Faq. Alternate Reality Gaming Quick Start Guide. Alternate Reality Games: What Makes or Breaks Them? - ReadWriteWeb. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) have become an incredibly powerful viral marketing and audience engagement tool over the last couple of years. However, the elements of a successful ARG remain a mystery to most people. Some of the most successful ARGs that I have participated in over the past few years were the I love bees campaign for Halo 2, the Iris campaign for Halo 3, the political dystopia campaign, for NIN's Year Zero, and most recently the Harvey Dent political campaign for the upcoming The Dark Knight movie. Even though I enjoyed participating in them, until recently I hadn't really thought about what makes them compelling - beyond their premise (i.e. the product they are based around).
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. Essential Elements of an ARG Here are few of the 'must have' elements for a successful Alternate Reality Game: 1. 2. 3. 4. Image from destructoid.com 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Alternate Reality Gaming - A Quickstart Guide.
So, you’ve discovered the world of Alternate Reality Gaming and are completely confused by it all. You are not alone! Hopefully this little guide will answer a few of your basic questions and direct you to places to learn more. Alternate Reality Gaming?! Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) is an experience that encourages players (you!) To interact with a fictional world using the real world to do it. For example: You’re spending some time exploring the internet and someone points you to a couple sites and tells you that it’s a crazy mystery about some missing monkeys. What you have done is used your real world computer to explore a bit of a fictional world. On the high from finding a second website, you decide to send a little email to crazymonkey@crazymonkeyman.com asking him why he thinks the cute little monkeys have been replaced by evil robots.
Now you are communicating with the fictional world using your real world email. That sounds great! Simple: You don’t! Yep, that’s often the case. ARGNet - Alternate Reality Gaming Network. Alternate reality game. An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players' responses.
Subsequently, it is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.
Definition[edit] Unique terminology[edit] Among the terms essential to understand discussions about ARGs are: Computer/console/video games. Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009. DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes.
GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century. For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector.