Mr. Hoey had never made a game like this before and took some of its code from his friend Dylan Valentine, a software developer, who was intrigued by what Mr. Hoey had told him about the project.

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This is the brainchild of Ave Lauringson, who found herself talking to a friend about teaching school kids to code in December 2011, while driving cross-country.

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"He lives by the Code, " says longtime friend Daniel Ritchie, former chief of Westinghouse Broadcasting.

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Your friend uses Xsync to scan the QR code you've created with his or her iPhone's camera, and the files are sent to your friend's iPhone.

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Entry to the new Wizardland areas is voluntary, but one never knows if the code passed along from a friend or forum will lead to a relatively unguarded treasure trove or a floor fourteen death trap.

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By leveraging the social connections in a network like Facebook or MySpace, phishers could send messages to a site's users that seem to be sent by a friend, and suggest visiting a page infected with bank code stealing software.

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Another friend, David, who majored in Economics at Yale, taught himself how to code on the Web and from networking with people in San Francisco.

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