What is an Alternate Reality Game?
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are interactive distributed narratives that uses transmedia storytelling and the real world as a platform for delivering a story developed through the actions of the players collective effort.
Players interested in “solving” the game are invited through the use of different media, such as telephones, mail, websites, and physical spaces; to collaborate and piece together every clue to reach the final goal of discovering the hidden narration.
Brief history and Examples
ARG takes inspiration from experiments of interactive storytelling made by classic media during the 1900s, starting from Choose your Own Adventure children’s novels, live tv drama shows or Live Action Role-Playing Games.
“Ong’s Hat” is recognised as the first proto-ARG, it incorporates elements of legends and conspiracy theories and it’s gameplay was online puzzle solving. ARG officially starts growing as a genre of gaming after 2001, when “The Beast” and “Majestic” were launched. The first, developed by Microsoft was a murder mystery set in the future and it’s main objective was to promote the movie A.I Artificial Intelligence, while the second one was an award winning ARG. They influenced the way ARG were going to be created and played in the following years. Between 2004 and 2020 ARGs exploded in popularity and the main focus would become promotion, either to another piece of media (tv shows, video games, music albums) or to raise awareness to important topics, and that’s were “Serious ARGs” take place.
Even though ARG had grassroot starts with many players coming together to create similar games, the quality ramped up when corporation started using this style of interactive storytelling to promote their products.
Research Focus and Prototype Direction
My goal in this research journey is to understand how and why ARG are effective in conveying stories and also the different ways in which players interact with it. My aim is to create an ARG so that I can prototype and test different interaction methods and define parameters to see if it is actually a compelling and effective method of storytelling.
In the next blogposts I’m gonna explore different aspects of ARGs trying to paint a complete picture before going deep in my personal prototype.
Bibliography
- https://www.slideshare.net/remotedevice/transmedia-storytelling-and-alternate-reality-games
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alternate_reality_games
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_reality_games
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(game)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ong’s_Hat
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game