unfortunately the quest to find the hare ended in a bit of a shambles, as you can read at Masquerade’s Wikipedia page.  The hare was located by subterfuge rather than by  solving the puzzle, and Kit Williams found that his credibility as a serious artist was undermined by the book’s commercial success.

Masquerade basically invented a whole genre of game: the armchair treasure hunt. You’ll spot the fact that Army Of Zero can trace its lineage back to Kit Williams’ work.

The important difference is that my artistic credibility within the art world is not at threat, and will probably remain at the same level no matter how popular Army Of Zero is.

Ahem.

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to a new BBC documentary, to be shown on BBC Four in the Autumn.