Alernate Reality Games...

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OK, so I don't know how many of you are aware about ARG. They overlaps the game world with reality, by utilizing real world media, in order to deliver an interactive narrative experience to the players.

ARGs are typified by involving the players with the story and its characters, by encouraging them to explore the story, solve plot based challenges, and interact with game characters. ARGs can be delivered via websites, email, telephones, or any other means of communication which is readily available to the players.

It has been speculated that this is one of those, but not as a media for a game or video what if it is like the "stalker game" that was played about 6 months back on a few torrants. The game, for those that agreed, information was leaked about the parties in question and they used any media possible to find "stalk" the person and then met them in real life... take a picture and place it on the web as proof they had followed through with the ARG.

ARGs inherently lead to and encourage player collaboration. The Internet is a highly pervasive medium used for delivering ARGs, and thus creates a perfect environment for the rapid delivery and dissimination of information.

If an ARG used an advertisement in a magazine to deliver a message, then only one player needs to aquire that magazine and scan the advertisement in order to publish it online for all players to access. The players can then use online resources such as forums or chatrooms to discuss the message and how it relates to the story.

Thus the player base for an ARG becomes a unified collective, with the majority of player base composed of lurkers following the discussion amongst the more vocal player base, but jumping in at various stages in order to make a contribution which the active players might have missed or did not have access to. This blend of passive and active players sharing experiences and knowledge is unique to ARGs, and is an integral part of playing the game.

ARGs encourage the collective player base to interact with the game world. This is done by allowing players to respond via the same media used to deliver the story. For example, a player might receive an e-mail from one of the characters containing an encrypted message. The player would then solve the encryption to reveal a website address which contains another message from the character, and requires further interaction on the site itself.


I don't know thought it was intresting... if it is an ARG, then it might have gotten alittle out of control that now the whole internet is talking about.