Introduction
The Alternate Reality Games are the first-born sons of cultural convergence [
1
], with
a card in the illustrious club of digital incunabula [2], imagined from the first
sleepless nights of Homo Ludens [3], a product or perhaps a symptom of the World
Wide Web without which they cannot be conceived [
4
], and at the same time related
to a myriad of ancestral narrative forms without which they do not seem to be
understood either. ARGs are questioned about everything, from when they were born
and what their seminal piece is, to which family they belong, not escaping anyone, but
their bastard lineage. Their very name throws up at least two controversial units, the
concept "game" and the concept "alternate reality" [
4
] [5]. 5] From this primary
critical reflection, a collection of terminological, structural and thematic divergences
unfolds that correlate to its evolution, from its first germinal stage, its subsequent
maturity, and the current stage, which we could venture to call a rebirth, in light of its
current development.
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
What seems to be unanimously assumed is that the ARGs found their fundamental
breeding ground from the proliferation of new actors in a media ecosystem [
6
] called
to be overpopulated, thanks to new technologies capable of performing the miracle of
a digital transmutation, what Negroponte calls "the conversion of atoms to bits" [
7
]
and the combination of these new tools, digital environments, web pages, emails, etc.
added to other types of more traditional packaging. The fact that ARGs are perhaps
the most notable example of this emulsion of old and new technologies is one of the
conventions signed by the practical majority of authors who reflect on the genre, as
well as its narrative heart [
4
], its interactivity and its transmedia nature [8] or the role
that reality plays in this type of playful experience, treated as a component or diegetic
stage, making the game transcend its own limits and breaking the magic circle [3]
under the legendary motto that has governed ARGs since their birth: This is not a
Game (or its acronym TINAG). But beyond minimum agreements, the truth is that
Alternate Reality Games are a true catalogue of dissensions, discrepancies and
slippery slopes where what is defined in consensus is systematically redefined by a
new practice: if for some people TINAG means a philosophy to be strictly followed,
disguising the game in reality and deceiving the player until the weight of fiction
forces the voluntary suspension of disbelief, for others it is nothing more than an
aesthetic that governs but starts from an a priori agreement with the players [
9
] while
some people underline its potential to produce changes in the life of the players [
10
],
speaking at another time of the manifestation of an identity crisis [5].
In our view, there are several factors that explain the above-mentioned difficulty in
finding adherence to the concepts that define gender. Firstly, the inexistence of a
founding text or truly binding shared codes and, therefore, the presence of an
exaggerated experimental nature that leaves each designer free to reinvent the genre
in almost every new project. Secondly, an exceptional dependence on technologies
and a great sensitivity to their dizzying evolution (obsolescence of some of them,
appearance of others, etc.). And thirdly, what seems to us to be the most significant
reason: a variability in terms of objectives and strategies to meet these objectives, or
in other words, a scenario in which each ARG aims to meet a different objective and
uses any means to achieve it, regardless of transgressing the hypothetical rules
established by the majority. So, it seems that the only strategy of adherence and the
only way to consider the phenomenon in all its dimensions would be the one that
subdivides it and studies it in that dissociation, responding to the peculiarities of each
of the subgroups and vertebrate a definition that, although it will be poly-headed,
should also aspire to present a single conceptual trunk.
1.1 Operational definitions of terms
The ARG universe contains a series of native concepts that somehow live in all the
examples and serve as units of measure to analyze their morphology.
. Puppetmasters. The directors of the game. The creators, writers and developers
who set the guidelines, write the story and design the game elements, mechanics,
puzzles and subplots, modifying them, if necessary, according to the players'
interactions. They are usually anonymous and work as a team, playing a combined
role of opponent and assistant. The puppeteer would represent a mode of production
[
11
].
. Rabbitholes or Trailheads. These are the entry points to the game. Evoking the
rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), rabbitholes are gateways to
the diegetic universe, calls to play or in marketing terminology calls to action (CTA).
They can be known by players like in ARGs of an educational or training nature [12]
or by respecting the principle of TINAG, camouflaged in an anomaly that happens in
the participant's routine and that also leads them to the gameworld, which is the real
world [
13
]. Rabbitholes would be narrative devices [
11
].
. The Curtain. The curtain is defined by the space that separates the players from
the puppetmaster, a metaphor for the distance between the diegetic and the real, an
intersection, a threshold that inevitably confronts the two entities in play and
represents the social contract made by both. The curtain is the conceptual framework
[
11
].
. TINAG. Acronym for This is not a Game that sets the basis for a mechanical and
rule system, and founds the philosophy and aesthetics that govern most Alternate
Reality Games, separating them conceptually from the rest of the game experiences.
Once we have reviewed the concepts of the ARG universe, we will explain the
objective of our research and how we have carried it out.
2
A New Taxonomy for a New Definition
Below we describe the categories of ARGs raised in this study mentioning as
examples a number of significant cases with their respective authors.
. Grassroots or canonical ARG. The ARG that embodies the conventions of the
genre more faithfully, more closely. The grassroots or canonical ARGs is that based
on the premise of play for play's sake, whose backbone is playful but with the
narrative as its heart (in fact Mcgonigal calls it narrative ARG in 2011 [
10
]). The
canonical ARG, moreover, is the one that best represents the spirit of This is not a
Game, since in most cases it disguises its nature until well into the narrative
development, not demanding from the participant the suspension of disbelief a priori
but rather giving him the sensation of living a real and unique adventure, only denied
or rather nuanced a posteriori. But it is perhaps in contrast to other playful
experiences that the character of this ARG subtype, and by extension, ARG in the
truest sense, can best be understood, comparing its fundamental vectors with their
translation into other playful languages. For example, regarding the well-known sense
of conscious reality / fiction ambiguity invoked in each TINAG, developed based on
the use of the real world as a diegetic setting and alien to other experiences deployed
in that same world but that harbor little identity doubt, namely, experiences such as
recreational treasure hunts [12], much more focused on the prize and therefore much
more competitive and with a much less narrative content than the ARG or experiences
such as Geocatching, where the player roams the corners of the city in search of
treasures left by other players, very aware of their participation in a collaborative but
also little fiction narrative. Or compared to games that require ad hoc interfaces to
enter that other world, from those that use costumes or props materials, as in the
common case of Live Action Role-Playing Game (LARP), to those that use
technology to do so, augmented reality on mobiles, virtual reality glasses etc., distant
forms from the ARG device that is precisely based on the negation of the interface.
And speaking of those responsible for such denial, in this subtype the puppetmaster
usually remain anonymous, work as a team (although they may also be the only
directors), and usually finance the projects with their own savings or seek methods of
financing that, in any case, never go against their anonymity and the narrative itself
(in some cases even offering financial rewards to the players). Dave Szulborski,
responsible for titles such as Chasing the Wish (2003) or Urban Hunt (2004) would
be a significant example of a grassroots puppeteer in the origins of the genre. In basic
ARGs, rabbitholes are presented in a camouflaged way and in many cases require a
predisposition to be found. In basic ARGs, the transmedia level is usually very high
and the archaeological demand is also very high, requiring a great effort from the
players to collect all the pieces of the narrative mosaic. This sub-genre is therefore
preferred by the fandom, not only because it is aimed especially at this minority
group, although it is deeply loyal, as Jenkins [
1
] or Scolari [
6
] say, but also because it
is born from its own bosom and is based on the collective intelligence of its
participants. We cannot forget that although The Beast (42 Entertainment and
Microsoft, 2001) is probably considered the ARG par excellence, the first ARG with
all the ingredients to be considered as such, when we talk about grassroots ARG we
are referring precisely to those that are born after the end of the previous one, as a
result of the excessive interest of fans in the incipient genre, the so-called
cloudmakers, those who then began to theorize, deepen and propose their own
productions. With regard to its chronological evolution, it should be noted that the
grassroots ARGs were the undisputed protagonists during the first years of the genre
and that although their production gradually decreased in the following decade, it
always maintained its numbers in a more or less sustained way. Nowadays, the basic
ARGs that are carried out show a certain tendency to change, translated into a
changing narrative timing (for example, the whole experience can be encapsulated to
be seen at once), a wide casuistry regarding the identity of the puppetmasters (in some
cases their identity is never known and in others they appear from the very
beginning), a development of games that can be completed by a single person without
paying too much attention to the community element and, above all, a propensity to
give priority to narrative over puzzles, often confusing it with more conventional
transmedia narratives and reserving its playful element to the fact of having to collect
fragments of information to witness the complete narrative experience. Ben's
Playhouse (Collin Henson, 2018) would be an example of a modern-day ARG with a
transmedia narrative structure, information fragmented in channels such as Youtube,
Instagram or Vine, and in addition, a use of false documentary techniques, found
footage and hoax appearance for its exhibition, this being the preferred style of the
modern-day ARG to transcend its limits and show a real appearance. Other relevant
examples of this category since its foundation: Lockjaw (Andy Aiken, Bruce Cain,
Clay Chiment, Derek Jensen, Brooke Thompson y Krystyn Wells, 2002), Catching
the Wish (David Szulborski, 2006), Noc+10 (Anonymous, 2015), Jejune Institute
(Jeff Hull, 2008), This House Has People in It (Alan Resnick, 2016).
. Grassroots but promotional in appearance. It is worth mentioning here a
hybrid between the first category and the second one that we will develop next. We
are referring to grassroots ARG but located in a prefabricated fictional universe and
that looks like an official promotion effort of this one. In these cases, we witness a
kind of appropriation by the puppeteers who, either as an exercise in fan art [
1
], or
taking advantage of the media pull and the facilities it provides, locate the narrative
within a world of fiction already created, become spontaneous and, in most cases,
illegal co-creators without official permission. Metacortechs (Steve Peters, Krystyn
Wells, Brooke Thompson, and Sean Stacey, 2003), ARG set in the Matrix universe
(The Wachowskis, 1999) and released several months before the release of its third
and final installment Matrix Revolutions (The Wachowskis, 2003), and Exocog (Jim
Miller, 2002), grassroots ARG set in the universe of the film Minority Report (Steven
Spielberg, 2002) would be the two greatest exponents of this type of ARG, which
even though they had nothing to do with the official promotional campaigns of these
films, they were confused with them, for the reasons described.
. Promotional or Branded ARG. Let us use the adjective "promotional" proposed
in the first place by Barlow [16] and also by Askwith [
17
] or the other proposed from
here, we refer at this time to the ARGs associated to some brand or product and that
are articulated as part of an advertising campaign to solve a specific marketing
objective related to these. Commonly used to advertise cultural products such as
films, series, video games, recordings, but also observable in other markets, from cars
to computer operating systems, promotional ARGs are a creative form of advertising
that is increasingly valued for its loyalty and branding potential. In this subspecies, all
the elements of the ARG organism are subordinated to the achievement of these
marketing objectives, as well as the weight, complexity and depth of both the
narrative and the playful elements, a fact that explains the tendency of this type of
ARG to practical laxity and to the slogan of making it easy for the player/client. This
happens in various ways: either by undermining the media universe of action with
rabbitholes or directly by breaking the TINAG and identifying them as games; either
by decaffeinating the puzzles or by creating easy-to-follow narratives, always keeping
the aesthetic of immersive narrative away from other persuasive social games that
often condemn the plot and other times also immersion. In general terms, we observe
two prototypical cases of promotional ARG: on the one hand, that which has to do
with advertising in a teaser mode, being set in motion months before the product's
launch and developing with different degrees of secrecy and camouflage in reality,
and on the other, that which has to do with promotion once the product is on the
market, a subtype that Askwith calls "of narrative extension" [
17
]. A clear example of
the first situation would be the already mentioned The Beast, for the promotion of the
film IA, Artificial Intelligence in 2001, or the case of I Love Bees (42 Entertainment,
2004), ARG for the promotion of the video game Halo 2 (Bungies Studios and
Microsoft, 2004), both reference Alternate Reality Games, launched months before
the film's release and the game's release respectively, sharing TINAG's philosophy
and a very important complexity, by the way, both made by the same company, 42
Entertainment, flagship of this kind of experiences. To illustrate the second situation,
just look at examples of tactical transmedia [18], where Alternate Reality Games are
one of the branches within the communication structure, as in the case of the spanish
fiction El Internado (Globomedia, 2007-2010) which in 2009 and synchronized with
the premiere of the sixth season of the fiction, launched an ARG called Dónde está
Yago, where viewers had to look for a missing former student; or the case of La
Garduña exists, ARG for the promotion of the spanish fiction La Peste, which in
2019 was launched almost simultaneously with the premiere of its second season,
without hiding at any time the nature of the game. Other examples of promotional
ARG: K, Uncap the Ride (BMW, 2002), The Art of the H3ist (Audi A3, 2005), Last
Call Poker (Activision, 2005), Edoc Laundry (Eponymous Company, 2006), Cypher
Hunt (Fiction Series, Gravity Falls, 2016).
. Commercial or payment ARG. We could define the commercial ARG as those
conceived with a commercial objective and designed to pursue an economic return,
only being enjoyable in its entirety after payment by the players. Either paying a
priori for the full game, or by subscription and enjoying certain content (for example
exclusively for one season), commercial ARGs are another of the oldest and currently
most widespread types of Alternate Reality Games. They make up a rather diverse
corpus (in fact we include both "productive" and "single-player" ARGs, which in
2006 Barlow classified separately [16], as well as the "monetized" ARGs that
Bakioglu talks about in 2015 [
19
] and the "live event" ARGs, named by Jane
Mcgonigal in 2011 [
10
], a heterogeneous group with which you have to spin the
wheel to get them right. An ARG that is free but seeks its own financing through, for
example, the sale of certain elements integrated into the narrative, we could not
consider it commercial if it did not suffer a significant impairment of its own narrative
or playful experience by not acquiring such a product. An example of this is the ARG,
Perplex City (Mind Candy, 2005), a game that, in order to be financed, included the
sale of collectible cards that provided additional information about the universe in
which the plot was developed. [20] The acquisition of these cards, while making the
players' experience more complete through discussion or exchange, was not necessary
to enjoy the full narrative, so we could not consider it a commercial ARG but a basic
self-financing success. What we could consider as the first commercial ARG is the
failed Majestic (Electronic Arts, 2001), born in the heat of the end of The Beast and
raised as a subscription game, something that did not convince the community of
players condemning it to its premature cancellation. There is a wide variability of
commercial ARGs regarding its fidelity to the conventions and rules of the genre.
There are those that do not differ much from the grassroots ARGs, beyond needing a
preliminary fiction pact to be carried out at the time of formalizing the purchase. This
is how Majestic worked, declaring itself under the parameters of This is not a Game,
just after the players accepted the terms of purchase; or also how the proto-ARG
worked that the protagonist of The Game (David Fincher, 1997) enjoyed (or rather
suffered), a film recognized as one of the most relevant precedents of the genre and in
which a millionaire, played by Michael Douglas, played a perverse ARG acquired by
his brother from a specialized company as a gift. There are also commercial ARGs
whose peculiarities structurally break the canon. In them, the eventual and therefore
ephemeral character of the canonical ARG is transformed into a permanent and
ondemand character, giving rise to the Permanent Alternative Reality Games (PARG),
packaged games that can be enjoyed whenever the player wishes. Also the collective
spirit of the canonical ARG becomes individual, being able to be enjoyed as a
singleplayer experience without the help of the community. Or there are also those that are
collective, happen punctually and demand the player to create an avatar and its
characterization, the so-called Real Games, hybrids very close to the Live Action
Role-Playing Game (LARP) or even the Escape Rooms. As we can see, the range of
possibilities in this ARG category is multiple, blurring the limits and being, as we
said, very common nowadays as products offered by development companies in their
catalogues to individual players or groups of friends, such as those called by "private"
[21] or to companies or organizations that demand some kind of activity to fill a
teambuilding event agenda. Some examples of developers offering this type of service
today: Realidad Alternativa (Spain) with their games, Signal and 1787, Action
Barcelona (Spain) with their games, Rescue Your Boss and Swat Countdown, and
Alice and Smith (Canada) with their games Bloodline 2, No Man's Sky and Black
Watchmen.
. Serious ARG. We define the serious ARGs as those whose objective are didactic,
organizational or of fomenting the critical spirit on the reality of the player. We
wanted to raise a subgroup wide enough to collect all those cases that, although they
show a dissonant form with respect to the established canon, can be considered
Alternate Reality Games taking into account their vocation for change or
improvement in the reality of the player. We incorporate the so-called ARG "of
educational training" [16], "of life management" [
10
], "educational" [
22
], "civic" [
23
],
"formative" and "organizational" [12]. Serious ARGs are directly related to other
forms of gameplay that pursue objectives applicable to the player's real life but are
developed primarily in digital environments such as Persuasive Games [
24
] or
Epistemic Games [
25
], and could be classified within a broader category that would
include all games whose purpose goes beyond simple fun, the so-called Serious
Games [
26
]. Serious ARGs take many forms; they can be used in school or university
settings to encourage students to learn a subject or also to train lateral thinking, as in
the case of ARGuing (2008), an ARG funded by the European Union to encourage
multilingualism among secondary school students in EU countries. They may also
occur in corporate environments where companies seek to train their workers in some
aspect or intend to measure their response to possible contingencies, as in the case of I
Love Trees (2011), ARG developed during the Pennsylvania Educational Technology
Expo and Conference to introduce participants to a system called Powerful Learning
Practices on educational technology. On the other hand, serious ARGs seek reflection
and critical thinking as in the case of World Without Oil (2007), Jane Mcgonigal's
illustrious ARG where a hypothetical scenario of a world without oil was proposed
and participants were asked to reflect and try to provide solutions to the problem. Or
in another sense, the author's games dedicated to promoting healthy living behaviours
even serving as therapy in the recovery from physical traumas, as in the case of her
game Superbetter (2009). As we can see, the possibilities are multiple and the
structural changes in each one of them can also be very pronounced: The This is not a
Game acquires a different meaning, the narrative can be relegated to simple
mechanical support, the ARG rules are blown up and the game itself becomes a sort
of vital play only being able to be identified with the original label because of its
unequivocal tendency to colonize the player's reality, although in a different way.
Regarding its evolution, we have to emphasize that the serious ARG appeared some
years after the foundation of the genre, they lived an important development mainly
thanks to the multidisciplinary approach on the part of all type of professionals,
psychologists, pedagogues, theoreticians etc. and at the present time they are one of
the most studied and with more practical possibilities. Some examples of serious
ARG: Robots Are Eating the Building (Harrisburg University, 2010), Chore Wars
(Kevan Davis, 2007), Evoke (Jane Mcgonigal, 2010), Conspiracy for Good, (The
Company P, 2010) y The Confort of the Strangers, (Evan y Johnson, 2008).
After articulating our classification, we believe it is pertinent to propose an updated
definition that works as a minimum agreement, capable of including the fundamental
characteristics shared in all ARGs in one way or another.
An ARG is a type of game characterized by a relevant narrative quota that
normally unfolds in a fragmented way and following a transmedia logic, which
assumes reality as a component of the game, emerging in it to the point of converting
it into diegetic space-time after a fictional pact with the players and ultimately seeks a
transforming effect on them, either by giving them a demiurgic illusion of narrative
protagonism, challenging them to overcome playful challenges that require a
cooperative effort to overcome them, or by stimulating the critical application of the
mechanics learned in the game in real environments and situations as creative ways to
improve their lives.
5
Conclusion
The Alternate Reality Games are a living genre with the same hybrid vocation and the
same tendency to break and transgress borders as when they were born. Although the
forms have been able to transform over time, the background of this transgression
remains the same: first, breaking the boundaries that separate the game from reality,
emerging in the player's life to change it somehow and then, breaking those that
pretend to department them, cracking the walls that contain them and running
spontaneously. Even so, we believe that only in a classifying effort is it possible to
understand them in their complexity, finding the common denominators to back up a
sufficient definition. After identifying native concepts thrown up in the first known
cases and inferring from these a sort of paradigmatic structure, we set out to compile
enough examples over the years and analyze them, highlighting the most important
characteristics to finally pose a series of categories capable of effectively framing all
the examples studied. With the reference of other classifications always as a cardinal
point, we wanted ours to be generous and ductile, even with solid outlines, and of
course to take into account that congenital propensity to evolve by hybridizing by
system. In short, we believe that as far as the Alternate Reality Games are concerned,
the frontier attack is guaranteed in the future as they become more popular and more
used, so it will depend on the analytical effort to continue reconstructing the
perimeters on time to reveal the mutations of the genre.
6
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