Slashdot Mirror
Alternate Reality Games Grab Mindshare
An nonymous reader points to articles at the New York Times and on the BBC about online games that require a lot more audience participation and curiosity than conventional games do. "Known as ARGs or Alternate Reality Games, these immersive experiences mix real world clues, phone calls, voicemail, email chatter-bots, real people playing roles in real life and a bevy of bogus and legit websites, to create a fully rounded gaming experience that bleeds over into everyday life. With central sites like ARGN, Unfiction, and endless forums and Yahoo groups, the BBC claims that this is not only a quickly emerging gaming trend, but that it may also have real-world applications like group dynamics and problem solving. Chasing the Wish claims to already have a few thousand people worldwide playing since it opened for play on Feb. 28. One sure sign of having people's attention is the fact that it's already spawned a parody site, Chasing the Fish."
Wasn't Majestic, the game released by EA pretty much the same thing? Charged a monthly fee to get calls in the wee hours of the morning, e-mails, movies, what-not. It didn't do so well, I guess customers didn't like waking up at 3 am to hear a poorly delivered line about the imminent danger they were in.
Last I heard EA scrapped the idea since no one bothered to keep paying.
...with a game called Majestic. Ron Dulin at Gamespot gave it a 6.7 and said "Majestic is a very passive experience, and as the novelty fades, so will your interest". The game faded after a couple of months because it just wasn't immersive enough, since you had to wait for phone calls or emails or faxes for the game to progress. It was also pretty linear and didn't take advantage of collaborative gaming. Maybe these new games can improve on that. I can imagine ARGs in which you join a government agency or revolutionary faction and work with other players on your side on different tasks set up by the game server, like collecting counterintelligence information on the internet and saboting the other team's networks and...umm, I think I let my imagination run wild there. Sorry.