Alternate Reality Gaming

[Gamskee]

I didn't find anything on this after searching, so I felt safe to post about this topic. Apparently a new type of RPG has started. Its kind of a cross between LARP and puzzle games, and is primarily played by phone and the internet.

Apparently, the ARG started with the Beast, a promotional game for the movie A.I. that played out like a conspiratorial murder mystery. Websites, numbers on the back of the A.I. movie posters, and phone calls were all used to piece a mystery together, mostly without indications of the fact they were playing a game.

Recently, I Love Bees, an ARG that was a promotion for Halo 2, finished. It sounded failry large, and even got a picture on CNN during the debates. Players took massive photo sessions, ran to GPS located phone booths, and had conversations with actors hired to play the mian characters of this drama, most notably an AI from the future that crash landed in our internet.

Here are some links for those who are curious or need further explanation:

http://www.argn.com/
http://www.unfiction.com/main.html

Now, this seems to me to be a highly simulationist form of RPG with a live format.

So, for general discussion questions:

1) It seems to be an RPG to me, but without usual trappings as you largely play yourself and solve puzzles, does anyone think otherwise?

2) Anyone think this is the next big thing for RPGs?

3) Is there anything within this style of gaming that might be useful for other LARPs, tabletop, etc.?

[M. J. Young]

Solving puzzles has long been a staple of role playing games; the very first "three kinds of role players" I ever encountered gave one as puzzle solvers (the other two were combat fiends and character interactors). It's also not entirely unknown for players to play themselves--when we designed Multiverser, we learned that it was common enough that there was a name for it, the I-Game. Of course, LARP has certainly been done; those of us who don't do LARP tend to think of it as fringe, but there are places and people for whom the original role playing stuff is fringe.

Of course, we can debate the edges. Is T.A.G. a role playing game? You're you, but you're an assassin with a target you have to find and shoot with your dart gun before someone gets you. Here, as there, we are creating something of a shared imagined space; on the other hand, we do that with many games we play which are not role playing games.

So I guess the question to be addressed is what makes it a role being played. In Multiverser, you're you, but "you" can change and become something else as you are subjected to imagined realities. If all you're doing is solving a puzzle and taking the game seriously, I hesitate to say it's a role playing game. There is some argument that the actors are playing roles, and probably improvising from a script; but you can say the same thing about certain video games which use actors for the avatars and voices, to some degree.

I guess I'll have to be persuaded that there's more happening here than just a bunch of people searching for the hidden case of beer (a similar "game" concept, I expect).

--M. J. Young