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Games Entertainment

Alternate Reality Games Grow In Popularity 55

Posted by Zonk from the you-could-be-playing-one-right-now dept.
A Joystiq post has some commentary on the popularity of Alternate Reality Games. Specifically, they reference some statistics gathered to give quantifiable metrics to game popularity. From the post: "Based on official numbers, the volume of forum posting and the number of hits on Google, these figures are pretty impressive. Two of the better-known ARGs -- The Beast and I Love Bees -- attracted upwards of two million players, according to their designers." For folks who play: What is your sense of their popularity? How many people do you know who play?
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Alternate Reality Games Grow In Popularity More

Alternate Reality Games Grow In Popularity

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  • Okay... it is alternate reality gaming. I followed both links, but found no reference to what this actually means. A link in one of the articles pointed me to wikipedia, which seems to have that page slashdotted.

    Can someone fill me in on what "Alternate Reality Gaming" means? If I missed it in the linked articles, I apologize, but wish we'd get more of a background on something that we are not familiar with.
    • Sounds like a vague description for a MMOG.

    • Re:What is "ARG"? (Score:2, Informative)

      by yitzhak ( 720512 )
      It's not like MMORPGS, it's more like LARPing. But if you STFU and RTFM, you should know that.

      Just kidding. It pisses me off when things get posted to /. with NO background information whatsoever, especially when the articles themselves assume you know what it is.

      ARGs are basically playing a game in the real world, and suspending your disbelief long enough that you are in an alternate reality. The idea is that fiction should blend seamlessly into life.
      • Yea, I know what you mean. I keep seeing articles for this "WWW" thing, but noone ever explains what it is. Ditto for PHP, RPG, and IRC. I mean, if people are just going to use these obscure terms without explaining them, what's the point?

        OK, a bit more serious now. Yea, ARG is a bit more obscure than the other acronyms I've listed, but considering just how many articles have been posted on ARGs on Slashdot in the past year (I tink there were 5-10 on "I Love Bees" alone, not including dupes), it is no

    • As I understand it, ARG is essentially a MMORPG, but one where the game is actually designed simply to let you live out a second life. (I think Second Life is actually the name of a popular one). Instead of running around for one or two hours a day doing some quest and killing fantasy monsters, you spend ten or so hours pretending to be a [instert favourite sexual orientation here] member of [inster favourite minority here] living in Laos.
      • Not at all. See the other posts in this thread for a proper definition :-)

        Second Life isn't an ARG--it's an MMO and a virtual world. Key ARG features missing: cross-media interaction; "This Is Not A Game" (blending of ingame and out-game resources--you never quite know if something is real or not); Web-based network of sites which follow a central universe or storyline; Puppet Masters creating content behind the scenes; puzzles including codebreaking, riddle-solving and distributed challenges (I Love Bee

    • Re:What is "ARG"? (Score:5, Informative)

      by clamatius ( 78862 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @03:40PM (#14709639) Homepage
      Here's unfiction's definition [unfiction.com] (unfiction is one of the bigger ARG discussion sites):
      A cross-media genre of interactive fiction using multiple delivery and communications media, including television, radio, newpapers, Internet, email, SMS, telephone, voicemail, and postal service. Gaming is typically comprised of a secret group of PuppetMasters who author, manipulate, and otherwise control the storyline, related scenarios, and puzzles and a public group of players, the collective detective that attempts to solve the puzzles and thereby win the furtherance of the story.
      • Gaming is typically comprised of a secret group of PuppetMasters who author, manipulate, and otherwise control the storyline

        And this is different from real reality how?
      • Gaming is typically comprised of a secret group of PuppetMasters who author, manipulate, and otherwise control the storyline

        You're referring to FOX News?

  • Definition (Score:3, Informative)

    by xtieburn ( 906792 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @03:39PM (#14709613)
    'An alternate reality game is a cross media game that deliberately blurs the line between the in-game and out-of-game experiences, often being used as a marketing tool for a product or service. While games may primarily be centered around online resources, often events that happen inside the game reality will "reach out" into the players' lives in order to bring them together. Elements of the plotline may be provided to the players in almost any form, some of those used have been'

    From wikipedia for anyone else who was wondering what the hell this is all about.

    • Re:Definition (Score:1, Funny)

      by wrast ( 870263 )
      Based on that definition, every time I touch the keyboard I'm in an ARG. My wife would give several examples of "reaching out" into my life as a result of games: not taking trash out, ignoring kids, not paying bills, etc etc.
  • It's a shame that there's only one company in this industry that can put on a decent show: 42 Entertainment [4orty2wo.com]. It's also a shame that they have to change their name for every big project they do (they were Myriad Entertainment when they made The Beast).
    • It seems to me that a bigger problem with the ARG genre is that the creators are often hidden till game end. Given that the game experience depends to a large extent on the quality of the writing and game design, you'd only want to play the ones which are designed by competent teams unless you had a lot of free time.

      For example, the parent says that only 4orty2wo creates decent games - but you don't know whether it's them when the game starts. By the time you know, you've missed some or all of the game.

      I
      • 4orty2wo confirmed that they were behind Last Call Poker fairly early on, partly by having Jane McGonigal (a sort of ARG celebrity) show up at live events, but also through press releases and the interviews. From what Jane has been saying lately, she agrees with you, and you're going to see 4orty2wo announcing their presence subtly for future games.

        You can usually tell anyway. For example, the entire site design for I Love Bees was similar to Ivy's breakdown page in The Beast, and some of the stories a
  • I know some ARGs have real world events (such as calling payphones). Are there any new ARGs that are currently running and are fairly interesting? None of the links seemed to say how one can get started (in true ARG fashion).
  • These stories never end up being about
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality [wikipedia.org]
  • This reminds me alot of the movie, eXistenZ.

    • Re:eXistenZ (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just to clarify about eXistenZ [imdb.com]which for the 90% of the population, who have never even heard of it much less saw it, was like The Matrix [amazon.com] only it would have done better had it some out a year or two before it. Like Eragon [alagaesia.com] and Prince [warr.org] before it.. Existenz was overshadowed by the more popular (notnecessarily better) precursor.
      • They are two completely different movies.

        eXistenZ was a fair-to-middling David Cronenberg sci-fi, with all his usual metaphorical references to kinky sex and schisms with reality (he also directed The Naked Lunch.)

        The Matrix was a fun wire-fu movie which used bad sci-fi to stand in place of the eastern concepts of "chi" which Western audiences usually can't get past when people are jumping 20 feet in the air and running up walls. Putting the characters into a virtual environment made the suspension of disb

  • One gamer's take... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RyoShin ( 610051 ) <tukaro.gmail@com> on Monday February 13, 2006 @04:09PM (#14709926) Homepage Journal
    I'm not part of any of the active ARGs right now, but I heavily got into ILB during its campaign, to the point that it could have been classified as an addiction. Unfortunatly, school and work got in the way of leading the forefront, but I still made sure to keep up on discoveries and hypothesises (hypothesii?).

    One of the big reasons ARGs create such fervor is that it's more like virtual reality than playing a game console. Instead of manipulating a character in the game, you are in the game. Your personal reactions can change or advance the story, but so can the actions of millions of other people around the world.

    However, I think ARGs more easily attract non-gamers than gamers. Because of the non-physical and low-visial environment that ARGs take, there's no fighting, adventuring, sword-swinging, racing, or gun shootng- in short, 70% of the gaming world wouldn't quite understand.

    "Regular" people would get into it more because it's closer to an interactive novel than a video game. You still read along and try to think ahead, but now you actually do things instead of placidly sitting to the side, which would excite home-making housewives everywhere. You don't need anything more than a keyboard and mouse (and maybe a cellphone), things that most people are comfortable, if not really adept, with.

    The gamers that would hop into it naturally are those who are into RTS or Myst. No longer is hack, slash, and headshot part of the formula, but strategy and puzzles rule the day. Critical thinking is necessary if you don't want to get left in the dust, and odd specialities can actually come in handy (we had one guy in ARG who was good with changing voice pitches and the like who was modifying voice recordings to see if there was a hidden message.)

    Another big thing is that, unlike msot other games, this all happens in real time. You can't just save and come back later, or restart if something goes wrong. You have to stick with it and check it often, or you might just miss out.

    ILB limited itself to one or two sites, e-mail, and a couple dozen public phones. The Beast, IIRC, covered a wild variety of sites, and used many other means of communication to advance the story.

    As for people I know personally, not that many. Most of the people involved in ARGs that I know I met through the ARG.

    I think that, as people get tired of Sequal of the Year awards, they'll turn towards things like ARG, which can have a much smaller budget, but a lot more user interaction.

  • PerplexCity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by araven ( 71003 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @04:25PM (#14710096)
    As someone firmly addicted to PerplexCity (perplexcity.com), which is a cruelly addicting crossover between ARG and CCG, I'd have to say that there's something to this ARG thing.

    Darnit.

    -kian

    P.S. Help on #251 would be very welcome.
    ~
  • I think that the biggest reason I enjoy playing ARGs is for the social problem solving.

    I played both "The Beast" and the "I Love Bees" ARGs and have played some of the grassroot games(the smaller "indie" games). I find that the better the story and puzzles that have to be solved the better the game. This is probably blatantly obvious but I think these things are much more important than the voice acting, script writing and what not. While having a bigger budget definitely helps, having good ideas and dec
  • Man, this was twelve years ago which really makes me feel old...

    Reading about alternative reality games immediately brought this to mind: the Publius Enigma [wikipedia.org].

    Eleven years later it was finally admitted that it was a record label marketing gimmick, but a LOT of people spent years chasing down clues online and offline about it.

  • Reminds me a lot of (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jdgreen7 ( 524066 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @06:04PM (#14711118) Homepage
    The Game [imdb.com]. I really liked that movie and thought it would be really cool (if not crazy and scary at times) to be involved in something like that. Might have to give some of these links a try...
    • Quite often, players of ARG (of which I am one) will reference this film to help new players get the feel of the interactivity and sense of immersion. (Mind you, to date, only one player has died in the course of playing ARG, and that was also "in-game" ^-^)

  • Competition Overload (Score:4, Interesting)

    by th3walrus ( 191223 ) on Monday February 13, 2006 @06:11PM (#14711193)
    I love the idea of ARGs. I played in Majestic when it came out and I loved the interaction. E-mails from characters, telephone calls at 2am with threatening messages, video diaries of kidnappings. It was awesome. Then I started interacting with the other players. Nobody was interested in the feel of the game. They just wanted to answers fast so they could try to get ahead of everyone else. It wasn't about solving the mystery through clues on your own for them. It was about winning. Other players would contact me and I'd offer them cryptic clues, but they would get angry at me for not just giving them the answer.

    I tried a couple since then, but could never get on board. Because so damn many people are hitting the mysteries so hard and so fast, the games have to keep pumping out stuff all the time. So while I'm still trying to figure out the first part of the game I'm getting clues to later parts that spoil or reference the stuff I'm still trying to work out.

    I think the future of this genre is going to be friends running small ARGs for each other in their spare time as a hobby.
  • I played the Beast as it rolled out. It was a very strange sort of online thing. The problem was the game was a lot more fun then the movie turned out to be. I remember waiting around hours for things like trailers and the like to hit. I was part of the Cloudmaker's Yahoo! Group. Those were fun days, especially because I was bored out of my mind at work.

    The problem is that their nature makes it very hard to be commercially viable on itself and their "ad-hoc" nature makes it hard to predict what the rea
  • As a writer for the prime ARG news-source, www.argn.com, I can say that I've personally seen how amazingly quickly this genre has grown. Since "The Beast" and Majestic (technically not ARG, but the first verrrrry close "packaged game") the numbers playing have skyrocketed.

    It's really a great way to meet some new people, to have a unique gaming experience, and more often than not (by far) it's 100% free to play. People are coming out with new games (quality-varying, of course) all the time, and it's still
  • Norman Spinrad once wrote a novel called The Iron Dream [amazon.com]. The basic idea is that instead of going into politics, Adolf Hitler emigrated to the U.S. and became an SF writer. Now understand: the novel is not set in this alternative universe; it's supposedly written in the alternative universe by "one of the great 20th-century science fiction writers, Adolf Hitler". A cool idea, that would have worked better if the plot weren't just a retelling of the rise and fall of the Nazi party!

    I once sent a copy of TID

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