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Alternative Reality Games: Subversive? Immersive? Or a waste of time?

09:05 / 22.06.06

Games, mainly internet based, that combine of fake websites, puzzel-solving, events and other real-world artefacts to create a very realistic and immersive game experience.

Anyone on the board played? Recommendations? Had a look at http://www.perplexcity.com/ but i'm shite at puzzles, but are there any more worthy of attention? Are they as engagings as, say, traditional Role-Playing Games, of little more than glorified crossword puzzles. Do you feel that they're just another insidious form of advertising, entertaining but worthless?. All thoughts welcome, especially from people that HAVE played.

10:05 / 22.06.06

Mike, I understand you might want to discuss ARGs, but if you do you might want to think of, y'know, discussing them. What are they, for those of us not living on the bleeding edge? What do you think of them? Got any links? You get out of Barbelith what you put in, y'know?

Anyway, I've had a go at them. I found one a year or so back called This is not porn that was actually very creepy and harder than the human genome to solve. I got one page in I think... not terribly inspiring.

I find one of the most entertaining things about this new genre of gaming is not solving the puzzles yourself, but working as part of an online community to solve them, or even reading about the complicated processes others are going through to win the game. This is especially true of the bastard-hard obscurathons that most ARGs seem to be like.

Also, have you seen the Lost ARG yet? It's easier than most, and has the benefits of a massive community beavering away at it too, and relevance to one of the best shows on telly, which gives even more reason to play.

So... you want to try that first post again?

13:03 / 23.06.06

Well, i'm not sure what to think, i've not played any, but have been a gamer for many years. I find the idea both interesting and confusing. And the focus on "puzzle solving" seems a bit limited. I love the idea of games spilling out into real life But i'm "time poor" so don't have time to play any at the moment.

And was interested in anyone that had. But i understand your chagrin at the low quality of my question. I was kind of hoping for experiences, not admonishment. So, in place of time-consuming research that Barbelith requires, i've asked the moderators to delete the thread.

Ill try better next time...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:16 / 23.06.06

(mod hat- check your PMs).

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

14:39 / 23.06.06

ah ARGs.

Before they were called that there was The Beast, which took place 100 years or so after the events of the film AI. IT was a murder mystery, and was an amazing way to drum up interest for a film that turned out pretty badly.

The thing about The Beast that made it great was that it was not an obvious advertising campaign. the LOST game has shoved more Jeep and Sprite ads down my through then I see in a week of TV.

For me they are mostly time wasters at this point, with many of the 'puzzles' nothing but finding a hidden link and then waiting for the games creators to update it. In the past there have been a few really hard puzzles, and in the case of the Beast a brute force attack was needed to solve one when the real world item that had the clue was no longer available.

Overall there are some really cool games out there, and checking out ARGN is a good place to start.

15:46 / 23.06.06

Where was the "Brute Force" required?

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

16:10 / 23.06.06

There were 3 real world meetings of the pro-human/anti-AI group (I don't remember the name) in LA, Chicago, and NY.

At each meeting there was a jigsaw puzzle the visitors had to put together, and iirc the Chicago group were unable to finish the puzzle in the time allowed. When the puzzles were complete you flipped them over and got a series of numbers, and there was a page we were all stuck on that required 3 numeric passcodes. They were each 15 characters long I think, and we only had 2. Some enterprising programmer wrote a brute force script that would have taken a year or so on one machine, but wrote it to be distributed and run off a server so you did not repeat guesses. It still took a couple of days but it worked in the end.

16:21 / 23.06.06

SO the game had to be hacked to be won? heh! Did the crappiness of AI the movie detract from The Beast? Or was it it's own reward?

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

16:28 / 23.06.06

The game storyline was brilliant. AI that ran peoples houses started killing their owners and making them all look like accidents. The failure in the movie AI was that it wasn't explained that the future robot lifeforms were the descendants of the ones who killed humanity.

Basically at the end of The Beast you are told that the AI who controls an artifical algae used to try to counter global warming has decided that humanity is bad for the planet so teams up with AI worldwide to slowly wipe out humanity by creating an ice age. The movie actually makes MORE sense if you have played the game, which means it is unfortunate that the game was not included on the DVD.

16:48 / 23.06.06

Heh. I tried to start a thread on this subject, sometime before the age of Games & Gameplay, I think. It's been dormant in the Conversation ever since.

I read somewhere that had the designers of The Da Vinci Code video game given up on the standard PS2 wankery and created a ARG similar to the Beast, it would've been more conducive to the scavenger hunt thrill of the characters in the novel. I couldn't agree more. There's just not enough ARGs out there in my opinion.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:29 / 24.06.06

Does anyone know what the lifetime of these games tends to be? I had In Memoriam for my old PC (which for some reason wouldn't run it) and am interested to know whether it still works (yeah yeah, I know, try it out...)- is it bots that send the emails and stuff? Are they still active?