what is an ARG? (SOGO week!)

Starting on the 12th and ending through the 16th, it's Speak Out with Your Geek Out week! Which means that there will be a post every day! Which means that, for the entire week, we'll be covering the general gaming pizazz: favorite non-casual/more hardcore titles, reasons why we geek out over games, whether or not games adapt well to other media environments, and so forth and so forth. All that Noriko Matsueda jazz. Friday's flavor of the day: chances are if you like games, you've thought about making your own. From someone who's tried multiple times and miserably failed, here's what not to do. PSST: Don't worry, I didn't forget about your Friday entertainment needs. Because I'm a nice blogger and I sincerely care about the five people who read this.

Ever since I knew I wanted to have a blog to keep me writing about something useful, I knew it would be about games, but I didn't want to commit to a particular genre. While it's certainly true that I have more access to browser games than, say, the newest $60 Xbox deal, I'm trying to keep this site from being "just" a casual games blog and trying to encompass all forms of games and interactive experiences that are digitally available.

I've linked to the Unfiction site on the sidebar over there —> for some time—actually, since the blog's origin, but just recently two possibilities occurred to me, that a) nobody has clicked on it, and therefore cannot appreciate its significance to the blog's intentions, or b) the few people who have clicked and explored it a bit found it tremendously confusing. Which is okay, because that is the entire point of ARGs, which I will now define for you as an Alternate Reality Game, which reads on Wikipedia like this:

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.
The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence[...]. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium. (emphases added)

Did I mention that the ARG "genre's" official mantra is "this is not a game"? This is pretty deep stuff, going as far as we can take the definition of entertainment without it completely 100% merging with our daily life to the extreme that is the Matrix.

ARGs are, in a sense, games designed for universality, in their audience and delivery platforms. They can be so ubiquitous that you don't even realize always if you're playing one, at least at the onset. You're browsing YouTube videos and you stumble on a mysterious vloggger detailing the literally supernatural mess she's been thrown into. You're searching on Google for old-school TRON images and stumble on a site claiming that Flynn lives. You find a scrawled note or poster somewhere in your real world with a phone number that connects with a static-filled voicemail message consisting of someone growling out individual letters that form a word that you can go home and input in your email client.... Depending on how obscure, random, or suspicious-looking the initial clue appears, most people will dismiss it entirely, or investigate it a bit and become bored by its apparent fakeness. (And a few goody-doers will probably call the police.)

But you, my adventure-hungry readers who are open to the variety of spices in life, will pursue it doggedly. Game or no game, ARGs are fun, unique, and very social experiences that draw in all kinds of gamers and non-gamers around the world. By day you work at the cashier's, in a cubicle, behind a long table in a lecture hall. At night you're a superhero, an undercover agent, debating the meaning of a poem you found in HTML page source code or driving an hour or two over to the nearest big city to pick up a package. What you're not doing is sitting in front of a screen pushing buttons like a machine.

It is true that many, many ARGs are basically promotional viral campaigns for other people's stuff. That doesn't mean they necessarily aren't "good," though. The Beast was a spin-off of Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence film all the way back in 2001, and the very first ARG that sucked a couple million people from all over the place into solving all these extraneous puzzles and uncovering stories that were linked to the movie's world. I Love Bees was an immense backstory exploration and way way way in advance product announcement for Halo 2. On YouTube, you may have seen featured ads or videos that have been speculated/confirmed to be linked to Wrigley's 5 Gum in a campaign called Mission Icefly.

But in between the occasional awkward ad campaign, tons of indie designers have pulled off some pretty equally awesome stuff with just as wide of an audience and just as successful storytelling, written by the players for the players. ARGs are quickly becoming the next big thing in gaming. Keep a close eye on the little things that pop out of your day's routine. You might accidentally fall into an immersive mind-blowing experience without knowing the signs. Be prepared.

Next time: How many ways can you remix the same level, over and over again?