ARG – Alternate Reality Games

ARG are games that follow a script and use real life means and mechanisms as a support to the unravelment of the plot. The objective is that the player is so absorbed by the script that it’s confused with reality. The most famous example is the movie “The Game” where the hero of the story receives an ARG as a birthday gift and is thrown into a sequence of alucinating action that mixes with reality and become so real that are easily perceived as real life events.

Another characteristic of ARGs is, sometimes, the necessity of creating comunities with the purpose of unraveling the mistery together,  like in the ARG called “The Beast”, known by that name because of it’s size and complexity, which triggered the creation of many comunities of people organizing themselves to discover together the solution of the puzzle. The biggest comunity and best well know was called “The CloudMakers”.

Although not games themselves, other productions were considered having the same principle of the ARGs, like the example of the movie promotion made for the film “Blair Witch Project” where you could actually watch documentaries on the television about the fictionary witch of the movie, making it more real and scarier. The mixture of fiction with reality brings more interest and a deeper emotion to the subject.
 

The main goal of an ARG is the same as all games: entertainment. An ARG is usually an appealing challenge and it’s delicious for people that are eager to prove their deductive capabilities.

Another great objective is usually the promotion of products. ARGs present themselves as a strong tool of viral marketing where the game (and as a consequence the visibility of the product) is spread among family, friends and aquaintences.
 

“Rabbit Hole”: the ARGs are many times associated to the Alice in Wonderland stories, for obvious reasons. You have a girl that, after entering through a white rabbit’s hole, is taken into a paralel universe where the rules and distorted from reality. Every ARG has at least one Rabbit Hole that is the point of enterence to start playing. In the movie “The Game” the rabbit hole was the brochure given to the main character, with the contacts of the company that supplied the game.

“PuppetMaster”: person that draws and/or controls the ARG (pulls the strings).

“Curtain”: its the separation bettween the players and the “backstage” of the ARG.

“Trail”: trail of clues that take us to the solution of the ARG. You can have several concurrent trails.
 

An ARG can support itself on several mediums to take a clue or piece of the puzzle to a player. Those can be more massive or more personal depending on what is the targeted audience for the game.

Some examples:

• Emails
• Phone calls
• Text Messages
• Web Sites
• Newspapers (articles, ads, classifieds)
• Chat Rooms (MSN, IRC, etc.)
• Convencional Mail
• Billboards
• Etc.

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