Alternate reality games use real world interactions and immersive fictional scenarios to deeply engage participants. They blur the lines between fiction and reality by hiding clues in everyday items like emails, ads, and packages. The document proposes using an alternate reality game to simulate running a failing company over 12 weeks for business students. Participants would solve authentic problems in small groups while roleplaying employees. The goal is to revive the simulated company through hands-on practice of skills like marketing, finance, and personnel management.

1. Alternate Reality Games
for Enterprise
Education
Simon Brookes
Portsmouth Centre for Enterprise
A Project partly funded by HEEG

3. http://swearercenter.brown.edu/old-site/Projects/PSO/Lessons/BrainHandout.jpg
Domain Knowledge
Business Finance
Marketing
Sales
Business Management
Skills
Communication
Leadership
Team working
Networking
Values/Beliefs/Attributes Behaviours
Proactivity
Risk taking
Implementing
Opportunity spotting
Adaptability
Self efficacy
Determination
Enthusiasm/motivation
Challenging

5. Authentic
Experience
Fidelity of realism
AuthenticityofExperience
Lecture
Case Study
Role Play
Simulation

6. Trans-media story telling
Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) is an experience that
encourages players (you!) to interact with a fictional world
using the real world to do it. http://www.giantmice.com/features/arg-quickstart/
Mobile phones in cakes Emails from characters
Magazine adverts TV adverts
Projections on buildings
Websites and blogs
Hidden Packages
Solve problems

7. Every effort invested in
making the fictional world
seem real

8. Blur the boundary
between fiction and reality

9. Deep levels of
engagement with, and
immersion into, the fictional
(simulated) game world

10. • Level one, 20 Credit unit
• 12 week, “thickly authentic simulation”1
• Work in small groups
• Role-play employees of a turn-around
company
• Task is to revive a failing company
• Basic marketing, business finance and
personnel issues
1Shaffer, D. (2005) Epistemic Games. Retrieved 31st August 2010, from
http://innovateonline.info/pdf/vol1_issue6/Epistemic_Games.pdf

32. Imagemodifiedfromhttp://abduzeedo.com/surrealist-drawings-reality-must-die