[Sandstorm]

From Wikipedia:

"An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium."

You may remember some famous ones, such as the one that preceded Nine Inch Nails' "Year Zero" album release, or I Love Bees. This form of gaming, which goes almost hand in hand with Viral marketing sometimes, is becoming increasingly popular (One ARG actually won an emmy). This would be an incredible way to get people involved with the con BEFORE IT EVEN STARTS, give out prizes and swag, arrange cool meet-ups, and GET THE WORD OUT.

It's not hard to do. You don't need anything extravagant. It's quite cheap, it just involves some planning.

Thoughts?

This post has been edited by callmeSamuel: 12 November 2010 - 10:41 PM

[basili1250]

Wow.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, Sam, the "game" is controlled by those who are running the "game" and the players are everyone else in the world. And the real beauty of it is that technically the players are "running" the game because they are in fact the ones who keep the game going and advance the "game's" "plot."

A nice image is someone wielding a stick with a carrot (game overseers) sitting on top of a horse (the players) guiding the horse...but eventually the horse wants the carrot so badly that the person is falsely in control of where the horse goes and thus the horse does as it sees fit.

Or am I totally wrong?

[Sandstorm]

Pretty much. Same with Dungeons and Dragons.

You know the quests you perform, the items you collect, the hunts you go on, ect, in an MMO?

Now picture: the MMO is REAL LIFE. The items you collect are actually palpable (like a comic book or an action figure or something small and nifty). The hunts you go on are actual hunts in locations in the real world (one might hide a series of clues in different spots around the city, like under a bench near the John Hancock or in a comic shop and you have to go in and say a certain password).

Then there's the ONLINE portion of the game. The research. Some clue might require you to watch a certain episode of, say, YGOTAS or read a certain penny arcade comic to get the full context of the clue.

I did a really bad job of explaining it there, I think, so just read the wikipedia article.

This post has been edited by callmeSamuel: 13 November 2010 - 08:39 AM

[basili1250]

No, you did a really good job of saying enough to get folks interested in researching more...dear God we're playing an ARG right now!!!

For reals though, this is something you can't fully explain, tis something that needs to be understood by the individual.

But what are your ideas or thoughts about an ARG geared towards ACen? Or did you have a different intent...my bad if I'm making assumptions about your purpose

[Sandstorm]

basili1250, on 13 November 2010 - 10:27 AM, said:

No, you did a really good job of saying enough to get folks interested in researching more...dear God we're playing an ARG right now!!!

For reals though, this is something you can't fully explain, tis something that needs to be understood by the individual.

But what are your ideas or thoughts about an ARG geared towards ACen? Or did you have a different intent...my bad if I'm making assumptions about your purpose

It's not too hard to explain, the wikipedia article does a fairly good job.

It could be anything from simple scavenger hunts, to a whole "Someone is trying to threaten acen, and you have to stop them" story line. Or anything. It would just take some planning.

That would be pretty cool, if someone set up a fake youtube account or something of news reports saying "Anime is to be banned in America", and then there was a resistance movement site that streamed anime videos with the clues in them or something. That's a generic idea, but if anyone has any suggestions...

[opimus.rm]

Acen is too crowed to do a larp. The ACEN concom has said no to larps in the past. Things could be taken out of context quite easily by the masses.

[Kitsu-chan]

Honestly, I think using ARG to decide the theme for ACen 2012 could be rather fun.

At ACen 2011, you could have Good vs. Evil for example (due to the Thor movie being released May 6, 2011 & the Avengers movie being due out May 4, 2012). You could have a group of heroes & a group of villians having a recruitment drive.

The teams would wander around ACen, get people to sign a paper & the players would get a sticker. The other side could also try to get the other teams players to convert (which would have to be a different paper to make counting easier) & players could only convert to the other side once per day & converts would be a differnt sticker than normal.

I think it would be fun & interactive way to let the masses help choose the theme for ACen.

This post has been edited by Kitsu-chan: 13 November 2010 - 06:40 PM

[Krystal]

Wait, so is there one going on now? And how do you get to play? This sounds like something I would really want to do, but I feel it would confuse me.

Is there a website we can sign up at to receive mailing letters?

[manga1]

NO LARP? Rats soo much for testing out my new english longbow with the bodkin points that were like the armor pirceing ones in the midevel times, rats and its made just like a yumi bow too, the kind used the warring times period by the japanese, they are almost 7 foot tall and fired 2/3s the way down.

just kidding, scavenger hunt it is. maybe I do if I have time.

[Shinamura]

I'm so lost.....