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Games Entertainment

Alternate Reality Games Examined 38

Posted by Zonk from the he's-everywhere-he's-everywhere dept.
The Guardian's gamesblog has an interview up with Matt Adams, one of the members of the company Blast Theory. Blast theory was given the "Maverick Award" at GDC 2005 for their Alternate Reality Game Uncle Roy All Around You, which uses mobile technology to insert players into a virtual landscape while traversing real London streets. From the interview: "Games are an expression of the ways in which the virtual interpenetrates our lives in ever more complex ways. Desert Rain took the Gulf War of 1991 as a critical moment in this process: when it became widely understood that the killing itself was 'off screen' and the imagery of war was taking over. Soldiers themselves are taught in increasingly computer generated spaces and have less direct contact with their enemy. And many of them are avid games players. America's Army is a game funded by the US Army to bring in new recruits."
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Alternate Reality Games Examined More

Alternate Reality Games Examined

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  • ARG Network (Score:3, Informative)

    by wallykeyster ( 818978 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @02:45PM (#12294681)
    For anyone interested in more information on ARG, check out the ARG Network [argn.com].

    • Re:ARG Network (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CoffeeJedi ( 90936 )
      This game was apparently pretty different from what we think of as ARG's, like ilovebees or the beast. Those are played out on websites and chat rooms (and payphones) pretending that a story is developing in the world around you. This "uncle roy" game seems more like a game where an artificial reality is placed "over top" of the streets you're walking on.

      • Re:ARG Network (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        OTOH, I think ARGs are young enough that we're going to see a lot of evolution in types of ARG.

        The name itself seems broad enough that it could encompass a lot of subtypes/genres from the ones closer to LARPing, to the ones emphasising group-based internet collaboration and puzzle-solving like the "traditional" ARGs.

        I mean, just look at that huge spate of IM-based ARGs that played out a few months back!

  • Interpenetrates! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I would have thought this was a made-up word but dictionary.com says otherwise [reference.com]. I'll have to remember to use this when I'm writing my next Star Trek: Voyager erotic fan fic!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Huh. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, pretty much.
    • No, you are not. I, for example, think these have been made way too much about.

      On some level I like the idea, but I also think it can be taken too far. And using them to promote something that bears no real relationship to the "alternate reality" game (itself a fairly misleading term) strikes me as being rather mercenary.

  • Old news. (Score:5, Funny)

    by KipCas ( 872321 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {pik2y}> on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @03:31PM (#12295187) Homepage
    Alternate reality has been in development for years. Since the 1st chat room had 2 people in it.

    Example:
    (ChatGuy) asl?
    (ChatGal) 18/f/California
    (ChatGuy) kewl, R U hot?
    (ChatGal) U no it
    (ChatGuy) LOL me too!
    (ChatGal) also, i'm rich
    (ChatGuy) OMFG so am i!!!1
    (ChatGal) btw, if we are the 1st 2 ppl in the 1st chat room, how are we using chat abbreviations that haven't even been invinted yet?
    (ChatGuy) wtf
  • Would you consider this game to be a further development of the Electronic Arts game, Majestic - http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/10/majes tic/index.html [salon.com]? Do you remember it? Text messages & emails & pages at all hours of the day? A combination of "The X-Files", "The Game" and a lot of imagination. And then, it was pulled from the market right after 9/11.
    • it incorporates elements of that, this was more of a single murder-mystery style event

      closer to Majestic would be the Beast (for the movie AI) or i love bees (for Halo 2), currently there are about half-a-dozen major ARG's being played, one of them is backed by Audi and is offering a level of immersion never before seen (Art of the Heist)
    • Similar to "In Memoriam" (this one is available)
  • Wait until there are games out there that utilize a GPS enabled tablet. Your immediate surroundings are re-interpreted by the game to show avarge pedestrians as monsters and you have to shoot them as you walk by. It's only a matter of time as the technology already exists.
    • Already done. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6689
    • The technology to take a 360 degree video capture around you and analyze it (in real time) for human figures, mark them as monsters, allow you to "kill" them without actually killing them, and then try to deal with the disconnect when the "dead" man blocks your line of sight to the "live" woman by shuffling his dead corpse in front of her, while wondering what the wacko with the goggles is staring at?

      Keep dreaming.

      By the way -- I do real-time visual processing for a 360 degree camera system (this baby [viewplus.co.jp]).

      • "Keep dreaming... ....Not only is it not going to be convinently man-portable"

        It appears as though you have been consumed by 'the box'. It is a dreadful disease, and I wish you luck on finding the cure, most are doomed though. At least there are some groups that you can join that will at least help you 'think' outside of 'the box'. You can live a semi-reasonable impersonation at being a real person by practicing 'out of the box' thinking often, even if your spirit has already been consumed by the box

  • gah, that's not Alternate Reality (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AntonVoyl ( 125030 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @04:26PM (#12295948) Homepage
    This is Alternate Reality [kang.aroo.tv] Ahhh, to be 11 and playing RPGs on the Apple //c again!


    AR was a damn fine concept and one I'd like to see revisited now that we have so much many resources at our disposal.

  • America's Army is a game funded by the US Army to bring in new recruits.

    I don't know about any of you... but when I think US Army soldiers, I don't picture overweight, pot-smoking, white college kids with 2.0 GPA's and a 1337 gaming PC playing first-person shooters as our fighting force.

    • Re:America's Army (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DingerX ( 847589 )
      Militaries around the world are changing. AA is primarily a marketing tool, but the interest in using commercial video games as training tools is increasing.

      And, on the other side, the number of recruits coming in who are already 1337 is increasing. An article on a recent miliatry FPS trial reported that a full 2/3 of the soldiers selected were familiar with FPS.

      Those making mods for military-style games are finding their work being favorably mentioned in surprising places [mindef.gov.sg], and well, if some you receivin

  • Not an ARG (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As well-known UK ARGinado Adrian Hon points out in a comment on that article, Uncle Roy is not an ARG in any real sense of the word. ARGN [argn.com] is a much better place to go for ARGs -- think I Love Bees [ilovebees.com].

  • Ads (Score:2)

    by Sludge ( 1234 )
    So what happens when you mix alternate reality with ads in games? All of a sudden you have a heavily breathing phone stalker with pepsi footnotes.

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