ARGs - I: What Are Alternate Reality Games? - Extra Credits

All righty. Over the next 2 weeks, we're going to talk about two things that are going to become one thing very shortly, ARGs. Even talking about ARGs can get a little confusing because people use the acronym for both alternate reality games and augmented reality games. And we're planning to talk about both, so I apologize in advance if this ever gets a little hard to follow. So, first off, let's start with the alternate reality games. If you haven't heard of these or if you haven't gotten a chance to look into them much, I'm about to make you lose an entire day on Wikipedia. If you're looking to kill some time, look up Year Zero, a Nine Inch Nails concept piece about a post-apocalyptic future. I love Bees, a Halo-related game about an errant AI taking over a bee appreciation website, and The Beast. So, what is an alternate reality game? These are games that weave the real world into the very fabric of play. Actually, it's more than that. Alternate reality games deny that there is a difference between the real world and the game world. These games usually work off of a premise that there's more going on in our banal

everyday existence than most people are aware of, and that the players are the select few of us who realize it. But what's really amazing about this is how you get to be a player in an alternate reality game. Unlike traditional games, the best alternate reality games have no marketing. You get to play by being one of those that realizes it exists. In a game about being one of the people who realizes that more's going on in this world than meets the eye, the entrance criterion is actually realizing that more's going on, which is awesome. Let me give you an example. For Year Zero, there was no announcement that the game was happening. To begin, people had to realize that on the back of the Nine Inch Nails 2007 European tour shirt, a series of letters which were slightly highlighted spelled out the words I Am Trying to Believe. When they typed I Am Trying to believe.com into a web browser, they got a cryptic disjointed website about a government-issued pharmaceutical and strange phenomena cited in the sky. From here, people had to search the IP range to find other sites related to the game. And that's the beauty of the alternate reality games, because they never admit they're a game, they can get away with offering up puzzles that would be considered by most designers as far too difficult to ask of a standard game audience. And

since good alternate reality games tended to attract an enormous player base, they can rely on the shared knowledge of their vast pool of players to come up with solutions for even the most archaic, esoteric, or obtuse problems. For example, I love bees presented its community with 210 sets of paired numbers with no explanation. The community had to then figure out that these numbers were actually global positioning system coordinates and times. After that, they had to realize that each positional location corresponded to a payphone. And then finally, they had to coordinate with no help from the game creators, who are still busy maintaining that this wasn't a game, to make sure that someone got to each phone at the specified time. At the appointed time, each phone rang with a piece of information or narrative that would push the game forward. Not a single phone call was missed, not even the one that happened in Florida in the middle of a hurricane. And this isn't an isolated example. Case in point, one of the puzzles in Year Zero required that players find a USB stick at a Nine Inch Nails concert and run a spectrogram on one of the MP3s on it to find out that the static in that MP3 drew a 10-digit phone number in the spectrogram readout. This is madness, amazing human madness.

It's unbelievable the things mankind can pull off when we work together as monumental groups. Angkor Wat, the Hagia Sophia, even the internet itself. And ARGs are incredible tools for getting us together to solve big problems. But we're not just talking to you about alternate reality games today because they're amazingly cool or because they'll have a substantive place in the future of gaming. We're talking about them because they might be something even more. Today, they're largely used to help promote products, and there's nothing wrong with that so long as it's done responsibly. After all, you've got to get the funds to run your ARG somehow. But we should also think about what they might help us do. At some point, we'll probably do a whole episode on alternate reality games in an educational environment. James is actually fleshing out his research on that right now. But just imagine if an alternate reality game had one puzzle where you had to decipher parts of yet untranslated hieroglyphic texts that were just sitting in archives somewhere. Or if imagine a puzzle where we had players construct more efficient delivery routes or analyze climate data. Alternate reality games are another vector on gamification done right. They're a low-tech way to get us working together as a group to do awesome things. Heck, imagine the good it would do if the game of zombies at your college had a quest to pick up and throw

away just one piece of trash. All right, maybe that's not the best example because that system would be really easy to cheat, but you get the idea. Also, ARGs teach us something important about games. Something that's perhaps merely an interesting novelty right now, but which may in the near future have a lot more application. And that's the effect of a narrative integrated with the real world. If you've ever participated in an ARG, you probably know how remarkably gripping they can be. This isn't due to them having better writing than most games, nor can it be wholly attributed to the air of mystery that surrounds them. It's due to their proximity to our lives. By being part of our everyday, by not admitting that they're games are just for fun, they let us see our world through a new and unique filter. And that's the power of the ARG narrative. By forcing us to see it in our world, by even if it's just subconsciously getting us to carry the game world with us, the narrative naturally has a bigger impact and requires more consideration than a similar narrative in a more abstracted setting might. And while this may not be so common in games today, everything from documentary games to augmented reality games will be using this interplay between game and real life as a part of their narrative in the near future. And while this has incredible

potential, without fully understanding its effect, without studying it in alternate reality games, we may blunder into some devastating territory. Well, I think that about does it for alternate reality games. Next week we'll be back to talk all about augmented reality games as well as the Google Glasses. See you then.