Szulborski, Dave
2005
This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming

Lots of definitions of play, immersion, ludology, narratology, etc.

1
“Regardless of which name we ultimately choose to apply, Alternate Reality Gaming is a rapidly emerging game genre and is one of the first true art and entertainment forms developed from and exclusively for the Internet.” It is not exclusively for the Internet, and he knows that: he mentions real life events, etc. later on.

47f
‘To be completely faithful to the TINAG philosophy, a game’s beginning (or launch, as they are commonly referred to) should be unannounced, although not all ARGs have followed this procedure and have still been successful.”
He is too prescriptive. ARGs are evolving. He published this in 2005, only 4 years after The Beast. How can there even be any categories or rules. Even in 2010 it is still Wild West out there. There is no such thing as a TINAG philosophy. Even the inventors of ARGs think they should never have invented TINAG. It is not a rule that people have to follow. It was an idea, and not the best one at that. And there are no shoulds in ARGs. Nobody knows enough to tell other people what they should do. Doing this would stifle creativity and evolution way too early!
He knows all this (see p. 191), I think, just has an inaccurate writing style.

66f
From Meadows, Mark Stephen ~ Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
“Meadows: What was the interaction between the authors – you guys – and the readers, or players? Was there an instance when you didn’t know what the outcome would be but had to keep writing anyway?
[Elan] Lee: Oh, definitely. There was one puzzle where there was no answer. We had no idea how it was going to resolve. There was an artificial character that thrived on nightmares and was born in a psychological institute that had become so addicted to nightmares, it was looking for what scared people the most. See, it had to generate more nightmares to feed itself. We opened up the doors to the players and wrote out a distress call: “Help me” came from a character that the players liked who Loki had overwhelmed, but we didn’t know what the response would be. We wanted to leave it to the players to come up with something creative. They wanted to find a way to trap Loki and put out bait and destroy him, so they all got together – thousands of people – and they made a dream database and put all of their own nightmares into this database (it was beautiful to see them all work together like that), so we directed Loki toward the site and there he died. We created the animation sequence of Loki living though one line of everyone’s nightmare and phrased it in a way that read from everyone’s paragraph, but it was a single series of a total, truly nightmarish experience.
Meadows: That’s a pretty unique form of authorship that gives a lot of control to readers.
Lee: Oh yeah. The players felt totally in control and totally powerful, so the game was changing the story based on their specific writing.”

71-92
“Chapter 6: ARG Pre-History”
Lots of precursors.
Categorises Ong’s Hat: Incunabula as the first ARG.

100
The Beast’s alleged budged was USD 1,000,000.
The same goes for I Love Bees’ budget.

105-117
History of Majestic.
Most details I have found so far.

112
“[...] EA [...] announced it would be offering a retail CD-ROM version of the game in November 2001, containing the introduction and the first four episodes for $39.99.” So it was not a flatrate fee for the online experience, but a last attempt to repackage what already existed.

191
“Currently, this whole genre is really still in its infancy. I liken where things are now with television in the early 1950s.”

342-377
Self-promotional EA called Errant Memories. Made for ARG newbies to read through and understand what an ARG is.