Background

URG or Urban Reality Game, and ARG or Alternate Reality Game are synonyms for the latest wave of entertainment for avid puzzlers. Also called “pervasive gaming”, the development of the story depends upon hundreds of players working to piece the story together, while at the same time influencing it’s outcome. As opposed to video or computer games, ARGs are not concerned with the technology. The ARG uses whatever exists in the real world, whether billboards or pamphlets or payphones, to leave clues, plotlines and interactions between players and characters. Everything fictional is made to seem as real as possible. But it is the interactivity of the game that makes it so popular. It’s the chat – gossiping, guessing, and working as a team creating the narrative – that players love as much as the puzzle itself.

The first game of this genre The Beast (by 42 Entertainment, 2001), but it was the enormous sucess of I Love Bees in 2004 (created by 42 Entertainment and commissioned by Microsoft) that made people think of the possibilities . Ultimately, I Love Bees was a marketing ploy leading up to the release of the computer game Halo 2. But since then not-for-profit groups have used this device to raise awareness of issues in a very realistic way. Case in point is World Without Oil (created by Ken Eklund, funded by Corporation for Public Broadcasting and presented by Independent Television Service 2007), an ARG that had players searching for and actually finding solutions for a society without fossil fuels.

ARGs as an art form have many possibilities. Andrea Phillips, an ARG writer and producer who was part of the team at London-based developer Mind Candy, which produced the game Perplex City says, "A lot of people in entertainment are seeing the value of using alternate reality gaming to tell stories as their own creative form, not just as a buzzy viral way to get more eyeballs….Collaboration in storytelling is an old tradition, even older than print. All our stories are ultimately descended from this sort of back-and-forth oral tradition, … So you could say we're working to reclaim something we lost hundreds of years ago when we first started recording narratives with pen and paper, and later with film."

Useful links

Semacode

Wired article

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