This resource contains links to blog posts, conference papers, journal articles, and other texts related to alternate reality gaming.

Defining ARG

• WTF is an ARG? (Andrea Phillips, 2009) “Why can’t we reach a consensus on what an ARG is, and what an ARG isn’t? Why do we return home, like swallows to Capistrano, to that question: What IS an ARG? This is my attempt to wrestle with this knotty topic, and offer up a few opinions.”
• Undefining ARG (Sean Stacey, 2006) “I have a way to define alternate reality gaming in such a fashion as to prove to you that I cannot in fact define it at all. While the previous statement may seem nonsensical, I encourage you to bear with me. The following is written with the assumption that the reader has some passing familiarity with the history, mechanics, and gameplay of ARGs.”
• Alternate Reality Games (Sean Stewart, 2006) “Building an ARG is like running a role-playing game in your kitchen for 2 million of your closest friends. Like a role-playing game, we get players to actually enter the world of our story and interact with it, both online and in the real world.”

Design approaches and philosophies

• Everything you know about ARGs is wrong (Dan Hon, 2008) “There are, it seems to me, a number of differing interpretations as to what an ARG is, exactly, and that makes them quite easy to attack. If you don’t know what something is, it’s quite easy for it not to have lived up to your expectations.”
• ARGFest 2007 Keynote (Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, 2007) “Delivering a keynote address to this audience is really difficult. What can we talk about? We can’t talk about anything we’ve done in the past because you were all there experiencing it. We can’t talk about anything we’re working on right now because that would ruin the fun and the mystery of the experience. We can’t talk about anything we have planned for the future because frankly, you are the competition. All that’s left is self-deprecation and the elephant in the room…trust.” (summary here)

See also: Part 2

Poetics, formal analyses, and surveys

• Storytelling in New Media: The Case of Alternate Reality Games, 2001-2009 (Jeffrey Kim, Elan Lee, Timothy Thomas, and Caroline Dombrowski, 2009) “New media allows previously passive consumers to tell and shape stories together. Yet most information is still disseminated in a top–down fashion, without taking advantage of the features enabled by new media. This paper presents five Alternate Reality Game (ARG) case studies which reveal common features and mechanisms used to attract and retain diverse players, to create task–focused communities and to solve problems collectively. Voluntary, collective problem solving is an intriguing phenomenon wherein disparate individuals work together asynchronously to solve problems together. ARGs also take advantage of the unique features of new media to craft stories that could not be told using other media.”
• Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games (Christy Dena, 2008) “This paper introduces an emerging form of participatory culture, one that is not a modification or elaboration of a primary producer’s content. Instead, this paper details how the artifacts created to ‘play’ a primary producer’s content has become the primary work for massive global audiences. This phenomenon is observed in the genre of alternate reality games (ARGs) and is illustrated through a theory of ‘tiering’. Tiers provide separate content to different audiences. ARG designers tier their projects, targeting different players with different content. ARG player-production then creates another tier for non-playing audiences. To explicate this point, the features that provoke player-production — producer-tiering, ARG aesthetics and transmedia fragmentation — are interrogated, alongside the character of the subsequent player-production. Finally, I explore the aspects of the player-created tiers that attract massive audiences, and then posit what these observations may indicate about contemporary artforms and society in general.” See also: Christy’s online augmentation for this paper.
• Towards a Poetics of Multi-Channel Storytelling (Christy Dena, 2004) “As yet no poetics to address transmedia, alternate reality gaming, cross- or multi-platform and cross-media of content have been proposed in academia; in addition no poetics has been invented for multi-channel single-story creation (that is: one story told over multiple media). This paper provides an overview of the poetics being developed for multi-channel storytelling. It is a narrative schema intended for instructional use in story creation and literary criticism.”
• IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper (IGDA, 2006) “Although new to many people, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are still far short of achieving their full potential, each new wave of games bringing major new innovations and increased understanding of what works and what doesn’t. We hope you find both inspiration and real practical help in this paper, and look forwards to playing the next wave of ARGs you come up with.”
• ‘This is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play (Jane McGonigal, 2003) “The increasing convergence and mobility of digital network technologies have given rise to new, massively-scaled modes of social interaction where the physical and virtual worlds meet. This paper explores one product of these extreme networks, the emergent genre of immersive entertainment, as a potential tool for harnessing collective action. Through an analysis of the structure and rhetoric of immersive games, I explore how immersive aesthetics can generate a new sense of social agency in game players, and how collaborative play techniques can instruct real-world problem-solving.”

Theoretical context

• ARGs and Academia (IGDA ARG SIG Wiki, 2007) “For many academics, ARGs are the manifestation of theories they have been exploring for a long time. ARGs provide, therefore, the unique opportunity to see many theories in action. Popular topics of interest have been the notion of fictionality, the notion of a game space, interactive narrative, commerciality and player dynamics. They have entered the realm of ARGs informed by particular key ideas which are exemplified in the following texts…”
• Participation (Claire Bishop, ed, 2006) “Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière’s influential ‘Problems and Transformations in Critical Art.’ The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.”
• Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud, 1998) “Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.”
• The Open Work (Umberto Eco, 1962) “The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of “openness”–the artist’s decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance–and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.”

Case studies and ethnographies

• ‘I am Trying to Believe’: Dystopia as Utopia in the Year Zero Alternate Reality Game (Alexander Charles Oliver Hall, 2009) “Year Zero, an ARG that includes a recent studio release by the “industrial” rock band Nine Inch Nails, is a dystopian narrative that is unfolding in the ARG tradition. As a dystopian narrative game, Year Zero is able to harness the cautionary element of the game for social awareness and quite possibly social action. Technology’s ability to resurrect its utopian energy by offering new ways of telling dystopian (and yet utopian) stories such as via the ARG is indeed ironic, but it is doubly important to finding utopian energy in postmodern culture and facilitating political action through gaming.”
• Fictional Press Releases and Fake Artifacts: How the Smithsonian American Art Museum is Letting Game Players Redefine the Rules (Georgina Bath Goodlander, 2009) “In the fall of 2008, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted an Alternate Reality Game titled ‘Ghosts of a Chance.’ We did this with three goals in mind: to broaden our audience, to do a bit of self-promotion, and, most importantly, to encourage discovery around our collections in a new, very interactive way. This paper will discuss the challenges that the museum faced, evaluate the successes and failures of each part of the game, and make recommendations for other museums interested in trying something similar.”
• Tracking the emergent properties of the collaborative online story “Deus City” for testing the standard model of alternate reality games (Adam Brackin, 2008) “This study explores the possibilities for better collaborative storytelling through Alternate Reality Games by investigating their origins as well as their definably unique qualities and characteristics; by critically analyzing the recent Alternate Reality Game “Deus City” which was specifically designed for the study to test new forms and delivery methods within the context of the genre; and by outlining areas of change which indicate where the future of Interactive fiction may be very soon.”
• Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming (Jane McGonigal, 2007) “This essay describes the design and successful deployment of a series of massively collaborative game missions in I Love Bees, the alternate reality game. Alternate reality games (ARGs) are massively multiplayer puzzle adventures that combine online interactive content with real-world game events. McGonigal proposes ‘stimulating ambiguity’ as the central design philosophy of ARGs. She explores how ambiguous game content stimulates massively collaborative game play that allows for a greater share of leadership and meaningful participation in large-scale player groups. She also outlines how the open-ended puzzles of ARGs inspire multiple, creative interpretations that allow for diverse problem-solving strategies to flourish in a single player community. The essay is grounded in a close reading of player-produced content and their interpretations of the core puzzle of the I Love Bees game: a series of several hundred GPS coordinates, dates, and times that were listed on the central game Web site.” (.pdf here)
• See also: ARGs in institutions

Interviews with designers, researchers, and players

• Interview with Cathy’s Book Co-Author Sean Stewart (Michael Anderson, Sean Stewart, 2010) “[You] could argue that storytelling has only gone through five big revolutions: campfire stories, the invention of theater, the invention of the printing press and rise of the novel, the motion picture camera and cinema, and THIS, whatever the hell you want to call it. The multi-platform many-to-many art that the internet enables. I am incredibly aware of my stupendous good fortune in lucking into a ground floor suite in Revolution #5. It would seem ungrateful to turn my back on it just now.”
• Events, not ARGs: Interview with the founders of 4th Wall (Elan Lee, Jim Stewartson, Sean Stewart, 2009) Interview on Variety’s Technotainment blog. “Our new company — 18 months old now — the basic idea is to take the rock concert and figure out, ‘What’s the album? What’s the content version of that so you can have these experiences any time, so they don’t go away on the date of a future release?’ They can ultimately be monetized. So, we think of the format and what we’re building as a genuine new entertainment format, one that sits between moves and video games.”
• Producing Transmedia Experiences: Participation & Play (Frank Rose, Jordan Weisman, Ken Eklund, Louisa Stein, Mia Consalvo, 2009) Panel discussion from Futures of Entertainment 4. Moderated by Ivan Askwith. “One of the most overt forms of transmedia storytelling, the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), often makes participation a central and defining aspect of transmedia experiences, and creates opportunities to engage participants in play, performance and game-like systems. How can these interactive and participatory experiences be planned for? What is their function in the larger transmedia experience, and how do we understand the relative roles of the “author” and the “audience” in creating transmedia experiences?”

• An Interview with JC Hutchins: Personal Effects (JC Hutchins, 2008) Michael Andersen’s interview on ARGN. “[We] all know that most ARGs require what I call ‘bunches of brains’ … lots of players … to unlock puzzles and push the story forward. Dark Art is different in that we’re aiming to allure folks who’ve never heard the word ‘ARG’ to participate in this awesome breed of storytelling.” See also: Lance Weiler’s interview with JC on the Workbook Project.
• Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games (Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, 2008) TOC’s Liza Daly conducts the interview. “I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers.”
• Elan Lee’s Alternate Reality (Elan Lee, 2006) “I consider the first ARG The Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” album. Of course, it depends how you define an ARG. My definition is very loose. An alternate reality game is anything that takes your life and converts it into an entertainment space. If you look at a typical video game, it’s really about turning you into a hero; a super hero, a secret agent. It’s your ability to step outside your life and be someone else. An ARG takes those same sensibilities and applies them to your actual life. It says, what if you actually were a super hero, what if you actually were a secret agent? Instead of living in the box that’s your television or your computer, why not use your actual life as a storytelling delivery platform?”
• The Story Doesn’t Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart (Sean Stewart, 2006) “I honestly believe that the gods in their infinite mercy looked down and gave me a chance —miraculously and wholly unlooked for—to be at Kitty Hawk, to be in motion pictures in 1905, to be at a place and a moment in time where something extraordinarily exciting was just getting off the ground. As much as I’d like to think it had much to do with my merit, mostly it’s this huge stroke of timing and good luck to be in the right place at the right time, working with the right people, to have a chance to be in on something at an extraordinary cultural moment.”

Research resources and references

• ARGology.org “ARGology is a group effort by a bunch of great people from the IGDA ARG SIG. It is a site which hopes to aggregate much needed information about alternate reality games for developers, journalists, researchers and players.”
• ARGN “Simply put, ARGNet is the place to be when news breaks about new ARGs, as it offers insightful, investigative reporting from dedicated, knowledgeable volunteers through articles, interviews and netcasts.”
• ARG Stats and ARGs Around the World Super-comprehensive list of ARGs, including information about uptake, impact, and awards. Compiled by Christy Dena (whose site also hosts many other great resources like this and this and this).
• is this ARG? Real-time social media and news feeds about Alternate Reality Gaming and more.
• Google Scholar keyword search
• Wikipedia: Alternate Reality Game
• Wonder Weasels Game guides and player information for a variety of recent ARGs.
• Zotero Group: ARG Research Zach Whalen has set up a Zotero group “for building a bibliography related to Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Transmedia Storytelling, Immersive Gaming and whatever other synonyms and related forms you can think of.” Most of the links found in this resource have been cross-posted there. If you are a Zotero user, please help the group to expand its bibliography!

Looking for a more traditional bibliography? Click here to view this list using the Chicago Manual of Style.

As always, any comments are much appreciated!

Know of something that should be listed here? Please get in touch with me via the comments and I will update the resource.

Museums

Games

• Ghosts of a Chance (Smithsonian, 2008-2010) “We live in a world in which information and entertainment are customizable and immediately available. The Internet has become a larger part of everyday life, and so too have networked games, as people seek community, activity, a sense of achievement, and the chance to be part of something bigger . . . Museums can reach out to their audiences in more ways, using blogs, podcasts, video, and social media, but can they meaningfully engage visitors using games? In the fall of 2008, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted an Alternate Reality Game titled “Ghosts of a Chance.” We did this with three goals in mind: to broaden our audience, to do a bit of self-promotion, and, most importantly, to encourage discovery around our collections in a new, very interactive way. This paper will discuss the challenges that the museum faced, evaluate the successes and failures of each part of the game, and make recommendations for other museums interested in trying something similar.” (Archimuse)

• More on Ghosts of a Chance: Georgina Goodlander’s paper, Nina Simon’s blog writeup, Anika Gupta’s piece on Smithsonian.com and goSmithsonian, Washington Post coverage, and NPR’s coverage.
• PHEON (Multiple institutions, 2010) “For the past couple of months CityMystery has been building a new game, called PHEON. (A pheon is an ancient Greek arrowhead that has come to symbolize nimbleness of wit.) The purpose of our game is to celebrate (and reinforce) the American impulse to innovate. An economist friend of mine recently said that we have to “invent” our way out of our current mess. With PHEON I am promoting the idea that Americans understand innovation as a reoccurring utility of our democracy, one that matches our ability to adapt and succeed. PHEON’s subtext has to do with how ideas are passed along: how one person articulates a wish that another fulfills.” (“Sneak Preview of a New Museum Game“)
• More on PHEON: see Pass on the PHEON!.
• Many museums are also developing location-specific games and storytelling activities (like this or this) that don’t fit comfortably into the definition of an ARG. For some starting points for looking into these kinds of projects, see my locative media and ambient storytelling resources, and visit Nancy Proctor’s site, Museum Mobile.

Articles and discussions

• Reshaping the art museum June 2009 article from ArtNews: “Confronted with urgent demographic realities, art-museum directors are drawing on game theory, interactive technology, and a host of other new strategies to help people feel welcome, engaged, and emotionally fulfilled.”
• Smithsonian 2.0 “The two-day Smithsonian 2.0 gathering explores how to make SI collections, educational resources, and staff more accessible, engaging, and useful to younger generations (teenage through college students) who will largely experience them digitally. Over 30 creative people from the web and new media world will meet with 30 Smithsonian staff members to generate a vision of what a digital Smithsonian might be like in the years ahead.”

Libraries and Library Systems

Games

• Find Chesia (Carroll County MD Public Library, 2009) “Carroll County Public Library simply defined their ARG as a game played online and in the real world, where players solve puzzles, collect clues and objects, and ultimately find out about the mysterious Chesia. The library’s definition focused on the interactive story element and the promotion of technology literacy. Lynn Wheeler, Director of Carroll County Public Library, expressed pride in the project and the volunteers and staff who ‘have worked tirelessly to create delightful opportunities for teens to learn about and in turn use Web 2.0 technologies to create fun learning activities.’” (School Library Journal)

• Blood on the Stacks (Trinity University, 2006-2007) “Blood on the Stacks began in the spring of 2006, with a charge from Library Director Diane Graves to invent an orientation to follow in the footsteps of the hugely successful Harry Potter-themed orientations created by science librarian Barbara MacAlpine. Librarians Jeremy Donald, Clint Chamberlain and Jason Hardin created a mixed-media, digital/analog experience that treated the library as both a cyberspace and a bricks-and-mortar campus hotspot. Communication professor Aaron Delwiche supplied the idea of making the library orientation an ‘alternate reality game,’ where a fictional online narrative combines with real-world people, places, and events to create a game that blurs the boundary between the real and the imagined, the online environment and physical reality.” (lib.trinity.edu)

Universities, Colleges and K-12

Games

• Reality (University of Southern California, 2011-) Collaborative production game driven by digitally-connected collectible cards, designed to accelerate creative serendipity and peer discovery. More info: here. See also, Wired article and henryjenkins.org.
• AFTRS/LAMP induction and orientation ARGs (Australian Film Television and Radio School, 2005-2009) “Mini Alternate Reality Games (mARGs), collaborative play and quests as part of LAMP residentials or AFTRS inductions.” Includes games designed by Gary Hayes and Christy Dena.

• ARGOSI (Manchester Metropolitan University/University of Bolton, 2008-2009) “Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction (ARGOSI) was a JISC-funded project that ran from April 2008 to March 2009. It designed and piloted an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to support the student induction process. This small-scale pilot project was . . . aimed to provide an engaging and purposeful alternative to traditional methods of introducing students to university life.”
• WOW! A Song for Skatz (UK K-12, 2009) Nikki Pugh, lead artist for this project, describes this ARG-like school activity as: “Immersive – you’re in it, it takes over; Challenging – you will be outside your comfort zone. You will step up; you will learn; you will grow; Awesome – it will be beyond your expectations. It will give you things that could not have been planned; Inspiring – there will be spaces left for you to fill in in imagination technicolour; Pervasive – it will seep out of the classroom and reach beyond lesson times; Malleable – it will mean different things to different people; also, you will need to plan and contingency plan… and then adjust those plans on the fly in response to what is presented to you.” Check out Nikki’s fantastic project documentation here.
• Skeleton Chase (Indiana University, 2008) “In late May [of 2008], Indiana University announced that it received a $185,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore how interactive digital games can be designed to improve players’ health. . . The [alternate reality game produced with this grant] was a collaboration between professors Anne Massey (Kelley School of Business), Jeanne Johnston (Kinesiology Department), and Lee Sheldon (Telecommunications Department).” (ARGNet)

Articles and Discussions

• Alternate reality games for developing student autonomy and peer learning Nicola Whitton’s case study of the ARGOSI project at Manchester Metropolitan University: “This paper discusses the educational potential of alternate reality games (ARGs), a relatively new game format that takes place both online and in the real world over a number of weeks, and combines narrative and puzzles to develop a collaborative community. In this paper, first the concept of ARGs are described, including their history and composition, and their potential pedagogic benefits are discussed in relation to constructivism, student autonomy and peer learning.” (lick2008.wikispaces.com)
• See also: Nicola Whitton’s ARGOSI PowerPoint presentation from the 2008 Let’s Change the Game Conference.
• MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition: ARG proposals Play without Borders and Earthrise are two recent DML competition proposals for school-based ARGs.
• Peer Puppeteers: Alternate Reality Gaming in Primary Schools “In this paper I will be reporting on a crosscurricular multi-media literacy project undertaken in a large South London Primary School over two years, which represents one element of my ongoing research into the potential of Alternate Reality Gaming in Primary Education.” (Angela Colvert)

Government, meta-institutional, and more

Not all educational or public-minded ARGs are necessarily tied down to a single institution or system. Here are a few notable games that have been produced outside of museums, libraries, and schools while still serving a larger learning or public service purpose:

Games

• ARGuing (European Commission Lifelong Learning Programme, 2010) “The ARGuing project helps teachers use the Internet (see Web 2.0 ) within language education. The project is funded by the European Union within the Comenius Lifelong Learning Programme. The project has developed and piloted a massive and very successful Alternate Reality Game (see Alternate Reality Games ) called the ‘Tower of Babel’ to ‘Engage’, ‘Motivate’ and ‘Excite’ students to learn languages using the new possibilities that the Internet age offers us (see more). ARGuing will build an educational methodology and teacher training guides and courses that can be used by teachers and teacher trainers to learn and understand how they can use the Internet, in a similar way to how their students are already using technology.”
• EVOKE (World Bank Institute, 2010) “When we evoke, we look for creative solutions. We use whatever resources we have. We get as many people involved as possible. We take risks. We come up with ideas that have never been tried before. An evoke is an urgent call to innovation. Evoking first started in Africa, but it can happen anywhere. And if you found this message, then it is your destiny to join us.”

• More on EVOKE: McGonigal describes the game on CNN
• Routes (Channel 4 Education/The Wellcome Trust, 2009) “Routes is an eight week game from Channel 4 Education in association with the Wellcome Trust that takes players into a world of genetics, evolution and the human genome.”
• World Without Oil (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2007) “WORLD WITHOUT OIL is a serious game for the public good. WWO invited people from all walks of life to contribute ‘collective imagination’ to confront a real-world issue: the risk our unbridled thirst for oil poses to our economy, climate and quality of life. It’s a milestone in the quest to use games as democratic, collaborative platforms for exploring possible futures and sparking future-changing action. WWO set the model for using a hot net-native storytelling method (‘alternate reality’) to meet civic and educational goals. Best of all, it was compellingly fun.”

Articles and Discussions

• Federal multi-agency Alternative Reality Game “The general idea of a multi-agency ARG would be to use game play as a way of engaging citizens in an exploration of democratic ideals. It would also be a way to discover new connections between Federal agencies, and new ways of connecting citizens to their government.” (Smithsonian 2.0)

Designers, observers, and policy-makers

• ARGLE Angela Colvert’s research into the potential of alternate reality gaming in education.
• Center for the Future of Museums “Musings on the future of museums and society from Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, an initiative of the american association of museums”
• Georgina Goodlander Manager of the Luce Foundation Center (visible storage) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
• Jane McGonigal Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future.
• John Maccabbee Game designer/producer/writer; involved in Ghosts of a Chance and PHEON.
• Ken Eklund author and game designer.
• MOERG “Alex Moseley is an Educational Designer at the University of Leicester. He is a learning and teaching practitioner, and conducts research into skills and subject teaching and support using paradigms from online games and social networks.”
• Museum Mobile Nancy Proctor‘s MuseumMobile “is a forum for conversations about mobile interpretation – media & technology – for museums and cultural sites.” MuseumMobile also has a public wiki, which is an outgrowth of the Tate Modern’s Handheld Conference Wiki.
• Nicola Whitton “I feel that the combination of gaming characteristics and lo-fi environment in ARGs are ideally suited to learning.”
• Nikki Pugh “I work in the grey areas between and across Art, Science and Technology, instigating enquiry-led processes that are often highly participatory in nature.”
• Nina Simon “[works] with museums to design exhibitions, programs, and online experiences that engage visitors as co-creators and community members, not just consumers.” Her design consultancy, Museum 2.0 is “focused on creating participatory, dynamic, audience-centered museum spaces.”
• NITLE “The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) is a community-based, non-profit initiative that helps liberal arts colleges and universities explore and implement digital technologies.”
• Playtime Anti-Boredom Society Creators of SF0 and many other exciting projects; involved in production of Ghosts of a Chance.

See also: ARGology.org: ARGs in Education & Training, IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper 2006, IGDA ARG SIG wiki: Educators and ARGs, Google keyword search [1] [2] [3], Twitter hashtag #mtogo

A few years ago, these kinds of systems were out of reach for most DIY designers and artists. This is no longer the case. Thanks to freely-available social media, mobile technology, and web publishing tools, ARG producers with shoestring budgets can now roll their own custom ARG management and delivery systems.

About this resource

For the purposes of this post, I’ve chosen to focus on providing examples of free technologies and services that can assist designers in managing/deploying content, architecting participation, and articulating game mechanics. To this end, I’ve organized things according to six key logistical requirements designers might encounter when running an ARG; these requirements are:

• The need to organize game assets and personnel
• The need to create and manage player profiles and communities
• The need to manage multiple web presences and social media profiles
• The need to deploy content on mobile devices
• The need to analyze participation and buzz
• The need to create and distribute physical artifacts

Obviously, not all ARGs are going to have every one of these needs, and some will have others that aren’t listed here. If you can think of a significant category of content-oriented requirements that should be here, please let me know in the comments and I will expand this resource accordingly.

Organize game assets and personnel

Keeping track of game assets such as websites, physical installations, performers, events, story flows, and the rest of it can quickly turn into a full-time job. For a really big ARG, production management presents challenges on the same order as the logistical operations seen in feature films — and often well beyond. Here are a few tips for how indie ARG designers can keep their games organized:

• Master the whiteboard Whiteboards are perfect for organizing the sprawl of media assets that characterize story- and interaction-heavy game designs like ARGs. If you don’t have a whiteboard, you can just paint one onto any wall. Don’t forget to take a photo backup of the board after you update it in case someone stumbles in and erases your game.

• Map game assets and story elements Mind-mapping software is an indispensible companion to the whiteboard, and can be the perfect tool for planning and tracking nonlinear distributed story-game activities like ARGs. My favorite instance of this kind of software is IHMC Cmap Tools, a free program (created with US tax dollars by the good folks at DARPA) that enables you to create semantic network maps like those described by Douglas Hofstadter in his book, Godel, Escher, Bach. Cmap Tools goes a long way toward automating making such mind maps, and it enables a bunch of other neat features, too, like embedded media, linked maps, parametric layouts, and more. These charts can reveal a lot about the interconnectivity of your story-world’s various components, and are great for visualizing the different ways that players will flow through the experience you are creating.
• Production management and collaboration tools Take your pick: Zoho, Google Wave, Campfire, and Ning are all great free online collaboration apps. For media-specific pre-production and production tools, try Celtx, “the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production system. It replaces ‘paper & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.”

Create and manage player profiles and communities

Customizing individual player experiences in an ARG requires being able link profile information to game states and story elements. Even a simple profile system can unlock powerful game mechanics and storytelling options such as progress-dependent content and in-game ability unlocks.

• Leverage existing profiles ARG designers can lower the bar to entry to their games — and take advantage of the affordances of mature social networking platforms — by making use of players’ existing accounts instead of asking them to sign up for yet another social service. APIs like Facebook Connect can bridge the gap between your game and your players’ everyday media flows — and provide you with a ready-made means for tracking game progress and delivering content. If you have a coder on your team, creating a dedicated app will be relatively easy; if not, Facebook’s developer documentation will help you to get started.
• Create dedicated social networking sites For designers who feel they absolutely must create a standalone player profile system, open-source software packages like Elgg, or free web services like Ning (for which many players will already have an ID) can be used to set up community hubs from scratch (as seen in this top-secret ARG and this fitness game). BuddyPress is perhaps the most interesting of these options, as it makes use of the massive developer community around WordPress, and has plugins that can link player profiles automatically to Facebook accounts.

Manage multiple web presences and social media profiles

Maintaining social media identities across a range of services is essential for running an ARG with a heavy online component. Here are some DIY content management and delivery tips for streamlining this process:

• Post status updates to multiple profiles Most readers are probably familiar with apps such as Seesmic Desktop, HootSuite, CoTweet, or Tweetdeck, all of which enable easy management of multiple social media profiles via a single interface. These apps also make it easy to track responses to your updates, post images to a variety of hosting sites, monitor keyword searches, and, in the case of HootSuite and CoTweet, schedule timed updates (great for producing “Twitter Drama”). There are dozens of similar apps, both offline and on; depending on the range of services you need to update, finding a handy desktop client or cloud app (not to mention one for your mobile devices) shouldn’t be too hard.
• Enable collaborators to easily post to blogs and other social media services Posterous is a powerful email-to-post blogging service that has a lot of potential applications in the DIY ARG space. Running a group blog with Posterous is ridiculously simple and fits into any workflow since the system uses ordinary email to make blog posts. Posterous will convert any images, audio files, or videos into web-friendly formats and lay them out nicely. But its most useful feature is the way it can “Autopost” content to a variety of other services, including WordPress-powered blogs, Facebook, flickr, and Twitter.
• Aggregate posts from players and/or in-game characters Aggregate your content into one place using WordPress plugins like FeedWordPress and Lifestream. These plugins, alongside WordPress’ already-formidable content management features, can enable ARG producers to gather together not only the social media content that they produce, but also — and sometimes more importantly — the content that gets produced by their player communities. FeedWordPress is particularly impressive, as it will archive, categorize, and tag everything that it aggregates — providing you with another layer of content to feed back to your players.

Deploy content on mobile devices

Engaging with players and storytellers via their mobile devices opens up exciting new realms of location-based gaming and participation.

• Automate SMS interactions and/or make a location-based game As GPS and smart phones become increasingly ubiquitous, third party apps for developing and managing games that take place in the physical world are starting to emerge. SCVNGR is an interesting early arrival to this space. According to their website, SCVNGR is “the world’s first platform to enable anyone, anywhere to develop, manage and deploy sophisticated interactive location-based mobile games, tours and experiences.” I’ve used the system for a few projects, and it works quite well. Just a couple of years ago, setting up an SMS-driven interactive location-based game was a serious coding challenge that required serious money and time. Now it’s free and easy. Also, it should be noted that games designed with SCVNGR will work best on iPhone or Android, but are also fully playable via SMS (significant for designers who want to keep the bar to entry for their games as low as possible).
• The WAAG Society‘s 7scenes application goes a step further than SCVNGR, enabling all manner of location-based interactivity. The app is supposed to expand beyond Nokia phones in mid-2010, meaning that you’ll be able to develop GPS games for iPhone and Android using 7scenes’ great interface. The only drawback: the full service isn’t free.
• Make a custom phone app Objective C coding skills aren’t as easy to come by as plain old HTML and JavaScript know-how. Which is precisely why PhoneGap is so cool: “PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.”

• Piggy-back on an existing game or platform If it makes sense in your story, why not just use existing mobile media services to extend your game into physical space? Just as social media services like Twitter and Facebook have long been used by in-game characters and agencies, so too can web-connected mobile media services like Foursquare, Brightkite, and Gowalla function as vehicles for cross-media storytelling (for an example of this, click here). And since many of these services provide RSS feeds for user profiles, you can easily connect the mobile end of your game world back into your web presence.
• See also: Locative media resources

Analyze participation and buzz

Committed participants are easy to track. They post in Unfiction forums, attend events, set up profiles, and communicate with in-game characters. Tracking lurkers and occasional participants is a different matter — but a significant one, since casual observers will often compose the bulk of a game’s audience.

• Monitor Twitter activity Web apps like Twitalyzer, Twitter Analyzer, and Twittersheep (to name just a few) can help you to track and understand your player community. Thanks to Twitter’s remarkably open and flexible API, new tools for analyzing buzz and influence on Twitter come out almost every day. Try a search like this one to see what’s current — or check out top-n lists like this, this or this.
• Monitor link sharing Link shortening services like bit.ly may present serious problems to future archivists, but for real-time web projects, they’re an easy way to track traffic flows and spreadable media. From bit.ly’s FAQ: “bit.ly users receive a unique bit.ly link that lets them track clicks and other data separately, while still seeing totals for all bit.ly links pointing to the same long link.”

• Monitor site traffic Google Analytics is a free service that enables you to monitor traffic sources and activity via a simple script that you can copy and paste into your site’s header. This is particularly useful for ARGs that have large lurker populations and/or are geographically dispersed. It’s also a good way to see which parts of a website are being read — and which are being skipped over.

Produce physical artifacts, merchandise, and e-commerce

Locative media isn’t the only way to bring your game into the physical experience of your players. Artifacts such as books, clothing, and other customized items have enormous potential as vehicles for real world storytelling and play.

• Publish books and pamphlets Print on Demand continues to revolutionize indie publishing, which is good news for transmedia producers who want to incorporate novels, graphic novels, comic books, photo albums, or other printed materials into their projects. Lulu.com will print your books on demand using the same kinds of presses that are used to make the trade paperbacks published by the big “legitimate” presses — and they’ll help you to distribute them, too. Setting up a Lulu.com storefront is almost as easy as creating a blog with Blogger — only the output is a real book, an item with heft and presence.
• Make stuff — and retail it Merchandise can be a good way to generate money for charitable causes. It can also be a clever way to tell a story. Indie ARG Must Love Robots did both of these things with their in-game clothing brand, Inactiveware. Like Lulu.com, Cafe Press and other on demand services make it possible for transmedia producers to quickly create and retail a variety of physical media artifacts — from t-shirts and mugs to mousepads and posters — that can extend and enrich their story worlds.

Help me improve this resource: send me an email or leave a reply in the comments if you have any suggestions.

Precedents and origins

• Grafitti

• Mail Art “The more theoretical branch of postal art probably has its roots in the Italian Futurists at the turn of the century. They actually used the mail as an artistic device. They sent letters back and forth from World War I praising the beauty of war (they were a sick bunch, what can I tell ya?) but they also used the mail imaginatively, creating innovative stationary, letterheads, logos, postcards and rubber stamps.” (A Brief History of Postal Art)
• Sticker Art such as Shepard Fairey‘s Andre the Giant has a posse
• Implementation “Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. The text was written collaboratively by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg with some contributions from others. Its initial incarnation was as a serial novel printed on sheets of stickers that were distributed in monthly installments.” (nickm.com/implementation)

Web-based ambient storytelling

• The Nethernet “…(previously known as PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is an online game in which players “passively” participate in while browsing web pages. Players earn data points by taking missions, which they can spend on various game items that could be attached to web pages to trigger events when another player next visited that page.” (Wikipedia: The Nethernet)

Context: Play and Mobile Media

• Come out and Play “Come Out & Play helps people rediscover the city around them through play. The festival offers a chance to explore new styles of public games and play. We show how much fun can be had by combining elements like GPS, sidewalks, chalk, smartphones, kickball, SMS, capture the flag, bluetooth, and treasure hunts in a dramatic urban context like New York City.”

• Geocaching “Geocaching is an outdoor activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook. Larger containers can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value. Geocaching is most often described as a “game of high-tech hide and seek”, sharing many aspects with orienteering, treasure-hunting, and waymarking.” (Wikipedia: Geocaching)
• SCVNGR

Improvisition and personal micronarratives

• #sxstarwars a spontaneous re-enactment of Star Wars, carried out by a group of SXSW attendees via Twitter. Variety article here.
• Foursquare
• Brightkite

Rabbitholes and User-Generated Content

• The Jejune Institute Explore the site, then check out the Unfiction forum to find out more.
• World Without Oil “World Without Oil combined elements of an alternate reality game with those of a serious game. The game sketched out the overarching conditions of a realistic oil shock, then called upon players to imagine and document their lives under those conditions. Compelling player stories and ideas were incorporated into the official narrative, posted daily. Players could choose to post their stories as videos, images or blog entries, or to phone or email them to the WWO gamemasters. The game’s central site linked to all the player material, and the game’s characters documented their own lives, and commented on player stories, on a community blog and individual blogs, plus via IM, chat, Twitter and other media.” (Wikipedia: World Without Oil)
• Jane McGonigal: “Why I Love Bees” (.pdf) “Alternate reality games (ARGs) are massively multiplayer puzzle adventures that combine online interactive content with real-world game events. McGonigal proposes “stimulating ambiguity” as the central design philosophy of ARGs. She explores how ambiguous game content stimulates massively collaborative game play that allows for a greater share of leadership and meaningful participation in large-scale player groups. She also outlines how the open-ended puzzles of ARGs inspire multiple, creative interpretations that allow for diverse problem-solving strategies to flourish in a single player community. The essay is grounded in a close reading of player-produced content and their interpretations of the core puzzle of the I Love Bees game: a series of several hundred GPS coordinates, dates, and times that were listed on the central game Web site.” (MIT Press)

Embedding media

• Glyphs, RFID tags, and spimes: see Locative Media Resources

• Augmented Reality (AR) Please, please, please don’t confuse AR with ARGs. They’re totally different things. When we talk about ARGs, we’re talking about a set of practices related to storytelling and interaction; AR refers to a specific set of technologies that enable a real-world environment to be augmented by computer-generated imagery or information, creating a kind of “mixed” reality. Layar and Google Goggles are two examples of AR that have recently appeared on cell phones.
• Ghostwire An AR game for the Nintendo DSi.
• The Hidden Park An AR game for the iPhone in which “…children navigate their way through the park by following a map that lets them know where the magical creatures live. Of course, Trutton’s map is magical – as [the children] move past landmarks in the park the map tells them where to go next. The children must solve puzzles and riddles on their way to the next destination. Clues to the answers can be found on the signposts in the park. Following Trutton’s directions, the children take photos of various landmarks. As if by magic, Trutton’s fantastical friends appear in the photos – sometimes right next to the children!”

Location-specific ambient storytelling

• Million Story Building “…an experimental design project exploring how location-specific mobile technology can add playful, imaginative and practical new layers to the relationship between a structure and its inhabitants.” (USC MEML)

Image Manipulation Tools

• Adobe Photoshop The industry standard bitmap image editor. If you’re a student, your school might have an arrangement with Adobe that will entitle you to a copy. If not, well… you could try looking elsewhere. I’m just saying.
• Paint.net (Windows) A good basic image editor that can do a lot and is completely free. “Paint.NET…features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.”
• The Gimp Cross-platform open-source image editor. Almost as powerful as Photoshop, and 100 percent free (and legal). Slightly steeper learning curve than Paint.net.

Good Places to Find Images

• Flickr.com
• Picasa.com
• Archive.org
• Extensive list of resources, tips and tricks: Random Knowledge

Inspiration and Food For Thought

• Arthur Lipsett’s found footage films: 21-87 and Very Nice, Very Nice

• Making a movie with stills and sound: Chris Marker’s La Jetee
• Making meaning with crowds and machines: Flickeur and Islands of Consciousness
• Photoshop Tilt Shift Trick Tutorial

Miscellaneous

• My Delicious bookmarks tagged design and images.

Technical Support

• About.com Photoshop Resources
• Adobe User Forums: Photoshop
• Gimp User Manual

Pervasive Computing

• Rise of the Network Society — Manuel Castells’ excellent book about the economic and cultural implications of pervasive computing. Writing about nanotech, Castells notes that “…experimental programs seem to indicate that molecular electronics is a possible avenue to overcoming the limits of increasing density in silicon chips, while ushering in an era of computers 100 billion times as fast as a Pentium microprocessor; this would make it possible to pack the computing power of a hundred 1999 computer workstations into a space the size of a grain of salt. Based on these technologies, computer scientists envisage the possibility of computing environments where billions of microscopic information-processing devices will be spread everywhere ‘like pigment in the wall paint.’ If so, then computer networks will be, materially speaking, the fabric of our lives.” (53)

• Cell Phone Usage Worldwide — There are over 2.1 billion cell phones in the world today.
• Hitachi RFID dust — These tiny RFID chips look like powder, measuring just 0.05 millimeters (0.002 inches) by 0.05 millimeters (0.002 inches), and are thin enough to be embedded in pieces of paper.

The Semantic Web

• Tim Berners-Lee: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.” (Weaving The Web, ch. 12)
• TED Talk: Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web of open, linked data –  “20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.” (TED)
• Linked Data — Tim Berner-Lee’s original article on the subject.
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web — W3C article on standards for concept and data URI (Universal Resource Identifiers). Abstract: “The Resource Description Framework RDF allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world—people, organisations, topics, things—in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important, providing both the core of the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for their effective use. It discusses two strategies, called 303 URIs and hash URIs. It gives pointers to several Web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other proposals have problems.”
• Related projects and associations: dbPedia, Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF), SIMILIE, SIOC

Internet of Things

• Shaping Things (.pdf) — A pdf copy of Sterling’s 2005 book wherein he describes the concept of the spime. From the product description: “The future will see a new kind of object—we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable—that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term “spime” for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won’t be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.” (Amazon.com)

• Spimes and the Future of Artifacts (video presentation) — An entertaining 35 minute presentation elaborating on six key technology trends (RFID, GPS, visual search, CAD, rapid prototyping and “transparent production”) that are changing the way that we relate to objects. He defines a spime as an object that is “plannable, trackable, findable, recyclable, uniquely identified and generates digital histories.” (5:33)
• Flurb #6: Computer Entertainment (text) — A signature Bruce Sterling rant posing as a lecture given to a 2008 SXSW audience by a time traveler from the year 2043. Representative passage: “This is my General Electric Pocket Mediator. This one’s about five years old, it’s a student’s model. Personal mediators are a stable technology in my time, we don’t have to fuss with them much. Unfortunately it doesn’t have full functionality here in 2008, because we don’t have the cloud yet. As soon as I reached here, my Mediator reached out for the cloud to reload its apps and OS… and it tapped into something called “Window-Vista.” Then it just plain gave up. It’s gone completely limp now. There’s nothing left here but this frozen screen-saver pattern.”
• Four Stages of the Internet of Things — Former Wired editor and all-around whiz Kevin Kelly riffs on this article by Tim Berners-Lee to construct a succinct description of what he thinks “the Semantic Web” or “Web 3.0″ is all about. In short, his four stages are: 1) Linking computers, 2) Linking documents, 3) Linking the data in (and about) documents, and 4) Linking things.
• The net shapes up to get physical — Guardian article by Sean Dodson. Good general description. Excerpt: “Most people, if they bother to think about it at all, probably view the internet as an agent of profound change. In the 15 years since Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, the life of almost everyone in the industrialised world has been touched by it. But just as many of us are getting to grips with its second stage, the mobile internet, very few are prepared – perhaps even aware – of the third and potentially most revolutionary phase of all: the internet of things.” (guardian.co.uk)
• RFID — Wikipedia article on RFID tags. Includes many interesting examples.
• Organizations: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), semanticweb.org, IPv6, IPSO Alliance, Zigbee.org, Pachube.com

Responsive Environments

• How smart does your bed have to be, before you are afraid to go to sleep at night? — Rich Gold critiques the notion of the “smart house” in this hilarious and thought-provoking essay. “Can an intelligent house fall in love with the house next door,” asks Gold. “Can they have baby houses? Is an architect a trained “womb” for houses, or more crudely, is an architect how a house makes another house? Does an architect feel like she/he is violating fundamental forces of evolution if she/he does not include the latest new technology in the house she/he next gives birth to? Do you believe in progress? Is a suburban house of today better than a terrace house in London in 1850 which was better than a thatched country cottage in 1700 which was better than the tepees and mud huts that Columbus found in the New World? Is the house that Donald Trump lives in better than the house you live in? If you were an architect and you designed an intelligent house, would the house’s own happiness matter to you? If the couple that bought the house you designed got a divorce, do you think you should be libel for damages?”
• Orchestrating your surroundings — A project proposal for a “smart house”-type environment by by Pau Giner, Carlos Cetina, Joan Fons and Vicente Pelechano.

Imagined Futures/Imagined Presents

• Ubik – A novel by Philip K. Dick treating themes of intelligent environments, resurrection and shifting ontologies. Research only: torrent here.
• Spook Country — A novel by William Gibson about locative media artists and shadowy private intelligence contractors.

See also: Ambient storytelling resources