Alternate Reality Games SIG/Whitepaper/ARGs and Academia

International Game Developers Association

original author: Christy Dena

You may be wondering what a section on the academic research of ARGs is doing in a whitepaper. You should be asking why a section of academic research hasn’t been included in a whitepaper previously. Academics play ARGs, they design them and watch them afar. All the academics, regardless of their level of participation, share a fascination with ARGs and want to understand the emerging form. Their research offers insights into what an ARG is, how they differ from other forms and how the design and experience of them can be utilised in other forms of entertainment and education. In short, they provide unique contributions for the benefit of players, designers, researchers, industry and media.

Table of contents 1 The Obligatory Notes on Method 2 Background or How Academics & ARGs Fell For Each Other 3 Current research 3.1 ARG Communities: Why They’re the Best Gang in Town 3.2 Henry Jenkins 3.3 Jenkins & ARGs 3.4 Jane McGonigal 3.5 ARGs & McGonigal 3.6 Jeremy Reynolds 4 ARGs & Philosophy: How ARGs Battleaxe Boundaries 4.1 Steven E. Jones 4.2 ARGs & Jones 4.3 Eva Nieuwdorp 4.4 ARGs & Nieuwdorp 5 ARGS & Education: Why No School Should Be Without One 5.1 Bryan Alexander 5.2 ARGs & Alexander 5.3 Ravi Purushotma 5.4 ARGs & Purushotma 5.5 Jane Turner (truna) 5.6 Ann Morrison 5.7 ARGs & Turner & Morrison 6 ARGs & Entertainment: “The Citizen Kane of Online Entertainment” 6.1 Christy Dena 6.2 ARGs & Dena 6.3 Andrew Losowsky 6.4 ARGs & Losowsky 6.5 Jason Mittell 6.6 ARGs & Mittell 6.7 Henrik Örnebring 6.8 ARGs & Örnebring 6.9 Marc Ruppel 7 Future Directions 7.1 reference:

[edit] The Obligatory Notes on Method

In the interests of accountability, academic writing usually does not acknowledge non-refereed publications. But since ARGs are an emerging area and because we wanted to provide you with the most up-to-date information, we decided to include substantial blog posts and give participants the chance to comment informally on their recent findings and insights. There is one contributor in this section too, that is not an academic, but has presented an academic paper as an independent scholar.

There are also some researchers that, for various reasons, were not able to be covered in this whitepaper. Of note is the ARG Ares Station³⁰, a Masters project for Nathan Mishler and Will Emigh at the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University Bloomington. That thesis is in the process of being written. Drew Davidson, the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center (Pittsburgh) at Carnegie Mellon University, will be discussing ARGs along with contributions from Jane McGonigal and Christy Dena in his forthcoming book: Cross-Media Communications: an Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences .

[edit] Background or How Academics & ARGs Fell For Each Other

Jane McGonigal was the first academic to come across ARGs and be inspired to include them in her PhD (forthcoming). Over the last couple of years, however, more academics are finding ARGs a rich subject for analysis. They have stumbled across ARGs or been grabbed by the ear and shown them, but regardless of their point of entry all have found them to be an unusual and inspiring confluence of ideas. ARGs are subject to such a diverse range of influences and yet have a strong community driver. If there is ever an artistic form that is moulded by the hands of many, this is it. The academics featured here have clay under their fingernails too.

For many of the 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:

For notions of ‘play’ see the pre-digital works: Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1998 (1950)); Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games (2001, (1958)) and Brian Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of Play (2001). For game studies in the digital era, see Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2003) and Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005). For narrative, look at Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative Across Media (2004) and for those looking at treatments of both game and narrative see Espen

Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives of Ergodic Literature (1997) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s (eds) First Person: New Media as Story Performance and Game (2004) and their forthcoming Second Person: Role Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. For the history of artforms in general see Randall Packer and Ken Jordan’s (eds) Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (2001). For group dynamics and the like see Pierre Levy’s Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (1997).

The academics were asked what reading they would recommend for ARG researchers and designers. The following are their suggestions:

• Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution (2003) [Alexander]
• David Szulborski’s This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (2005) [Alexander]
• David Weinberger’s Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web (2002) [Alexander]
• Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) [Dena]
• Shawn James Rosenheim’s The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (1997) [Dena]
• Textual Studies works by D. McKenzie, J. McGann and G. Genette. [Jones]
• ‘Matt Webb’s weblog www.interconnected.org is one of the more thoughtful weblogs that reminds of ARG thinking too.’ [Losowsky]
• The introduction and two first chapters of Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning’s The Quest forExcitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (1986) [Örnebring]
• The writings of James Joyce [Morrison]
• University of Virginia’s ‘Directory of Webquests’: http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/edis771/webquests/directory_of_webquests.html [Purushotma]
• Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play [Reynolds]
• Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative Across Media (2003) [Ruppel]

[edit] Current research

The following section provides a snapshot of the most recent research into ARGs. All of the academics showcased here are interdisciplinary, so they use a variety of methods and look at many aspects of ARGs. For the sake of clarity, however, we have grouped the research into categories that are representative of the main concerns of all the investigators. Within each category the academics are listed in alphabetical order according to surname and their publications are listed at the end of this section.

[edit] ARG Communities: Why They’re the Best Gang in Town

The community of ARG players is widely admired by those within it and those observing it. What makes the ARG community unique begins with the design characteristic of ARGs: they are collaborative. They are so vast and layered in complexity that no single person can possibly find all the texts and unlock them in time and with their own knowledge alone. ARG players rely on each like no other community therefore. An ARG doesn’t come alive until it is played. An ARG does not persist without the work of many players, often worldwide. Ironically, because of the no-interference policy of producers of ARGs, it is up to the players to work how they communicate, share, analyse and act. It is for these reasons, and many more, that the ARG communities are a fascination to many academics from a variety of fields. They believe that the unique activities of ARGs communities can enlighten producers of media on how to design for participation, provide insight into tools for empowerment, are ideal marketing hubs and also illuminate the nature of communication and networks in general.

[edit] Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins is Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and the DeFlorz Professor of Humanities, MIT. He is the principle investigator for the MIT-Microsoft Games-to-Teach project, co-faculty investigator of the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) and one of the founders and directors of The Education Arcade. At C3, Jenkins is investigating transmedia entertainment, participatory culture and experiential marketing. He has published monthly columns at the Technology Review Online and Computer Games magazine, and at the Media Center’s ‘We Imagine’ section of Morph. He is the author of numerous books, chapters and articles, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Jenkins has two books forthcoming: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

University Website: http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/

Personal Blog: http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Convergence Culture Consortium (C3): http://www.convergenceculture.net/

[edit] Jenkins & ARGs

Jenkins first heard about ARGs through an undergraduate student, a Cloudmaker, who was on the educational games design project. He spoke with Neil Young at EA about his experiences with Majestic and then finally connected with Jane McGonigal. ARGs contributed to his ongoing research into ‘collective intelligence issues’ for his forthcoming book Convergence Culture, the research he has been conducting for Project New Media Literacies (commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation) and his journalism at Technology Review Online. In Convergence Culture, Jenkins discusses three core ideas: convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence (Jenkins, forthcoming). Convergence is the ‘flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences’ (ibid.). Participatory culture is the inverse of ‘older notions of passive media spectatorship’ where media producers and consumers interchange their roles. Jenkins invokes Pierre Levy’s notion of ‘collective intelligence’ to frame ‘an alternative source of media’. It is world where ‘[n]one of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills’.

Alternative reality games operate across all three of these spaces [convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence]. First, they are informational scavenger hunts which disperse information across a broad range of different media channels. This goes back to the pioneering work which Neil Young did for Majestic, arguably one of the earliest and most influential examples of this practice. Second, they encourage players to create new media tools which they can use to process and communicate information. And third, they can only be solved by people working together as teams and tapping the power of social networks to solve problems. So Alternative reality games are, in a sense, the perfect illustration of all of the principles which I see shaping the media landscape at the present time .

In Convergence Culture Jenkins augments the insights of Jane McGonigal with observations about the ways players are affected by ARGs:

A well-designed ARG also changes the ways participants think about themselves, giving them a taste of what it is like to work together in massive teams, pooling their expertise towards a common cause. They develop an ethic based on sharing rather than hording knowledge; they learn how to decide what knowledge to trust and what to discard (Jenkins, forthcoming).

Jenkins is encouraged by the ARG players applying their investigative skills onto real world problems — such as the Cloudmakers approach to September 11 and the Collective Detective’s think tank on corruption in US Federal spending. What he finds interesting

is the connection the group is drawing between game play and civic engagement and also the ways this group, composed of people who share common cultural interests but not necessarily ideological perspectives, might work together to arrive at “rational” solutions to complex policy issues (ibid.).

He notes in his article in the Technology Review, ‘Chasing Bees, Without the Hive Mind’, that ‘the sense of empowerment players discover through participating in such robust knowledge communities’ was prefigured by Pierre Levy and his notion of ‘collective intelligence’:

Levy has predicted that such knowledge cultures represent an alternative source of power that exists alongside the political authority of the nation state or the global reach of commodity capitalism. We will someday learn to use this power to change the world (Jenkins, 2004).

Jenkins also extends his ‘collective intelligence’ lens to its implications and applications in education with the Project New Media Literacies Project (Jenkins, et. al, forthcoming). See the section on Ravi Purushotma for further details about this project. Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture (2006) provides an extensive analysis of ARGs and their communities.

[edit] Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is a pervasive game designer with 42 Entertainment and a games researcher at UC Berkeley. As a designer, she specializes in real-world, multiplayer games for public spaces and serious places, including cemeteries, downtown urban centers, city and national parks, airports and public transportation systems. Most recently, she produced Hex168 (2005), which asked Xbox gamers to game their own everyday, real-world environments. Previously, she was a lead designer for 42 Entertainment's I Love Bees (2004), which received the Innovation Awards from the International Game Developers Association, the games Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and recognition from the New York Times' 2004 Year in Review as one of the most significant cultural phenomena of the year. She is also well-known for her design work on flash mobs (2003), urban superhero games like the Go Game (2001 - present), and alternate reality games like Last Call Poker (2005).

Her research focuses on systems and interfaces for massively collaborative play, both in game environments and in everyday life. She consults frequently for technology companies like Intel, Microsoft and Nokia, and for organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Institute for the Future. When not puppet mastering games, she teaches game design (San Francisco Art Institute) and contemporary games culture (UC Berkeley), with an emphasis on how these two fields intersect with public policy, social networks and live performance.

Website: http://www.avantgame.com/

Blog: http://avantgame.blogspot.com/

[edit] ARGs & McGonigal

McGonigal describes her forthcoming dissertation, the first PhD with an extensive treatment of ARGs, as aimed at the fields of digital game studies, ubiquitous computing and performance studies. Her research emphasizes, she adds, the performance aspects of both the games and the culture of ubicomp research and so predominately contributes to performance studies. Her PhD, ‘This Might Be a Game’, ‘examines the historical intersection of ubiquitous computing and multi-modal digital gaming, circa 2001 AD’ (McGonigal, 2006b).

In order to mark the heterogeneity of this experimental design space at the turn of the twenty-first century, I propose three distinct categories of ubiquitous play and performance. They are ubiquitous computer gaming, in which academic research games are deployed to colonize new objects, environments, and users in the name of ubiquitous computing; pervasive gaming, in which spectacular art games aim to critique and to disrupt the social conventions of public spaces; and ubiquitous gaming, in which commercial, massively-multiplayer games work to materially replicate the interactive affordances of traditional digital games in the real world.

Using design statements, original gameplay media, and first-person player accounts, I explore the aesthetics and socio-technological visions of seminal games from each of these three categories, including Can You See Me Now? (Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab, 2001); the Big Urban Game (The Design Institute and Playground, 2003); and The Beast (Microsoft, 2001), respectively. I focus in particular on the category of ubiquitous gaming, which of the three has produced to date the most scalable, reproducible and popular vision of a games-infused, everyday life (ibid., original emphasis).

Besides the comprehensive case studies of The Beast and I Love Bees that McGonigal’s writing and presentations offer, she also works as a mediator between ARG designers and players and academia. In her paper, ‘A Real Little Game’, McGonigal describes the horror of academics that hear about the immersive effects of ARGs and who then deem them “schizophrenic machines” (McGonigal, 2003b). She juxtaposes the rhetoric around the supposed ‘dangerous’ immersion of players who apparently mistake ARGs for real life with the now debunked views of screaming audiences who first experienced cinema. She interrogates the notion of players ‘stumbling’ into something and treating it as real. From an interview with Elan Lee, she illustrates the original intentions behind the TING philosophy, a philosophy that forces all designers and participants to never indicate that they are playing a game:

Players were never meant to believe the “This is not a game” rhetoric, he explained, but rather to be baited by it. “It was obviously a game,” Lee said. “There was nothing we could do about that. What we could do was make it a game with an identity crisis. If I know it's a game, and you know it's a game, but IT doesn't know it's a game, then we've got a conflict (ibid.).

Players of The Beast, she adds, self-regulated themselves when they thought they had done something too real (for instance: believed they had hacked into a real person’s email).Of the relationship between players and puppet masters McGonigal notes:

The key to immersive design, we agreed, is to realize that the clear visibility of the puppetmasters’ work behind the curtain does not lessen the players’ enjoyment. Rather, a beautifully crafted and always visible frame for the play heightens (and makes possible in the first place) the players’ pleasure – just as long as the audience can play along, wink back at the puppetmasters and pretend to believe (ibid.).

In ‘This Is Not a Game’, McGonigal outlined the ‘immersive aesthetics’ of ARGs: the use of the real world, and everyday devices; the play was in the online and offline lives of the players and the websites had ‘every functional hallmark of nonfictional sites’; (McGongial, 2003, 112). She elaborates here:

Aesthetically, technologically and phenomenologically speaking, there was no difference at all between the look, function or accessibility of the in-game sites and non-game sites’ (ibid.).

Other devices are having the real world times and game times correspond: midnight was midnight in both, despite the gap in over one hundred years. Another characteristic she popularised is the now well-known “TING”/‘sub-dermal’ method (not acknowledging it is a game).

In ‘Supergaming!’, McGonigal provides a case study of four projects from the San Francisco area that she describes as indicative of a ‘techno-cultural hub’. She bundles these works under the rubric of ‘supergaming’:

The term “supergaming” is intended to invoke four key attributes of the trend. Supergaming is massively scaled, as in supersized gaming. Supergaming is embedded in and projected onto everyday public environments, as in superimposed gaming. Supergaming heightens the power and capabilities of its players, as in superhero gaming. Finally, supergaming harnesses the play of distributed individuals in a high-performance problem-solving unit, as in supercomputing gaming. In other words, supergaming is both a robust design solution to the community-scaling problem and a potential catalyst for redefining what we mean by and expect of “community” in a new-media context (ibid.).

The purpose of supergaming is to attract audiences: local, online and through media outlets. Supergames can be massively scaled, she argues, contrary to Clay Shirky’s 2002 claim that communities cannot scale.

More recently, in her chapter for the forthcoming book Second Person, McGonigal introduces the notion of ‘power play’ (McGongial, forthcoming). Through a description of the activity of ILB players

— who attended GPS coordinates around the world on a certain day and waited to see what would happen — a ‘new mode of digital gaming’ is explained:

Power plays are a kind of cross between a digital dare and street theater. They are live gaming events, conducted in public places and organized via digital network technologies, in which players are directed via clues to show up at a real-world location (ibid.).

McGonigal cites ‘smart mobs’ and the Go Game as fitting this category too. Power plays are engineered to be ‘public performances’ that address players, people on the street and the unseen ‘puppet masters’. Interestingly, the first use of the term ‘puppet master,’ McGonigal informs, was uttered by a player, Sean Michaels, in the Cloudmakers listserv on the 16th April 2001. She unpacks just what a ‘puppet master’ is, describing how they are never revealed ‘until the game is finished—if ever’; how they differ from Dungeon and Game Masters by not interfering with the live play; how they are not contactable for discussion and how they completely control player actions.

In a sense, then, the gameplay of a puppet mastered experience boils down to a high-stakes challenge: Perform—or else. Or else what? Or else, be denied the opportunity to play. Be left out. Be left behind. There is simply no optionality to the power play—do exactly what you’re told, or there’s no play for you. This underlying power structure requires a level of overt submission from gamers that is simply unprecedented in game culture. And so the players’ definition acknowledges: It is the puppet masters, not the players, who “control the game” (ibid.).

She compares this phenomenon with the many pervasive games such as The Big Urban Game (2003) and Uncle Roy All Around You (2004) where the ‘participants are online directors rather than pervasive performers’ (ibid.). To explain the motivation behind wanting to participate in a puppet mastered game, McGonigal claims that players

have discovered a new criterion for digital realism—a kind of psychological realism that perfectly complements the ‘immersed in reality’ framework of real-world, mission based gaming (ibid.).

Rather than engage in ‘realistic’ 3D graphics, players jump straight to real life and engage in a conceptual immersion. Indeed, McGonigal claims that for a game to be real it must not offer ‘optionality,’ the choices that many games seek to offer. This powerlessness, she continues, gives the immersive gamers pleasure and is definitely wilful. She notes how the players of ILB instructed (through their actions) the puppet masters on what they wanted, and the puppet masters responded by giving it to them.

For players, the pleasures and challenges of real-world gaming missions are the pleasures and challenges of dramatic performance. And for puppet masters, writing real-world mission scripts is very much the same process as writing dramatic texts; redesigning them in real-time is very much the process of directing live actors on stage (ibid.).

McGonigal has just completed her PhD thesis.

[edit] Jeremy Reynolds

Jeremy Reynolds is a recent M.A. recipient from Purdue University’s Professional Communication program. He now works as an Art Director and Writer for Floyd and Partners, a full-service advertising agency in Fort Wayne, IN. Reynolds first discovered ARGs through a post about I Love Bees at Penny Arcade. He subsequently played ILB and was surprised by how well the community worked together and the depth of resources the players developed on short notice. Although the player base was large, diverse, grassroots and almost entirely computer-mediated, Reynolds explains, the community was polite, self-correcting, focused and incredibly efficient. ARGs, he observes, contain examples and illustrate concepts of community and culture building, computer-mediated communication, conflict, persuasion, avant-garde media, semiotics, and cultural studies.

In his Masters synthesis paper, ‘Formation of Shared Group Consciousness through Play’, Reynolds studies ARGs in relation to organizational communication in action (Reynolds, 2006). He draws on Ernest Borman’s Symbolic Convergence Theory (1985) to examine the development of group culture and shared consciousness within communities. Fundamentally, a group experiences a common event, with each dramatized communication they create a group social reality which is evidenced in metaphors, in-jokes and so on. These shared fantasy communications recall the original experience and shape the community. Reynolds explained that ARGs are powerful culture-building mechanisms because they bring people together and specifically task the group with creating the building blocks of a strong group culture. Beyond simply illustrating SCT, Reynolds argued, ARGs are one of the most effective methods conceivable for actively generating the sort of communicative and cultural interactions that Symbolic Convergence Theory describes. In ARGs, one of the shared fantasy themes is ‘This Is Not A Game’ (TINAG or TING).

As much as an ARG performs at not being a game, players perform at not playing a game (ibid., 9).

Among the benefits to players, he notes the ‘sense of empowerment that players feel from taking part in a vast network of similarly-minded, networked individuals’ (ibid., 10). For Reynolds, the signs of a shared group consciousness are in the adoption of special group names: ‘Cloudmakers’ for The Beast, ‘Beekeepers’, ‘Crewmembers’ and ‘Sleeping Princess Army’ for I Love Bees and ‘Retrievers’ for Art of the Heist. Although ARGs run for a few months, Reynolds notes that players stay in the shared consciousness long after and often identify themselves with a previous group name. Indeed, Reynolds recognises that the Cloudmakers have a special status as ‘sagely veterans’ and, because of their swift puzzle-solving skills, ‘above-average intelligence’.

Reynolds believes his research can benefit the marketing industry, and is pursuing non-academic exploration of the marketing aspect of ARGs. He observed in his thesis that:

ARGs are an effective form of marketing; the games build an entire narrative around the product, players create new viral content about the product and the spectacle that ensues draws a large audience from the outside world (ibid., 11).

He adds that ‘as marketing tools ARGs are excellent because they not only require extended exposure to the advertised product, but they encourage participants to build an authentic group culture that is interwoven with brand communication’.

[edit] ARGs & Philosophy: How ARGs Battleaxe Boundaries

No-one in the ARG community, academia or industry has settled on a description of what an ARG is. This is understandable considering it is an emerging form, but also because it is a hybrid of so many areas previously believed to be clearly delineated. Some argue ARGs are nothing but marketing campaigns, others they are the epitome of interactive fiction; others believe them to transcend reality and some think they’re virtual worlds; some think they’re stories, games or performances and others are trying to understand how they’re all of them. Either way, ARGs challenge boundaries. Here are some of the attempts to knock down, shift and walk through those ephemeral walls.

[edit] Steven E. Jones

Steven E. Jones is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of a number of articles and books on romantic-period literature and culture, including Shelley’s Satire (Northern Illinois UP, 1994), Satire and Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), and (as editor), The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period (Palgrave Macmillan 2003). His most recent book is Against Technology: from the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (Routledge, 2006), and he is currently working on a new book on Video Games and Textual Studies.

University Blog: http://www.rc.umd.edu/sjones/blog/

[edit] ARGs & Jones

As a textual scholar, Jones is interested in ARGs as examples of multilayered and cross-platform media events. He argues for a textual analysis approach to videogame studies but believes his research contributes most to cultural studies. In his paper presented at MLA, ‘This Medium will Metastasize’, Jones invokes D.F. McKenzie and Jerome Gann’s notion of a ‘text’ — that is, one that is multimodal and encompassing of many environmental forces and dynamics — and argues that these should be the lens to analyse videogames with (Jones, 2005).

This kind of textual studies seems particularly suited to the study of the porous and quantum objects of attention that today’s video games are, and might encourage us to stop treating games as formal, self-contained objects (even if “interactive” ones) and start recognizing that they are always played within dynamic material and social circumstances that necessarily include not only their encoding and platform […] but also the social networks of players, different overlapping gaming subcultures, and even what we might call “paratextual” events, including but not limited to their marketing and reception (ibid.).

To illustrate, Jones describes how I Love Bees and Halo 2 should be included in any analysis of each.

The story of their relationship is much more interesting than can be revealed by either a focus on formalist or phenomenological gameplay in Halo 2 or an old-fashioned cultural-studies approach to the ARG as mass marketing. I Love Bees was clearly more than merely a marketing device, or rather, it was a marketing device meant to blur the boundaries of marketing and gameplay, in both directions–and it succeeded (ibid.).

Jones observes correlations between the ARG and the videogame, including how both encourage a ‘more or less playful paranoia’. In addition to the textual analysis he offers, Jones notes that players of ARGs are also using textual analysis themselves:

Actually, players of this composite game phenomenon were prompted to act remarkably like textual studies scholars–were in effect coaxed into editing or piecing together fragments of printed and spoken words, but also game-world and real-world actions, locations, and mappings, in order to make sense of their own and others’ emergent gameplay. They were potentially engaged in performing a whole series of what we might view as editorial or–in this broad sense–textual-critical interactions (ibid.).

His future research will also investigate where gameplay and storytelling meet commodification. He is currently writing a book that includes chapters on I Love Bees and The LOST Experience.

[edit] Eva Nieuwdorp

Eva Nieuwdorp is a PhD candidate in New Media and Digital Culture in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, where she participates in a research project called ‘Playful Identities: From Narrative to Ludic Self-Construction’. This project looks at identity construction in relation to an increasingly technologically mediated society and the possibilities this yields for personal and cultural expression and self-reflection. At the moment Nieuwdorp focuses her research on the construction of personal and cultural identity in and through games, and especially pervasive games, looking at concepts such as embodiment, convergence and performance, as well as investigating new terminological approaches to ‘pervasive games’. She has spent a period as a guest researcher in January-May 2005 with the Trans-Reality Gaming Laboratory at Gotland University (HGO) in Sweden, as part of the European Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming (IperG), where she has done research on defining pervasive gaming. She is active in assisting the teaching staff in developing syllabuses and curricula for several courses on digital games, as well as regularly performing junior teaching duties in seminars.

[edit] ARGs & Nieuwdorp

Nieuwdorp is interested in ARGs because, she explains, of the intriguing relation between the player and game world. In a paper she delivered at DiGRA last year, ‘The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle’, Nieuwdorp interrogates the notion of an ‘interface’ in relation to pervasive games, including I Love Bees (Nieuwdorp, 2005). Since pervasive games, with their use of real world devices and everyday life, do not necessarily have screens Nieuwdorp concludes that the ‘main facilitating factor in creating and entering the pervasive game world lies not solely within the hard-and software, but also in the player him/herself’ (ibid., 4). For Nieuwdorp, the player enters a game world through a ‘switch’ in their head. This switch, which Nieuwdorp explains with semiotics, is an ‘active mental shift’ where the player accepts new conventions and meanings. Basically, they look at things differently, according to how the ‘game’ constructs it. Usually a game space, or magic circle, is delineated from real life with ‘boundary-maintaining mechanisms’ (Erving Goffman) that Nieuwdorp describes as transformation rules.

Transformation rules tell us what part objects in the lifeworld domain can play in the existence of the game world; when we think back to the example from The Go Game that we looked at before, we can see that the transformation rules in that particular instance are very loosely defined, making it difficult for the player to discern what is still part of the game world and what is not. This means that the realised resources in the game world are potentially and seemingly infinite to all players, because they cannot be sure what objects are intended to play a role in the game world and which do not (ibid., 7).

Nieuwdorp then addresses the under-researched area of ‘the instance when this change in mental state actually occurs, which in turn denotes the coming-into-being of the game world’ (ibid., 7). Developing anthropologist Victor Turner’s term, Nieuwdorp labels ‘the semiotic switch between the lifeworld domain and the semiotic domain of the pervasive game’ as the ‘liminal interface’ (ibid., 8). Invoking Roger Caillois’ notions of paidia (play) and ludus (game), the liminal interface is explained as having two levels. The ‘paratelic interface’ is the first step when ‘a person becomes playful and lets go of the restraints and cultural conventions’ (ibid., 9). They then move through the ‘paraludic interface,’ a state where ‘he/she must learn to understand the rules of the game’ (ibid.). Nieuwdorp reiterates that these shifts are not strictly delineated either:

These shifts from non-play to play into game require a very active stance of the player, who needs to realise on a meta-level the qualities of all three: something is play because it is not reality, something is a game because it is not play and consequently not reality. This constant threefold reiteration of a game of its own status as a game means that the player of a pervasive game will always in some form be reminded of the game being a construct. However, accepting the game world as a separate semiotic domain implies accepting the conventions within that domain as dominant and thus as “real” (ibid., 9-10).

Nieuwdorp is currently writing her PhD on pervasive gaming.

[edit] ARGS & Education: Why No School Should Be Without One

Thankfully for students, academics have been looking at the benefits of running ARGs in schools. They have discovered that students are more likely to participate if they’re playing an ARG (of course!), the skills ARG players have to learn are highly appropriate for what students need to know in this new media world, and that the low-tech nature of ARGs means they are accessible to students and can be created using limited resources. ARGs are described by one of the following academics as the ‘the quintessential teaching mechanism’.

[edit] Bryan Alexander

Bryan Alexander is Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, working from offices at Middlebury College, where he researches the advanced uses of information technology in liberal education. A PhD graduate of the University of Michigan, he taught English and information technology studies as faculty at Centenary College of Louisiana. His primary research interests concern mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software.

Other interests include digital writing, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Committed to exploring computer-mediated pedagogy, he continues to research and write on the critical uses of computers and teaching in terms of interdisciplinary liberal arts and the contemporary development of cyberculture.

Website: NITLE Liberal Education Today: http://www.nitle.org/

Website: Smartmobs: http://www.smartmobs.com

Weblog: Infocult: http://infocult.typepad.com

[edit] ARGs & Alexander

Alexander discovered ARGs through rumours around the Web, places like Ain't It Cool and other virtual communities. He has been studying ARGs in terms of literary analysis since 2002. ARGs are part of his research portfolio and he has created a sample game for educators in academia. He is particularly interested in the emergence of a new way of telling stories, web 2.0 stories; the pedagogical implications and how they challenge popular perceptions of computer gaming.

In his talk presented at the New Media Consortium, ‘Alternate Reality Games’, Alexander discussed changes in the field of ARGs in 2005, provided a case study of Metacortechs and presented principles for digital gaming and learning which included the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of ARGs and the fact they have no heroic central position (Alexander, 2005a). He also describes the differences between ARGs and other digital games: there is a permeability of game boundary (space and time); a focus on distributed, collaborative cognition; increased ephemerality; a constructivist narrative model; unstable emergence and a fanfiction model. In his presentation at the ELI Annual Meeting, ‘A New Approach to Gaming and Education’, Alexander provided detail about how ARGs can be used for deep learning, interdisciplinary multimedia inquiry and are inexpensive and engaging (Alexander, 2006a). ARGs, Alexander continues, offer rich case studies for media studies and information literacy. At the same conference, Alexander also ran a workshop, which was actually a demo ARG, Kate Schedoni, he created for the event.

Alexander played and analysed the independent ARG Metacortechs (Alexander, 2005a, 2006a), observed the use of web 2.0 tactics in BBC’s Jamie Kane (Alexander, 2006c) and more recently has been documenting the process of playing ABC’s The LOST Experience on his personal blog (Alexander, 2006e-i). Of note, however, is Alexander’s open and ongoing publishing of what he considers being the creative antecedents of ARGs (Alexander, 2005a, 2005b, 2006d). Alexander includes in the list, along with other contributors, a mix of hoaxes, immersive education games, novels depicting multiple realities, performance stories, LARPs, How to Host a Murder Parties, videogames that use real world settings and participatory dinner theatre. In the future, Alexander will be publishing on his observations of Metacortechs and ARGs as they related to literacy.

[edit] Ravi Purushotma

Ravi Purushotma is a Masters candidate in the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, where he works as a researcher on their New Media Literacies and Education Arcade projects. Formerly a student in the UCLA Teaching English as a Second Language program and English teacher in southern China, his interests are in how foreign language learning will need to be re conceptualized to take advantage of the instantaneous access to foreign culture and media available with today's technologies.

Webpage: http://www.langwidge.com/

[edit] ARGs & Purushotma

Purushotma first had heard about I Love Bees and was, he explains, interested in the reports of the levels of peer learning that was going on among players within the game. Specifically, the idea that since the games used everyday technologies the skills learned playing the games would apply to other tasks in real life. Purushotma is now a co-researcher on the Mac Arthur Foundation funded New Media Literacies (NML) project. The NML project seeks to identify the various skills necessary to operate in the information age.

In the forthcoming Project New Media Literacies whitepaper that Purushotma contributed to, ‘Confronting Challenges of Participatory Culture’, ARGs are offered as examples of collective intelligence (Jenkins, et. al., forthcoming). See Henry Jenkins’ section for more about this theory. Of particular interest was the approach to problem solving as team-orientated, inverting the contemporary approach of creating autonomous problem solvers; and peer-to-peer learning. The report includes ARGs as a potential classroom practice to ‘help children to learn what they need to know to become fuller participants in the new media landscape’ (ibid.).

Purushotma describes ARGS as the quintessential teaching mechanisms for many of the skills listed in the whitepaper. He is pursuing ARG research and its application in education in a few ways: a comparative analysis of ARGs and webquests; identification and extrusion of ARG design principles to apply to educational webquests; investigate the skills acquired whilst playing an ARG and how these techniques can be applied in curricula in general and specifically for foreign language subjects.

[edit] Jane Turner (truna)

Jane Turner (aka truna) is a game design researcher, teacher and artist. Turner is chapter auntie of the Brisbane IGDA and a researcher for the Australian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), exploring cultural interfaces in game design in particular. She is currently also a lecturer in Immersion and Game Design.

Personal Webpage: http://truna.net

Design Website: http://making-games.net

[edit] Ann Morrison

Ann Morrison lectures in studio process, interactive environments and visualisation within the Information Environments Program, School of ITEE, at the University of Queensland. Morrison is an installation and new media artist with a 17 year exhibition history and 9 years multimedia industry experience. Morrison is currently writing, working with locative experience projects and constructing a context containment interactive environment.

Personal Webpage: http://anmore.com.au

University Webpage: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~morrison/

[edit] ARGs & Turner & Morrison

In their paper, ‘Suit Keen Renovator’, Turner and Morrison provide a case study of an ARG created as a pedagogical tool for undergraduate students (Turner and A. Morrison, 2005). Their ARG, which they term as ‘[Alt] real’, was developed to ‘test the potential of exploiting a rich immersive multiplayer environment’ and to ‘engage and develop self-directing learning processes’ (ibid., p: 209). It was funded by The University Teaching and Learning body and the Australian CRC for Interaction Design. The subject, Creative Industries, aimed to guide students in designing solutions for real world problems. 300 students in the first semester and 120-150 in the second-semester participated. The project, Creative Town, was a simulation of a Queensland town, Our Ipskay, in need of planning assistance.

In groups of 3-4 they interrogated the various in-game websites to find ‘gaps and opportunities they can turn into business or art design proposals’ (ibid., p: 211). They then presented posters of their pitch and submitted written proposals to a fictional Business and Arts Council. The proposals are discussed in enactments of council meetings with tutors playing council officials. The meetings helped provide the conflict needed for gameplay, they explain, but also provided feedback to students as to their progression through tasks. Turner and Morrison observed that students could see how the theory was relevant, treated the town and therefore their proposal as ‘real’ and participated in the production of the imaginary town and the cultural and economic implications of design. Future iterations will have a greater adherence to the real life rules of council meetings. In summary:

The strengths of [Alt] real design, as opposed to use of more graphic or technologically rich environments, so tempting in projects like these, are the strengths of the dream of interface design: that the task can be achieved without noticing the technology, that the environment doesn’t coerce any particular style of activity and the imaginations of the players are allowed full reign (ibid., p: 213).

The contribution this case study makes is two-fold: Firstly, it targets and implements a way to engage students with theoretical concepts by giving them a practice-based and relevant pathway with which to engage. And secondly, it also uses simple technologies to achieve a game environment that the students become very involved in. More complex technologies would alienate non-technical, non gaming students, and disadvantage those without access to higher-end machines (ibid.).

For education departments this is of some significance, making these forms of learning environments a cost effective and easy to implement learning tool (ibid.).

Turner is working on a paper at present that will include an analysis of ARGs, and Morrison will have ARGs figure in her forthcoming thesis.

[edit] ARGs & Entertainment: “The Citizen Kane of Online Entertainment”

In 2001, Internet Life magazine described The Beast as the “Citizen Kane of online entertainment”³¹. Many academics share a belief that ARGs signal the emergence of a unique form of entertainment that should be observed if not employed by those working in the entertainment industry. ARGs have, to varying degrees, an unprecedented mix of narrative complexity, gameplay, performance and participation without the use of artificial intelligence engines, high-end graphics, blood splatter and cut-scenes. They attract thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of people watching at the sidelines. The following academics bravely venture into the mechanisations of ARGs and emerge, bright eyed and wind-blown, waving what they believe to be the secrets of this new form of art.

[edit] Christy Dena

Christy Dena is a cross-media entertainment researcher, consultant and creator. She is researching cross-media entertainment for a PhD at the School of Letters, Art and Media, University of Sydney. She is a consultant to film, TV and new media practitioners in Australia and overseas and has mentored at Australia’s cross-media lab: Australian Film, Television and Radio Schools’ Laboratory of Advanced Media Production (AFTRS’ LAMP). She currently creates what she terms miniARGs for entertainment industry training, research and her own cross-media stories. She has given numerous presentations on ARGs to industry and academia and also is a lecturer and tutor of new media arts theory to tertiary students and a new media arts reviewer. Dena is a public speaker on cross-media design who has delivered presentations to organisations such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Council for the Arts. She is on the Board of one of Australia’s key new media arts organisations dLux Media Arts and is a member of the IGDA ARG SIG.

Main Website: http://www.cross-mediaentertainment.com

[edit] ARGs & Dena

Dena entered ARGs through a serendipitous search on the Net in 2001 and then later returned through the papers of Jane McGonigal. She has played parts of Jamie Kane, Art of the Heist, ReGenesis II, The LOST Experience and Catching the Wish. ARGs are a part of her research into cross-media entertainment for she investigates the changes to the design and experience of a work that is distributed across multiple platforms and arts types. For Dena, ARGs fall into a particular part of this emerging form (Dena, 2004a) and are identified by, among other characteristics, the high degree of dependency between all the components distributed across time and space. For an invited report on the ‘Current State of Cross-Media Storytelling’ presented at the European Information Society Technologies event, Dena extruded design principles from McGonigal’s observations and argued they are factors for the moderate-to-high-diffusion-and-acceptance of cross-media entertainment (Dena, 2004b). In ‘Texts, Worlds, Realms and Channels’, Dena posits a taxonomy of multi-platform works as illustrated through ReGenesis II and The Beast (Dena, 2005b). In ‘Elements of Interactive Drama’, Dena draws the parallel between ARG design principles — such as the use of everyday devices, blending of fiction and reality and the flesh-responsiveness of puppet masters as opposed to electronic responsiveness — and the traits of contemporary interactive narratives in general (Dena, 2005a). At her ‘Clustering Consciousness’ talk she illustrated some of the codes of cross-media entertainment through an analysis of ReGenesis II (Dena, 2006a).

Of note, however, is her upcoming talk for the Association of Internet Researchers Conference: ‘How the Internet is Holding the Center of Conjured Universes’ (Dena, 2006b). In this paper Dena presents a narrative-and ludic-agnostic terminology through a description of the components of ReGenesis II. She argues that the creation of Trails and Guides by ARG players are a necessary

response to the non-networked state of most transmedia entertainment. ‘Orphaned entertainment’ is presented as a design flaw that cross-media designers need to address. She also makes the observation that contrary to the romantic view of fan communities, that when playing and interpreting fans make a strong distinction between official and unofficial production. She then argues that the phenomenon of ‘frame-less’ content (no indicator as to the producer or whether it is ingame) has forced ARG players to develop specialised skills such as advanced IP checks and discourse analysis.

In her blog post and subsequent comments at Writer Response Theory, ‘Bots Just Wanna Chat’, Dena discussed her chatbot interactions in Jamie Kane, highlighting the conflict between game goals and socialising, the personalisation approaches of the game and how this affected the experience, task feedback and the observation that interaction is so much easier as an ARG player because they play themselves (Dena, 2005c). In her post, ‘Top ARGs, with Stats’, Dena aggregates the player statistics and media responses that have been published for a selection of key ARGs (Dena, 2006c). In a post about The LOST Experience, ‘It’s Alive!’, Dena frames the information published in media articles according to design principles she believes were being developed: tiered audience targeting; facilitating inter-country global collaboration; use of old and new media, recent and new LOST releases; providing narrative depth to the overall LOST universe; confluence between TV and ARG storylines; rewarding emerging media use and facilitating branded entertainment (Dena, 2006d).

ARGs will feature prominently in her PhD.

[edit] Andrew Losowsky

Andrew Losowsky is a British freelance writer and editor based in Madrid, Spain. He writes for publications such as The Guardian and Grafik, mostly about technology and design. He is also editorial director of the international publishing company le cool. He does not have a university affiliation but has presented an academic paper as an independent scholar.

Website: http://www.losowsky.com

[edit] ARGs & Losowsky

Losowsky played NokiaGame (1999), The Beast (2001), and then kept an eye on the subsequent communities and games that built up from there. He describes the attraction as a fascination with the unpredictable nature of the development of story, both in mixed media and in pace of development, as well as the puzzle elements contained within. Losowsky is keenly interested in new methods of storytelling, both as a writer and reader.

In his paper, ‘Alternate Reality Games and the Future of Narrative’, Losowsky offers what he sees as common features of ARGs: use of mixed media (multiple media platforms); unpredictability; story as event; player interaction and new publishing models (Losowsky, 2005a). Player interaction is observed as being non-competitive, essential for the existence of the work and influential on the plot. The new publishing models of ARGs include anonymous authorship and free game-play. For Losowsky, an ARG is ‘part theatre, part cinema, part the film The Game, part conspiracy theory, part online chat and part old fashioned story telling’ (Losowsky, 2005a, 10).

In his ‘Puppet Masters’ article for The Guardian, Losowsky highlights how some ARGs are created by fans to extend the fictional world of an existing property, and the potential conflicts this can cause (Losowsky, 2003). Also published in The Guardian was an article on BBC’s Jamie Kane (Losowsky, 2005b). Losowsky cites how the BBC sees Jamie Kane as a form of interactive fiction that was designed for 14-18 year olds and is accessible both technically and morally. Losowsky also blogs occasionally on ARGS, and has contemplated the fiction and truth status of them in his ‘Separating Truth from Reality’ post (Losowsky, 2006).

[edit] Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College, Vermont. His book, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004) offers a new approach to exploring television genres as cultural categories, as exemplified by a number of historical case studies. He has published essays in Cinema Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, Television and New Media, Film History, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and a number of anthologies. He is currently writing a textbook on television and American culture, and a book on narrative complexity in contemporary American television.

Website: http://seguecommunity.middlebury.edu/sites/jmittell

[edit] ARGs & Mittell

Mittell looks at ARGS as part of research project for publication and for industry consulting. He is interested in new developments in storytelling within television and digital gaming and so looks specifically at tie-in games like The LOST Experience. In his lengthy article published at Flow, Mittell shares the first publication of his close play analysis of ABC’s The LOST Experience (Mittell, 2006b). Mittell believes the ARG was not living up to expectations and offers the ‘competing industrial and narrative norms of television’ as the influential agents. The difficulty, Mittell observes, is the need for the producers to ‘sustain two storytelling modes’.

Producers must ensure that whatever is revealed in the ARG is not needed to comprehend the TV series, as the audience of millions for the latter will certainly dwarf the number of players who will stick through "Experience" until its conclusion this fall. Additionally, "Experience" is running simultaneously across the globe, but Lost's schedule outside the US is significantly lagged--for instance, the UK is just now getting episode 7 in the already completed season 2--meaning that any plot revelations in the ARG must be sure not to spoil mysteries within the television series. Thus "Experience" must offer only supplementary inessential narrative information to Lost, allowing the television series to retain centrality within the storyworld (ibid.).

Mittell also notes the difficulty in sustaining an ARG, an alternate reality, when the TV show of LOST is already presented as a fiction. He cites the conflicts that have occurred around the Gary Troup book Bad Twin: the fictional corporation Hanso, for instance, has claimed that Troup did die in the real plane crash which has been fictionalised in the LOST TV series. The integration of advertising into the ARG, he observes, has also ‘irritated’ many players. It is not so much the embedded advertising, Mittell posits, but the ‘tacky and superfluous’ inclusion without ‘significant payoff’. As an example, Mittell describes the in-game character, DJ Dan, who is anti-corporation but has real life corporate banners on his website. Mittell is optimistic however, and will be following up this post with an extensive analysis of the whole ARG.

This critique of "The Lost Experience" is meant not to condemn an ambitious attempt to take a cult game form into the mainstream or innovate cross-media storytelling techniques. […] But every medium and storytelling format has its own norms and biases, limitations and possibilities--thus far, the conflicts between these two narrative modes seem to have hurt the game's viability (ibid.).

In his follow up post at the Convergence Culture Consortium blog, ‘The Lost Experience: Act II’, Mittell reframes ARG into having a three-act structure (Mittell, 2006c). The first act, he explains, was more for ARG players, providing lots of clue gathering activity but little narrative. The second act appeals more to the serialised television viewing audiences because it is more story-driven and episodic. In this act, hacking activity turned to reading blog posts and watching video-clips. With this shift, Mittell notes, many players left the game, prompting him to elaborate on the difficulty of appealing to different audiences further:

For most TV viewers, an ARG is far too much of a time-consuming headache to dedicate themselves to. But for ARGonauts, the video diaries of Rachel Blake are too much like viral video to offer the paranoid pleasures of previous ARGs. How will these desires reconcile? (ibid.)

In the academic presentation ‘Serial Narratives and Tie-In Games’, Mittell has also referred to the Alias ARG and its relationship to the TV show (Mittell, 2006a):

These examples of emergent fan-driven alternatives to licensed games suggest that fans do want to explore the narrative worlds of a television series via games, but that most options presented thus far fall short in capturing what makes a series like Alias so beloved by viewers. Contemporary television narratives like Alias and Lost seem inspired by the complexity and engagement of videogames, and thus are ripe for cross-media storytelling as long as creators can better realize and maximize the particular possibilities offered by each medium. Once they do, the derisive attitude toward licensed games may give way to a dedication to new paradigms of convergent narratives (ibid.).

Mittell will be covering TV-based ARGs in a book that is in-formation.

[edit] Henrik Örnebring

Henrik Örnebring has a PhD in Journalism and Mass Communication from Göteborg University, Sweden, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Television Studies at Roehampton University, London, UK. His research interests include media history, particularly the history of television and the history of journalism (both areas on which he has published previous work). He is also interested in using historical perspectives and historical studies to analyse and understand contemporary developments in media; such as processes of increasing media convergence, the ongoing fragmentation of media audiences, and the ways in which new digital media and digital technologies affect ‘traditional’ media.

[edit] ARGs & Örnebring

Örnebring discovered ARGs about two years ago through an article in a gaming magazine. He was interested in them, he explains, as a cross-media phenomenon and as an area where both commercial and non-commercial actors are involved. His first paper on ARGs, ‘Extending the Narrative of Alias: the emerging cultural economy of Alternate Reality Gaming’, Örnebring contributes to the academic discussions about fandom and so-called ‘American Quality Television’(Örnebring, 2006). Örnebring argues that

ARGs are an important area of study because they serve as a focal point for several different but interconnected theoretical and empirical issues in media and cultural studies in general and television in particular.

Örnebring explores ARGs through the lens of fandom but is careful to highlight how some theories of fandom are not appropriate:

Not all ARGs are connected to an existing media property. Many fan-or grassroots-produced ARGs are set in their own fictional universes, and grassroots-produced ARGs are currently at least as common as commercially-produced ARGs. This means that many of the members of the ARG community are perhaps more correctly described as fans of ARGs, rather than a particular media text or set of media texts.

ARGs, Örnebring argues, are ‘closely related to the rise of so-called quality television or American quality television’ (AQT). Drawing on Thompson’s description of AQT, he situates ARGs, and in particular the Alias ARGs, as part of the commercially-motivated trend towards creating properties which are ‘multi-layered, literary narratives, ensemble acting, complex backstory and serial “memory”’.

Örnebring outlines four ‘unique elements that sets it [ARGs] apart from other media genres’(Örnebring, 2006). Firstly, ARGs are always based on a fictional universe that is either created from scratch or builds on an existing fictional world. Second, a central characteristic of ARGs isinteractivity, which, for Örnebring, is ‘the opportunity for participants to communicate with the fictional universe’. The third characteristic of ARGs is that the ‘fictional universes are presented in anarrative format’. In this category, Örnebring delineates between clues and puzzles that are just solved for the purpose of getting to another one, and clues and puzzles that ‘form part of a coherent narrative set in the fictional universe’. The final characteristic is that ‘ARGs can be divided into two types based on the motivations of the producers […]: commercial and non-commercial’. Commercial ARGs, he explains, ‘are those ARGs that are part of the marketing campaign of a product […] or other media text’. They are a sub-type of viral or buzz marketing, are usually free to participate in, the integrity of the fictional universe is usually viewed as important and the products are not often revealed until the end. Non-commercial ARGs are produced by fans, do not market a product and are usually non-profit. ARG players however, he notes, do not distinguish between commercial and non-commercial ARGs, because the emphasis is on the game experience.

Örnebring undertakes the first comparison of commercial and non-commercial ARGs, which are also within the same ‘fictional universe’: Alias. He analyses the producer-created (ABC) ARGs for the first (Oct 01-March 02) and second seasons (Aug 02 – Nov 02, March 03) and the fan-created ARG: Omnifarm (2005) according to the characteristics he proposes. Here his summary chart fromthe paper, republished here with kind permission from Örnebring:

Point of comparison	AliasARGs Season 1-2	OmnifamARG
Fictional universe	Based directly on the TV show.	Based on the backstory of the TV show; fills in syntagmatic gaps.
Narrative extension	No or little overall narrative in ARG. Narrative extension explicitly tied to specific episodes, events and characters on the TV show.	Strong overall narrative in ARG. Narrative extensions based on the backstory; specific episodes, events and characters rarely (if ever) mentioned.
Interactivity	Online only. No opportunity for participants to affect the narrative.	Online and offline. Opportunity for participants to influence the narrative (ending in particular).

Table 1: Comparison between Alias ARGs Season 1-2 and the Omnifam ARG (Örnebring, 2006)

He then argues what his comparison shows is that:

ARGs could be viewed as part of an ongoing contestation of narrative, where (fan) audiences increasingly feel that they have (or ought to have) some measure of ownership of a text, and where media organisations, faced with a world of easy-access downloading and file sharing, increasingly want to retain control over their intellectual property.

His ongoing research into ARGs includes a major project examining the emerging cultural economy of ARGs and the ARG subculture.

[edit] Marc Ruppel

Marc Ruppel is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland College Park. He has presented papers on several subjects from Native American literature and science to new media and narrative theory, with a particular focus on stories told across media. Marc has also taught courses focusing on topics ranging from new media literacies to film, and his dissertation, tentatively titled “Triggers and Traces: Convergence, Divergence and the Cross-Sited Narrative”, is currently in progress.

Website: http://www.things.wordherders.net

ARGs & Ruppel

Ruppel’s first interaction with an ARG was with The Beast. He was, Ruppel explains, fascinated by the fluctuations between something like a late night in-game phone call and the online reactions of those who received it, the give and take between automated (i.e. top-down) narrative and emergent speculation and information aggregation. Since then he has followed and participated in several ARGs, ranging from the National Treasure ARG to I Love Bees.

Ruppel’s research into ARGs is directly related to his PhD dissertation on cross-sited narratives, stories told across a diverse media set. He feels ARGs are becoming the pervasive model of narrative distribution and will be dedicating a chapter in his PhD to the subject. Ruppel explains that ARGs traffic in narrative information, and so are primarily narrativistic. He is investigating ARGs via historical, cultural, quantitative and close-playing modes of analysis.

In his seminar paper, ‘Hybrid Channels’, Ruppel investigates the cognitive and cultural phenomenon of cross-sited narratives, and argues that works such as I Love Bees and The Matrix represent a new mode of storytelling that presents significant challenges to both cognitive theory and narratology (Ruppel, 2004). In his paper presented at the Society Literature and Science Conference, ‘Triggers and Traces’, Ruppel introduces his terminology and methodology for the study of cross-sited narratives and includes a significant section on ARGs (Ruppel, 2005a). As he explains in his paper ‘Learning to Speak Braille’, ARGs fall within ‘horizontally cross-sited narratives’, for they function in the ‘expansion of a narrative across media’ (Ruppel, 2005b). Ruppel illustrates in his PhD qualifying exam, the ‘migratory cues’ of I Love Bees such as the flash of the URL on the TV commercial (ibid.), cues defined as

a signal towards another medium—the means through which various narrative paths are marked by an author and located by a user through activation patterns (ibid.).

At his talk at the Digital Humanities Conference in Paris, ‘Many Houses, Many Leaves’, Ruppel outlines how the current archiving practices are informed by ‘single-medium logic’ and so are therefore an insufficient approach for works such as ILB (Ruppel, 2006). Ruppel also discusses The LOST Experience at his blog, reframing it to include the TV show:

I think it's possible to view the entirety of the LOST storyworld, TV show included, as perhaps the most pervasive ARG ever created, with millions upon millions playing it every week, every day, without even realizing it (Ruppel, 2006b).

Ruppel is continuing with his research into LOST and other ARGs, looking into the demographics of who does what with its different incarnations. They will be discussed extensively in his PhD.

[edit] Future Directions

The research briefly discussed here provides helpful guidance for producers of ARGs and of cross-media/transmedia/multi-platform entertainment in general. It is clear from some failed attempts that the ARG form is not easily cloned and so needs to be employed with careful consideration of its mechanics and the community. At present, ARG creators are extremely reticent to share their design secrets and so the insights that academics offer will assist in the development and expansion of the craft. This is perhaps the gift that academic study can offer ARGs: a non-commercial investment into its future.

However, there are obstacles to the study of ARGs that researchers have recognised:

• Preservation of ARGs [Alexander]
• Researchers need to collaborate to study these works. Just as it is impossible for a single person to negotiate all the texts in an ARG, it is impossible for a single researcher to experience and document everything in an ARG. Researchers need to pool their collective intelligence when an ARG is in play just like the players. [Dena]
• ‘I do think that, if we are to truly make ARGs a viable subject of our research, we have to address the potential dilemma of archiving these works. So much of an ARG is temporally bound. How many payphone conversations, for example, were lost during I Love Bees? How many websites, TV ads, video games, will potentially be lost as the years pass by? In order to prevent these narratives from being relegated to an Agrippa-like Gibsonian bookmark of expiration, there has to be a way to archive these narratives. Beginning with the message boards themselves is a good start.’ [Ruppel]

What are the future areas of research the academics feel are pertinent?

• There needs to be “audience” analysis - gender, race, location, etc. [Alexander]
• More researchers need to look at the design of non-mainstream ARG forms [Dena]
• Research more the intersection of formal and social or cultural meanings—where gameplay or storytelling meets commodification, viral marketing, etc. [Jones]
• Future research should address ‘ARGs as a kind of marketing (both from the producers’ andthe audiences’ perspectives).’ [Örnebring]
• ‘A comprehensive empirical study of the ARG community/subculture, getting basic data aboutthe cultural practices as well as demographics of this group of media consumers.’ [Örnebring]
• ‘We really need more solid documentation and case studies about the learning experiences that go on in ARGS. So one could go to a policy maker or textbook publisher and say "Look, here is a case study of Pedro Smith. In the course of playing this ARG he learned how to set up a blog, coordinate 50 people to do x, etc. He then used the skills to set up a blog about
• environmental hazards in his area and rally a group of concerned citizens." This is why this needs to be in our school system.’ [Purushotma]
• ‘Comparative studies of ARGs & other narrative forms/game modes.’ [Mittell]

And so ends the section on ARGs and Academia. This may be the first inclusion of an academic section in a major games whitepaper and hopefully it will not be the last. We believe that scholarly research can provide industry with as much inspiration and understanding as ARGs gives academics.

[edit] reference:

[30] Ares Station online archive available at: http://www.aresstation.com/

[31] Sourced from: http://www.seanstewart.org/news/