I’m hearing the term ARG (Alternate Reality Games) a lot more lately, which is a great thing. Only trouble is, people seem to have very different interpretations of what it is. Even what the acronym stands for is inconsistent, with Augmented Reality Games cropping up in some places.
So what is an ARG? A community driven, trans media hoax? An internet game with phone calls in the dead of night? A marketing stunt where you don’t tell anyone what you’re selling?
Here’s my definition:
1. It’s a story.
2. It’s told through at least one electronic media, not including a television.
3. You need to follow at least two sources of information to understand it.
You’ll notice I don’t include communities, or pretending it’s real (TINAG) in the definition. That’s because I don’t believe they’re essential to an ARG. They can be extremely important, and for a long time they’ll be closely linked, but for ARGs to break out into mainstream media we need to be willing to move away from them. A thriving community will always build around a great story (take Doctor Who or Buffy), but if you force people to join one in order to take part, either as part of the registration process or because of the breath of information needed to advance in the story, you’ll drive a large proportion of your potential audience away.
Similarly with pretending it’s real: for a lot of people this is part of the fun, but at some point you need to let your audience in on the trick or risk confusing and losing them. The recent World Without Oil did this perfectly. The site treated the crisis as if it were real and even the help page didn’t tell the truth, but right at the bottom was a link: ‘I still don’t get it?’ which spilled all. It also helped that the story was close enough to be real, but far reaching enough that if it were true we’d have heard about it on the news.
There’s a lot of fun to be had in hoaxing your audience (See Orsen Wells’ War of the Worlds broadcast, or BBC 1’s Ghostwatch), but people get tired of being tricked. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. ARGs will never gain wide reaching appeal until people feel safe with them. You can always turn a TV off, or walk out of a Theatre, but with an ARG, how do you stop it? Or even pause it? Until people know they can walk away at any time, most of them will never sign up.
