Introduction: What are Alternate Reality Games?

(...and why should we care about them?)

The idea was that the fiction should jump the dike. A book you can close, a movie happens in a theater--but the Game should evade those boundaries. If our imaginary world called you on your real phone, wasn't it at least as real as the telemarketers doing the same thing? Realer, because you would have seen pictures of the imaginary people calling you. You'd know things about their childhood, their hopes and disappointments, their taste in food.

-Sean Stewart (2003)

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When pressed for a concise definition of alternate reality games (ARGs), many players and researchers will refer to them as “playable fictions” or “transmedia stories,” definitions that are on par with describing composition as “the teaching of writing.”  While technically correct, such broad characterizations gloss over the fact that there have been nearly as many approaches to composition instruction as there are instructors; likewise, there have been as many approaches to alternate reality games as there are games and players.

Since the first alternate reality games emerged nearly ten years ago, several notable attempts have been made at providing a definition for the genre. The International Association of Game Developers Special Interest Group on Alternate Reality Games whitepaper provides the following definition:

Alternate Reality Games take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world. The contents of these narratives constantly intersect with actuality, but play fast and loose with fact, sometimes departing entirely from the actual or grossly warping it—yet remain inescapably interwoven.

Definitions such as this one capture the essence of the form but say little about the characteristics that distinguish ARGs from other transmedia narratives or massively multiplayer online games.  The 2006 whitepaper focuses the majority of its work on refining the above definition by differentiating between alternate reality games and adjacent or complementary forms.  In doing so the authors position alternate reality games amongst a matrix of other texts, such as detective stories and role-playing games, by examining the connections between them.  I do not mean to downplay the whitepaper’s value as a resource; rather, I take it as evidence of the difficulties encountered in trying to pin down a concise, concrete definition of ARGs.

In my own experience I have found it most useful to describe ARGs through a set of characteristic terms and traits.  When I introduce these games into my own composition and rhetoric courses, I do so by asking students to first read Sean Stewart’s introduction to what most players consider the first “real” ARG, DreamWorks SKG’s The Beast (developed by Microsoft’s Game Group), a game that was designed as a viral marketing prelude to Stephen Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. 

Stewart’s piece is informative on a number of levels.  First and foremost, before he worked on The Beast, Stewart was an experienced author and brings this perspective to his reflection on his experiences while  creating and managing the game.  He introduces the early phases of development as a kind of “prewriting” where he and other designers worked together to brainstorm ideas for not only a new story, but a new form of storytelling.  Stewart breaks the game’s mechanics down into four brief “assumptions” he and creative partners Jordan Wiseman and Elan Lee agreed upon:


1. The narrative would be broken into fragments, which the players would be required to reassemble. That is, the players, like the advanced robots at the end of the movie [A.I.], would be doing something essentially archaeological, combing through the welter of life in the 22nd century, to piece a story together out of fragments.

2. The game would--of necessity--be fundamentally cooperative and collective, because of the nature of the internet. His belief, which we all shared, was that if we put a clue in a Turkish newspaper at dawn, it would be under discussion in a high school kid’s basement in Iowa by dinner time.

3. The game would be cooler if nobody knew who was doing it, or why. Therefore, secrecy was very tight. Almost nobody at Microsoft would know what the hell we were doing. Jordan had brought in old pal Pete Fenlon to subcontract writers, artists, and web designers, for the sake of speed and staying under MS's own internal radar.

4. The game would be cooler if it came at you, through as many different conduits as possible. Websites. E-mails. Phone calls. Newspaper clippings. Faxes. SMS messaging. TV spots. Smoke signals. Whalesong. (Stewart)


These “assumptions” effectively describe the characteristic traits of most, if not all, ARGs that followed The Beast:

  1. Serial Release—The diegetic elements of ARGs are rarely, if ever, available all at once.  Clues and narrative elements are released in “real time” over the course of days, or months, and often require close scrutiny of available information to find where the next “chapter” can be found.
  1. Collaboration—The diegetic elements of an ARG are far too spread out and well hidden, the puzzles too difficult and idiosyncratic, and the source material much too diverse for any one person to navigate comprehensively on their own.  Because of the distributed nature and sometimes cryptic content of ARGs, each player can only experience so much of the narrative first hand; therefore, players must rely on the clues and facts presented through the system of nodes to which they are connected.  This reliance on “collective intelligence” constructs the experience in such a way that the full impact of the text can only be experienced en masse by a community of players. One of the central goals of ARGs is to weave a story that requires a community of readers to work together and mobilize their collective knowledge toward a productive goal. (For more on this see “Collaboration” section.)
  1. The “This is Not A Game” (TINAG) Aesthetic—During the early stages of The Beast, the phrase “This Is Not A Game” appeared briefly in a television advertisement for A.I. and was quickly picked up as a mantra for the ARG community. TINAG is a benchmark for fidelity in ARGs and is indicative of designers’ central goal: “to have the player believe that the events take place and the characters of the game exist in his or her world, not an alternate reality” (Szulborski, 2005, p.31).
  1. Pervasive, Transmedia Storytelling—In his excellent primer on ARGs This is Not A Game, Dave Szulborski (2005) uses this trait to set ARGs apart from other “playable fictions” such as virtual reality or role-playing games by explaining that ARGs do not immerse the player in the fictive world of the narrative; instead, ARG play immerses the narrative in the reality of the player’s life (p. 33). ARGs are, first and foremost, a way of telling stories. As stories, ARGs involve elaborately constructed characters, situations, and narratives designed to convey a message.  They are "transmedia" in that they are not framed by any one technology or interface.  Instead, by using as many interfaces as possible, the “magic circle” is expanded to include all of reality.  In other words, rather than being limited to the confines of the computer screen, the only conceivable frame for the game becomes reality. To successfully navigate the narrative across multiple media players requires a range of literacies or access to others with those literacies. (For more on this, see "Composition" and "Collaboration" sections.)

Stewart’s discussion of The Beast also maps onto process-oriented discussions of writing.  Stewart and his team had to constantly anticipate the actions of players.  By observing the actions of players in real-time, Stewart and his fellow designers had to adjust their story, its timeline, and other elements in response to this feedback.  (For more on this see “Composition” section.)

ARGs offer the composition classroom a range of contexts, exigencies, and audiences.  Rather than responding to decontextualized writing prompts disconnected from the “real world,” students write in response to and support of the community, the story, and its characters.  As I discuss elsewhere, ARGs give composition instructors and students situations that require careful attention to composing arguments, conducting research, and the relationships between them—a familiar refrain within the composition classroom.  Additionally, ARGs’ reliance on discourse technologies which constitute today’s media landscape provides the opportunity to explore—through production and play—the multimodal composing skills and new information literacies that increasingly structure contemporary discourse.

Johan Huizinga (1955) identifies cultural development as emerging from ludic activities such as games because “culture arises in the form of play…it is played from the very beginning” (p. 46). As games researcher Ian Bogost states in Unit Operations, Huizinga attempts to position games as a “metacultural phenomenon where entirely serious practices like law, war, and politics find their origins” (p. 115). Despite efforts to differentiate between play and, to use Huizinga ’s term,  “ordinary life,” Homo Ludens contends that, because play is pervasive in society, all elements of culture exhibit ludic qualities.

Even though Huizinga believes that play serves an important function in cultural development, he contends that play occurs within the confines of a “Magic Circle”--a safe space separate from the concerns of reality--the joy of play is indivisible from the serious business of culture.  While separate, the magic circle is permeable: what is learned within the protected space of the classroom can be translated into “ordinary” practices that have an impact on the community that the student returns to.  When deployed pedagogically, ARGs help dissolve the boundaries between the seriousness of cultural production and the privileged play of the classroom. 

Example ARG: World Without Oil >