1. Alternative Reality Gaming

2. This presentation contains no inception spoilers

4. ...is an interactive fusion of creative writing, puzzle-solving, and team-building, with a dose of role playing thrown in. It utilizes several forms of media in order to pass clues to the players, who solve puzzles in order to win pieces of the story being played out

6. Launched in book form in 1979, along with a treasure hunt involving buried gold in a secret location in England

7. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide

8. Searchers often dug up public and private property acting on hunches

9. The solution to the Masquerade puzzle is elaborate: in each painting, lines should be drawn from each animal's eyes through their longest digits to a letter in the border...

11. A lot of puppetmaster's see the game as the almost perfect ARG

13. A whisper is sometimes louder than a shout

14. The "this is not a game" aesthetic

15. Real life as a medium

16. Collaborative storytelling

17. Meta-communication

19. The Beast ran for twelve weeks in the spring and early summer of 2001, is one of the most influential early ARG games

20. The Beast was set in the year 2142, 16 years after the events chronicled in A.I. There were three overlapping entry points to the game, or "rabbit holes"

22. 2 nd - One of the trailers encoded a telephone number in markings on the promotional text; if a player called this number and followed the given instructions he/she eventually received an email stating in part that "Jeanine is the key" and that "you've seen her name before."

23. 3 rd - an A.I. promotional poster sent to some technology and entertainment media outlets had a very simple code stating "Evan Chan was murdered. Jeanine is the key."

25. Searching for this name on the net led fans to the fictitious Bangalore World University and on through a bewildering series of sites that detail the world of AI

26. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1274487.stm

27. The beast: Jeanine Salla

29. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0972095/

31. The game had classic viral, exponential growth: on the first day a player found the site, only a few hits were recorded. By the first week, hundreds of people had visited. Over three million unique users visited the game site months later

33. In the process, players decoded messages encrypted with a World War II Enigma machine cipher; translated German, Japanese, and Chinese text; and created a nightmare database to trap an insane AI named Loki, who was "hacking" a swath through the in-game websites.

35. The Curtain - The curtain is generally a metaphor for the separation between the puppetmasters and the players.

36. Rabbithole - Also known as a Trailhead.

37. This Is Not A Game (TINAG) - Setting the ARG form apart from other games is the This Is Not A Game aesthetic, which dictates that the game not behave like a game

39. Massive scale ARGs : I love bees, the lost ring, flynn lives

40. Self-supported ARGs : perplex city, edoc laundry

41. Serious ARGs : world without oil, traces of hope, black cloud

42. Open source ARGs : wedreamthecity, metacortex

44. Viewing source code, “De-stegging”, Waiting, Codebreaking, More codebreaking, Esoteric knowledge, Viewing more source code, Solving stupid puzzles, More waiting, Not telling me what to do, “This is not a f**king game”, Lazy calls to action, Helping a teenage girl, Helping an attractive teenage girl, Helping an attractive amnesiac teenage girl, Treasure hunts, Millions of blog entries, Jumping through f**king hoops and finally Masturbatory platform excitement

45. Bad storytelling is bad storytelling

46. Thank you, any questions? Ian Forrester | c ubicgarden.com | mydreamscape.org Presentation : CC BY-NC-SA