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Alternate Reality Games and Mobile Phones

Feb
201016

One of the untapped markets of gaming at the moment is Alternate Reality Gaming. For those who are not familiar with ARG’s (as they are also known) they are basically games that exist along side your day-to-day “reality”. Perhaps a walk-through of how an ARG works would be better to help people understand the concept….

Imagine that you are playing a mystery/detective game and your current mission is to find the murderer of a particular crime among a set of suspects currently in custody. In your normal game you would be staring at a monitor with keyboard and mouse in tow but in an ARG the crime scene, suspects’ homes and haunts as well as how you interact with the game are all in reality; you can visit the crime scene in your neighborhood, find clues at particular locations that indicate GPS coordinates which lead to real landmarks (such as payphones), where a real phone call will lead you to the next leg of the game and characters will communicate to you via text messages and e-mails.

This is, admittedly, a niche style of gameplay in the eyes of some but I personally feel that this is an untapped market waiting to explode. ARG’s had first come onto the scene with RPG’s of yesteryear through the D&D players who would don costumes of their game persona as well as “murder mystery” dinner parties where the guests would be given roles to play through the evening. By the turn of the century/millennium however there had arisen a new type of ARG that involved embedding clues in images, clever hints in the content of a “fake” website (even nested in comments of the page’s source) or in e-mails sent to the participant’s address leading them to solutions to the challenge they were to overcome.

While the early ARG’s (dinner games, D&D with foam swords, etc) were quaint and certainly immersive to the participants it would seem that the latest incarnations were terribly limited due to technology; the only avenues for making the game “reality” came via e-mails or phone calls which the player was required to catch or via websites they were expected to visit. In short, your interactions were limited to your computer (which at the time was most likely in your home). With the advent of GPS guided phones with constant access to the internet and built-in cameras it is likely that a new age in ARG’s has arrived.

These games are not limited to simple “mystery” games but also to racing games. Imagine a game that gives you a track that you are expected to run/drive through and you can get achievements by beating other players’ scores. Scavenger hunt games are also more interactive as well with the ability to give players the ability to create their own “easter eggs” to be found.

But you don’t have to take my word for it…

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