What is a ARG?

1. Alternative Reality GamingAlternative Reality Gaming

2. This presentation contains no inception spoilersThis presentation contains no inception spoilers

3. What is a ARG?What is a ARG?
Alternative reality gaming better known as unfiction, transmedia
storytelling, extended experiences, chaotic fiction, pervasive
gaming, immersive fiction, beasting, etc...
...is an interactive fusion of creative writing, puzzle-solving, and
team-building, with a dose of role playing thrown in. It utilizes
several forms of media in order to pass clues to the players,
who solve puzzles in order to win pieces of the story being
played out

4. Forerunners to ARGsForerunners to ARGs
Masquerade became the forerunner of an entire genre of
cryptic puzzles
Launched in book form in 1979, along with a treasure hunt
involving buried gold in a secret location in England
The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide
Searchers often dug up public and private property acting on
hunches
The solution to the Masquerade puzzle is elaborate: in each
painting, lines should be drawn from each animal's eyes
through their longest digits to a letter in the border...

5. Forerunners to ARGsForerunners to ARGs
The Game is a 1997 Neo-noir psychological thriller film directed
by David Fincher, starring Michael Douglas, featuring Sean
Penn, and produced by Polygram. It tells the story of an
investment banker who is given a mysterious gift:
participation in a game that integrates in strange ways with
his life. As the lines between the banker's real life and the
game become more uncertain, there are hints of a large
conspiracy
A lot of puppetmaster's see the game as the almost perfect
ARG

6. Characteristics of an ARGCharacteristics of an ARG
Platform-less narrative, cross-media interactivity
A whisper is sometimes louder than a shout
The "this is not a game" aesthetic
Real life as a medium
Collaborative storytelling
Meta-communication

7. The beastThe beast
Created by a team at Microsoft to promote the Steven Spielberg
film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
The Beast ran for twelve weeks in the spring and early summer
of 2001, is one of the most influential early ARG games
The Beast was set in the year 2142, 16 years after the events
chronicled in A.I. There were three overlapping entry points
to the game, or "rabbit holes"

8. The beast: the rabbit holesThe beast: the rabbit holes
1
st
- Trailers and posters for A.I. had a credit for Jeanine Salla
as Sentient Machine Therapist hidden among the credits for
Spielberg and the actors.
2
nd
- One of the trailers encoded a telephone number in
markings on the promotional text; if a player called this
number and followed the given instructions he/she eventually
received an email stating in part that "Jeanine is the key" and
that "you've seen her name before."
3
rd
- an A.I. promotional poster sent to some technology and
entertainment media outlets had a very simple code stating
"Evan Chan was murdered. Jeanine is the key."

9. The beast: Jeanine Salla is the key The beast: Jeanine Salla is the key
News of the websites first broke on the Ain't It Cool News
website and was sparked by eagle-eyed film fans spotting the
name Jeanine Salla credited as a "sentient machine
therapist" in one of the trailers available on the net.
Searching for this name on the net led fans to the fictitious
Bangalore World University and on through a bewildering
series of sites that detail the world of AI
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1274487.stm

10. The beast: Jeanine SallaThe beast: Jeanine Salla

11. The beast: Jeanine SallaThe beast: Jeanine Salla
Jeanine Salla is a fictional character who was created as part of
a marketing scheme for the film "Artificial Intelligence".
Jeanine Salla was a name placed in countless clues in film
posters, websites, previews, and commercials. Starting from
her name, people were drawn into a highly complex
interactive "game" that involved websites, phone calls,
emails, faxes, and teams of "players" working around the
world to solve the clues
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0972095/

12. The beast The beast
For three months, players unraveled the clues to figure out the
murderer. This included live phone conversations with actors
and rallies in three cities around the U.S. Players created a
Yahoo! Group to discuss clues and exchange information
and also archived the entire game
The game had classic viral, exponential growth: on the first day
a player found the site, only a few hits were recorded. By the
first week, hundreds of people had visited. Over three million
unique users visited the game site months later

13. The beastThe beast
In tracking down those responsible for Evan Chan's untimely
demise, the Cloudmakers—and the thousands of
independent players who followed along—uncovered a secret
cabal of Watchers, an underground movement of sentient
robot revolutionaries, and a secret project gone madly out of
control
In the process, players decoded messages encrypted with a
World War II Enigma machine cipher; translated German,
Japanese, and Chinese text; and created a nightmare
database to trap an insane AI named Loki, who was
"hacking" a swath through the in-game websites.

14. TerminologyTerminology
Puppetmaster - A puppetmaster or "PM" is an individual
involved in designing and/or running an ARG.
The Curtain - The curtain is generally a metaphor for the
separation between the puppetmasters and the players.
Rabbithole - Also known as a Trailhead.
This Is Not A Game (TINAG) - Setting the ARG form apart from
other games is the This Is Not A Game aesthetic, which
dictates that the game not behave like a game

15. Moving onMoving on
Following in the footsteps of the successful Beast, several other
games jumped into the picture with varying degrees of
success. Some tried to follow the pattern of the Beast while
others used the general idea but charted new territory for
themselves.
Massive scale ARGs : I love bees, the lost ring, flynn lives
Self-supported ARGs : perplex city, edoc laundry
Serious ARGs : world without oil, traces of hope, black cloud
Open source ARGs : wedreamthecity, metacortex

16. Upping the gameUpping the game
No more - http://www.slideshare.net/picnicfestival/everything-we-know-
transmedia-wrong-by-dan-hon
Viewing source code, “De-stegging”, Waiting, Codebreaking,
More codebreaking, Esoteric knowledge, Viewing more
source code, Solving stupid puzzles, More waiting, Not telling
me what to do, “This is not a f**king game”, Lazy calls to
action, Helping a teenage girl, Helping an attractive teenage
girl, Helping an attractive amnesiac teenage girl, Treasure
hunts, Millions of blog entries, Jumping through f**king hoops
and finally Masturbatory platform excitement

17. Bad storytelling is bad storytellingBad storytelling is bad storytelling

18. Thank you, any questions?Thank you, any questions?
Ian Forrester | cubicgarden.com | mydreamscape.org
Presentation : CC BY-NC-SA