The game involved, loosely, three layers of interaction: character development and back story, file and password cracking, and live events (or, generally, the Retrievals).
Players who were involved in the live events received special pins and complimentary cell phones (which, as a side note, were difficult for some winners to activate).
Arclight was organizing theft timetables, commissioning forged replicas, doing reconnaissance work, and hiring all manner of unruly assistants for the big heist.
Early in the game, a security camera recording was discovered which showed a shadowy villain stashing pieces of information inside 6 different Audi A3 cars.
During the game, Virgil was often foreshadowed as being the villain, but in reality he was simply paranoid due to his line of work, and traumatized by the loss of his wife.