Jeffrey Kim
Elan Lee
Timothy Thomas
Caroline Dombrowski
2009
Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games, 2001-2009 (05.07.2009)

Elaborates on 5 Alternate Reality Games (ARG):

The Beast (2001)
I Love Bees (2004)
Last Call Poker (2005)
Year Zero (2007)
Free Fall (2008)

“The Beast was arguably the first ARG. The game was created to promote Kubrick/Spielberg’s movie A.I., and was designed and written by Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, and Jordan Weisman. The project was funded by Microsoft, and emerged when Spielberg asked for a way to let the audience know the world of the movie before seeing it. At first, the game designers thought they would create a series of linked console games with similar characters. Then, they decided more was needed — some kind of “glue” to hold the games together. That glue would be a set of Web sites that connected the characters and the setting of the movie.
Three months prior to the movie release, they canceled the console games entirely and focused only upon the “glue,” which did not yet have a name. They decided the entry point for the game would be on movie posters, although they e-mailed clues to gaming news sites as well.” The name later became The Beast.
Difference between Lee’s glue and mine: to him, the websites seem to be the glue, so The Beast is the glue; to me, the coordination, design, and technology are the glue, so the way the websites were connected to each other were the glue.

“Without easily accessible online access, a player is at a huge disadvantage.” ARGs are only possible because of an initial technological push!

“This suggests that storytelling cannot be only the passive, top–down experience familiar to content producers. Audiences demand a stage and a voice of their own.”

“ARGs are a form of collective storytelling.”

“ARGs are certainly not the end of the road, but they provide key insights into how storytelling evolves as technology continues to shift.”

“These communities are ephemeral, emerging for the purpose of a single game and dying off when the game is complete.”

“Although the game designers have a planned route in mind at the outset, the very nature of the game requires participation and player contribution. As a result, predetermined outcomes are rare.”

“Like the game designers, researchers must be adaptable and able to process the unusual diversions from planned routes. Models must be flexible to map to real–life social interactions. Currently, ARGs are dominated by their marketing purpose and tightly linked to product release. The pace and flow are tied to the product release, and data capture is only intended to guide the team of storymasters as hype reaches a critical stage. Researchers need to work with designers or create their own games to capture full sets of usable data.”

“No single methodology exists for analyzing digital social interactions. […] Existing theories can provide windows not only into communication and game story mechanisms, but also into the gaps in this field.”
Relevant theories:

• Social network analysis
• Actor-network analysis
• Entropy-agency