Alternate Reality Games are usually commercially driven viral marketing campaigns for big brands such as Microsoft and Playstation, either that or they are tiny 'grassroots' productions.
Alternate Reality Games are an experience like none other and no game is the same. Players and designers become immersed in the experience and can recall events and characters fondly long after the experience has ended.
Alternate reality games are usually earmarked by a large game-reality in the form of multiple websites, all of which take themselves as being totally real. In fact, sometimes it is difficult to tell if a website is fictional or not.
Alternate Reality Games are cross-media games that deliberately blur the line between what's real and what's a game.
Their goal is to connect people to the story and other players. Alternate Reality Games are gradually becoming the adventure games of the new millennium, and Perplex City throws in a CCG (collectible card game) for good measure.
You can play for free, during the course of which you'll browse through mysterious websites and blogs, send and receive emails, get phone calls, go on real-world scavenger hunts, and more. Alternate Reality Games are games in which a team of puppet masters sets up fake clues and circumstances in the real world, to allow players to play in an alternate reality. For example, apparently recently some people received parcels with mysterious contents, without ever having signed up for a game or ordered anything.
Alternate reality games are chaotic play when they run, and produce chaotic fiction as a result. They are a subset of the whole of possibilities of chaotic fiction and play, but to me they are a strong subset. Alternate reality games are gaining momentum, especially given the rapid growth of multiplatform entertainment and users’ ever-growing interest in immersive entertainment.
Jones believes ARGs will have the opportunity to develop many different business models as the genre matures. Alternate reality games are games spanning multiple media in which the interface is the real world. She will also talk about 'Operation: Sleeper Cell' the ARG that she has been involved in developing for Cancer Research UK in her spare time outside work.
