Story Guidelines

Hide stories in unexpected places  Give yourself ridiculous constraints  Experiment outside your comfort zone  Invent a character without a storyline  Give the fans stuff to play with  Give them stories to snack and binge on


Alternate Reality Games

ARG

Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG)

Unique genre of gaming (since about 2000) that combines real world events with some form of virtual experience. Built around solving puzzles or mysteries rather than killing enemies and has many emergent properties created by users rather than simple linear story-lines story-

ARG
Alternate Reality Gaming is, according to CNET, "...an obsessionobsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure realhunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community... "These games are an intensely complicated series of puzzles involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper realadvertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more. That blend of real-world activities realand a dramatic storyline has proven irresistible to many." These games often have a specific goal of not only involving the player with the story and/or fictional characters but of connecting them to the real world and to each other. Many other. game puzzles can be solved only by the collaborative efforts of multiple players, sometimes requiring one or more players to get up from their computers to go outside to find clues or other planted assets in the real world.

Traditional GAMES


DEFINED RULES DEFINED SPACE GIVEN SET OF COMPONENTS SET OF VICTORY CONDITIONS

is the next stage in the game evolution.



EMERGENT PROPERTIES IMMERSIVE REAL WORLD ELEMENTS COLLABORATIVE INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING SELF ORGANIZING STRUCTURE
(OF THE ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK)

The Beast (the first mainstream ARG)

This much we were told from the beginning: Evan Chan was murdered. A web of clues was spun through the datasphere, and the Cloudmakers meticulously pored over each and every puzzle and detail. The Cloudmakers brought together diverse skills ranging from cutting edge spectral analysis to a unique and unrivaled knowledge of historical events and world literature . . . and a whole lot more. Two heads may be better than one, but seven thousand combined to form the ultimate crime fighting syndicate. -www.cloudmakers.org

A complicated promo for the movie AI. Began in 2000, ended in 2001 with over a million players.

A crafty way to self promote comic books. Ran for 3 years in 2 forms.

A complicated advertisement to increase interest for the TV series Fallen. Began and ended in 2006.

The first mainstream non-promo ARG. Very linear storyline. Simplistic card based puzzles. 3 years for season one, and sadly season two never happened.

www.argn.com

(www.unfiction.com/forums) www.unforums.com

despoiler taking the spoiler out of, um, spoilers

www.despoiler.org

www.argology.org

[Source: http://www.42entertainment.com/see]