Immersive gaming and alternate reality games
Tim Finin, 1:33pm 27 December 2007Alternate reality games, also known as immersive games, blend fantasy and reality in ways that blur the difference. We are not talking about virtual reality technology that require their users to don special helmets or use kinematic effectors, but games that embed their narratives and interact with players using everyday aspects of the the real world — Web sites, email, instant messages, phone calls, letters and billboards.
The genre has largely been used by conceptual artists, advertising agencies and marketeers. Here’s how Dave Szulborski describes it on his This is Not a Game site.
“Alternate Reality Gaming, sometimes also called Immersive Gaming, Viral Marketing, or Interactive Fiction, is a rapidly emerging genre of online gaming and is one of the first true art and entertainment forms that was developed from and exclusively for the Internet. Alternate Reality Games have been wildly successful when used for multimillion dollar marketing campaigns, such as the 2004 game I Love Bees, used by Microsoft to help launch the hugely anticipated X-Box video game Halo 2, and the game that started it all, the Beast, used to promote Steven Spielberg’s science fiction epic A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 2001.”
Wired has an article, Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games, that describes an a viral marketing campaign to promote Nine Inch Nails. Muhammad Saleem blogs about the online viral marketing campaign it used to promote the move The Dark Knight. Finally, ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post, Alternate Reality Games: What Makes or Breaks Them? that attempts to deconstruct ARGs.
Alternate reality gaming is definitely unusual, but it draws on many of the skills any student of gaming should be developing: the ability to construct a rich narrative, the capability to design an environment that reveals itself as players explore and gradually discover and solve underlying puzzles, and the skills to exploit the latest digital technologies.
Many of them are inherently social games as well, encouraging or even requiring groups of people to collaborate and share information to unravel the story.
Ebiquity Blog
January 1st, 2008 at 2:40 am
These immersive games may seem like they are beneficiary from a distance but being a part of this and eventually pulling myself away from it made me realize how addicting it can really be. I genuinely think that games like this are so popular and actually addicting because they put the players in an alternate world, where real life starts over and every problem that is going on in real life is no longer an issue. I used to play WoW and make friends with other players, do PvP battles, and stay up to 5 O’Clock in the morning playing this game when I had a class at 8 O’Clock in the morning.
It is pitiful that a mere game could capture some of us like that. It eventually got so bad that I didn’t care about sleep, I fell asleep in all of my classes, and every time I slept, I had dreams about me playing my character in WoW.
Real life shouldn’t be swept under the rug. If people want to play games like this, they need to make sure that their real life isn’t slipping away. The only way you can find out if you are addicted is to stop playing and see how much you miss the game like I did. When I stopped playing, I still thought of nothing but the game.and I wanted to talk to all of my WoW friends and I disregarded my friends and even my boyfriend. In fact, if it wasn’t for him, I would probably still be playing.
Leveling up may seem important, but where does that put you in the real world?