Alternate Reality Games

Slide 1: ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES and why you should care

Slide 2: A Story  Margaret’s Honey website gets “hacked”  Interested visitors talk to Dana, the webmaster, about what’s going on  Visitors find garbled “mayday” messages, fragments of a story in embedded code and corrupted images  Ongoing blog/email contact with Dana, mysterious artificial intelligences deepen mystery

Slide 3: A Story, Cont.

Slide 4: A Story, Cont.  Players come across puzzles hidden in the site, leading to more messages  Players are lead to payphones across US  Over 12 weeks thousands of players congregate at phones to hear story fragments, talk to an AI, and perform missions

Slide 5: What’s in a name?  alternate reality? no  games? no  actually, sort of

Slide 6: Pervasive Gaming (in a nutshell)  (Social) Play  Narrative  Technology  Cross Media & Common Modalities

Slide 7: Pervasive Gaming (in pictures) cyberspace in-between meatspace also:

Slide 8: Interesting Numbers  Tie-Ins / Marketing  Art of the Heist: 45mil impressions  The Beast: 1mil players  I Love Bees: 2mil players  Independent  Chasing the Wish: 3k players  MetaCortechs: 12k players  Perplex City: 40k players

Slide 9: The Technology (in a nutshell)  Web (2.0 and otherwise)  Blogs, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, Forums, Websites, etc.  Email, IM, IRC  Mobile  SMS, Location/Context-Sensing  Telephony  Phones, Asterisk ?

Slide 10: Play traditional MMO

Slide 11: Pervasive Play  Low barrier  Constructive  Dynamic  Flexible  Scalable Community

Slide 12: Narrative

Slide 13: Pervasive Narrative  Immersive  Dynamic  Flexible

Slide 14: All Together Now  Actors inhabit same space as player collaboration

Slide 15: The Technology (in pictures)

Slide 16: The Technology (in pictures)

Slide 17: Why is this so cool?  Immersive!  Novel  Meatspace is fun  Dynamic - constant improvement  Flexible - constant surprise  Agile development

Slide 18: Why is this so powerful?  Collective intelligence  Collective empowerment  Reality <--> Game “To make people believe is to make them act”

Slide 19: TorGame (long-lasting meatspace)

Slide 20: TorGame (long-lasting meatspace)

Slide 21: TorGame (long-lasting meatspace)

Slide 22: TorGame (long-lasting meatspace)

Slide 23: World Without Oil (preparing for the future by having fun)

Slide 24: World Without Oil (preparing for the future by having fun)

Slide 25: World Without Oil (preparing for the future by having fun)

Slide 26: World Without Oil (preparing for the future by having fun)

Slide 27: The Future  The future of entertainment?  Integration with traditional entertainment media  Integration of more recent technology  Problem solving  Greater emphasis on social networks