My late friend , writing partner and contributor to this very site, Dave Szulborski, has been named as the World’s Most Prolific ARG Developer by Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition.

“Between 2001 and 2008, pioneering American game designer Dave Szulborski (1957-2009) worked on a total of 13 major ARGs, starting with “Majestic”, EA’s attempt to create an immersive, persistent government-conspiracy-themed game. He went on to become the first professional independent ARG developer and wrote a number of books about how to make and play them.”

Miss ya bro.

(Thank to Steve Peters for the info)

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In anticipation of the upcoming performance of The Abattoir Pages, Joseph Matheny in conversation with John Harrigan about anything and everything that comes to their mind.

All music provided by Veil of Thorns
Songs, in order:

• And the Beast of the Vision Still Roams in Dream
• Intellectual Institutional Object
• Thought Pollution Evolution

In Your Ear: Reviewing Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story

Guerrilla Zoo and FoolishPeople present The Abattoir Pages, a terrifying immersive Halloween experience, hosted in a vast, secret subterranean landscape that was once one of London’s largest abattoirs.

The Abattoir Pages combines immersive performance, art installation, haunting and treasure hunt-style activity to form a labyrinth of mystery and horror, exposing the earliest Gaelic and Pagan rites. Once inside, audience members will be free to explore the abandoned underground chambers, join the secret party or may be caught in the middle of the most terrifying of puzzles.

This Hallowe’en, the infamous horror author Helen Mayer will hold court at a debauched secret party. She will share the perverse and warped research conducted inside the old abandoned abattoir, which was the genesis of her greatest work. In this dark playground, the very nature of human terror has been tested, abused and fed into the living story ‘The Forest’.

The author invites you to solve the puzzle and unlock the terrifying history within the old and powerful pages hidden throughout the slaughterhouse. Each holds a key to learning the truth of an ancient tale, which will ensure your survival.

Tonight, a debt will be repaid to blood dishonoured. An eternal nightmare rises up from the depths of the dark boreal forest, in the shadow of the mountain. It comes to feed on new meat inside an old abattoir.

http://www.apocryphon.org/

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A tribute to the late Dave Szulborksi, a pioneering Alternate Reality Game developer, storyteller and puzzle writer.

Credits:

Music – Dave Szulborksi
Video production – Michelle Senderhauf and Dee Cook

Higher quality versions at: Pilotlite

MP4 podcast/download version below.

Vicious war in Northern Uganda has destroyed Joseph’s home and torn his family apart. He has one goal, to find out from the Red Cross if his mother is alive or dead.

Now he has arrived in the dangerous refugee camp they call Hopetown, he has 24 hours to track down the Red Cross messenger and he needs you to be his guide.

He has a satellite phone, you have the web – together you’ll make a great team. Time is running out; guide Joseph through sickness, fire and violence as together you follow his traces of hope. Register to play

I’m taking a brief break before finishing up the Dark Side of Alternate Reality Games series to let you know about a couple of very special ARG events coming up in the near future. If you truly want to know what ARGs are all about, or maybe even experience one up close and personal for a brief period of time, you’ll never get a better chance than these two opportunities.

One is a conference in the heart of the city, where you’ll learn what ARGs are and why they are so effective from the people who make them for a living. And the other is a deep woods camping expedition where you’ll come face to face with the true immersive capabilities of ARGs, in a 3 day expedition into the heart of a Lovecraftian storytelling experience you won’t soon forget.

Intrigued? Then read on.

Although ARGs are rapidly gaining acceptance in the worlds of both entertainment and marketing, the art of making them is still a pretty small and specialized field. So it’s not that often you get a chance to listen to and question over a dozen experienced ARG creators in the same place at the same time, some of the professionals who have made the most successful and noteworthy ARGs of all time. On Nov. 2nd, 2007, UnFiction, the largest ARG fan community on the Internet, is sponsoring Embrace the Chaos, a one day seminar at the Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall in New York City.

Primarily aimed at producers, creatives, and theorists in the fields of advertising, media, and game design, the Embrace the Chaos seminar will feature panel discussions and question and answer sessions with people like Brian Clark (GMD Studios), Rachel Clarke (Buzz Marketing), Ken Eklund (Writerguy), Brian Enigma (ARG Security), Adrian Hon (Six to Start), Evan Jones (Stitch Media), Mike Monello (Campfire Media), Mark Ostrick (Ostrick Productions), Sean C. Stacey (Unfiction), Brooke Thompson (Giant Mice), Lance Weiler (Head Trauma), and me, Dave Szulborski.

We’ll be talking from our personal experience in crafting ARGs for commercial and entertainment purposes, in a series of presentations designed to educate and excite newcomers to the world of Alternate Reality Games.

For more information and to register go to the conference website at www.embracethechaos.org.

Now, for those who want to experience what an ARG is like, in a very condensed and in-your-face manner, there’s Scream in the Mountains, an immersive camping experience from Brian Clarke and the madmen at GMD Studios.

Brian and a great team of Puppetmasters just wrapped up The Providence Prophesies, the first installment of a serial ARG entitled Eldritch Errors. Set in a fictional world inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, The Providence Prophesies, was the first chapter in what GMD Studios hopes will become a self-supporting ARG entertainment series, paid for eventually by sponsors as a form of branded entertainment.

That’s assuming, of course, they don’t scare their audience to death in the meantime.

Check out this description of the next chapter planned in the Eldritch Errors campaign:

We’re going to ask some people to take October 26, 27, and 28th off from their jobs and families and travel somewhere remote and inconvenient? And some of them should even bring backcountry gear for a day even deeper in the wilderness? All so that they can have the most immersive weekend horror experience any ARG has ever dared contemplate? Madness! We’ve gone too far! Storytellers were never meant to fiddle with such things! We should seriously consider insuring the participants’ lives against the potential of death by fright!

That’s right – the next chapter in the immersive storyline is going to take place somewhere out in the remote deep woods, as fiction and reality blend into one horrific weekend of fun.

Sound crazy? Or just your cup of tea?

The people behind the Eldritch Errors project have a great “behind the scenes” website where you can learn more about the upcoming Scream in the Mountains event, as well as read about the experiences in creating the first chapter of The Providence Prophesies.

So go ahead and accuse me of pimping for ARGs again, but these are two very unique events the likes of which don’t come along too frequently. If you’ve got any interest at all in learning more about Alternate Reality Games, either from the marketing perspective or as an intensely immersive storytelling experience, you’re going to want to check out either or both of these rare opportunities while you have the chance.

Scream in the Mountains – October 26, 27, and 28th, 2007 – location TBA

Embrace the Chaos – Nov. 2nd, 2007 – NYC

Oh, what the Hell.

While I’m at it, I might as well let you know about one other venue where ARGs will be taking center stage for a while. It’s called the View Conference (recently renamed from Virtuality) and it’s happening in Italy in November. The conference itself is a huge event, a traditional meeting place where video game and entertainment creators gather to see, analyze, and discuss cutting-edge game and video FX technologies.

This is the first year where Alternate Reality Games will be discussed in detail, which is big news in and of itself, and both I and Ken Eklund will be presenting there about our work in making ARGs. It’s another great chance to learn about the genre first-hand for anyone in Europe at the beginning of November.

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In my two previous entries on the subject I’ve tried to dispel some of the misconceptions about the ”Dark Side of Alternate Reality Games”, including the beliefs that they are inherently: a) evil, b) mind control exercises, c) hoaxes, d) corporate funded marketing campaigns, or e) any combination of the above.

I haven’t, however, addressed several critical questions that some people have asked me either via email or in the course of various presentations I have given about ARGs, questions that have obvious relevance to the topic at hand. Perhaps the most frequent question is this :

“If ARGs are so innocent, why are there so many things hidden within them, in web page source codes, inside of image files, and so on? Why do the creators keep even their identities hidden?”

My answer to this question starts with an admission.

Yes, ARGs and the things that they are made of – websites, documents, images, videos, and so on – quite often have messages or other information hidden somehow within them. Whether it’s something as simple as putting white text on a white background or placing messages as comments so that they only show up in the source code of a web page, there’s no denying that the history of ARGs is filled with examples of hidden content. I personally invented a few new ways to hide images and text within Word document files that had never been done before in the course of creating my games.

And yes, this could be potentially troublesome in the light of terrorist activity of the Internet that could theoretically employ similar methods to send covert messages and instructions. Or even to someone who firmly believes that subliminal messages are commonplace in mass media communications and sees these hidden elements as proof of the mind-controlling nature of ARGs.

But here the critical difference is intent.

ARG creators want their hidden content to be found.

If that’s the case, then why hide it at all?

In a large number of cases it’s done as part of a puzzle, where the hidden information is either part of the information needed to solve a puzzle or the reward for finishing one. If the content is a web page, often the premise for the information hidden is the source code is that the character who created the page was trying to hide it from unfriendly eyes.

ARGs by their very nature are mystery stories of sorts, at least in their delivery method. Even if the narrative of the game isn’t of the mystery genre, the way it is broken up and delivered and distributed as various pieces of media makes the process of experiencing it a kind of scavenger hunt, as players seek out and assemble the various elements of the story strewn across the web and the real world. The point is that everything the game creators make is designed to be found and enjoyed (or at least puzzled over). And that includes the hidden content in source codes, embedded into images via steganography, and so on. Those are all parts of the story, just as the videos, sound clips, and web pages are.

So there’s no malicious purpose or intent to the hidden content in ARGs, in terms of conveying hidden or subliminal messages. Because of the way ARGs are made and presented, ARG players spend a good deal of their time devouring every single piece of content, examining it every way they can think of and often inventing new ways to do so along the way. Player communities often thousands strong devote themselves to solving and understanding every mystery within these games. It’s rare that any minute detail escapes their notice, so it’s almost certain that any such content with a dark or devious purpose in any past ARGs would have been noticed and thoroughly examined and discussed by now.

But there’s absolutely no evidence of any such content ever being found.

It honestly almost makes me laugh, the thought of trying to hide some sort of subliminal elements or messages in ARG content that would be unnoticed or undiscoverable by the players while having some sort of deleterious effect on them. It would be like choosing to hide the person or object you wanted to smuggle into the country in bales of marijuana before trying to cross the border. You couldn’t choose a less successful strategy.

So forget the idea that the hidden elements in ARGs somehow represent subliminal or dangerous messages. It’s just not true.

Furthermore, there certainly have been successful ARG campaigns that never hid any information using any of these methods, although that’s not to say they didn’t use puzzles that might have employed codes or ciphers of some sort. The point is, hiding information in various ways in game content is just one tool that an ARG creator can use if they want to, and hidden elements like this definitely aren’t a prerequisite of a successful or well-made Alternate Reality Game.

There’s another aspect of ARGs that’s often hidden, at least during the course of the live run of the game, namely the identity of the creators or Puppetmasters. While it’s not a hard and fast rule, the game creators often choose to remain “behind the curtain” while the game is afoot, but it’s certainly not because they plan on using that anonymity for any malevolent purposes or as a means of harassing anyone without fear of reprisal or possible legal prosecution. More often than not it’s because the creators want players to focus on the characters and story of the game, and not on who made it. Once an ARG concludes, these Puppetmasters are usually more than willing to step forward and claim their work, and it’s rare that a game successfully ends without following up with a credits list of some sorts.

This also explains why so many ARGs use domain names that have been registered privately, using proxy services that hide and protect the identity of the registrant. Actually some large scale corporate ARG campaigns choose to register all in-game website names normally, so as to make their corporate involvement readily apparent via these public records and to preclude any possibility of the site or the entire campaign being labeled deceptive or fraudulent. Leaving their name in the WhoIs records identifies or brands the domains / websites as part of a marketing or promotional campaign.

Finally, there’s one other question I’ve been asked that I’d like to address before ending this series about the Dark Side of ARGs. It’s a question that brings the entire discussion full circle to why I began it in the first place.

“Could an ARG be created to specifically harass, influence, endanger, or harm someone?”

The answer to that question isn’t quite as simple, and deserves a post of its own.

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Myths and Misconceptions

The Dark Side of Alternate Reality Games? – Part 2

Dave Szulborski

“I don’t think ARG is a dark conspiracy enacted by our masonic reptilian overlords — I actually think they’re much, much worse: a bunch of artists messing with people’s heads with corporate money.”

In continuing on with this “expose” about the Dark Side of Alternate Reality Games, let’s begin by addressing that little gem of wisdom quoted above. It’s full of enough misconceptions to easily fill up another column. So let’s look at some of the stated and implied meanings about ARGs in the quote, and see how they hold up to a few facts and exposure to the truth.

1) ARGs are primarily corporate-funded marketing campaigns.

Sorry to burst your bubble but that assumption is just downright false. Although the largest and most famous campaigns have indeed been part of corporate marketing campaigns, the overwhelming majority of ARGs that have been created in the last six years or so (pretty much covering the entire history of ARGs as a recognized storytelling or communications genre) have been independently funded grassroots efforts, with absolutely no corporate money or message behind them. Sure, large scale big budget games like The Art of the Heist or I Love Bees have gotten the most press and are the examples most people who’ve heard of ARGs will know, but they are in the overwhelming minority when it comes to the field of ARGs as a whole. Nowadays, for each corporate sponsored game that is created, there are usually 4 or 5 grassroots games running around the same time.

Take a look at the image embedded here; it’s a partial list of current games running, courtesy of the main source for news about the ARG world, ARGN.com. A majority of games on this list are grassroots games, made and paid for by individuals who just have a story to tell and are using this new form of digital storytelling to do it.

These indie games are made by people who do it for the love of the genre itself, folks like myself who are so fascinated by the potential of this new form of storytelling that they devote their own funds and creative energies to making these experiences for others to enjoy free of charge. I have been involved in a full dozen ARG campaigns since 2001, and over half of them have been games that I personally conceived and paid for myself. Yes, there have been a handful of corporate sponsored games mixed in there in that same time frame, which have garnered me a fair amount of money and attention, but they are the exception, not the rule. And I’m certainly not alone.

Many of the people working professionally making ARGs for corporate campaigns got their start and early experience exactly like I did – making their own games purely for the enjoyment of others, with no guarantees or thoughts of them ever being rewarded with anything other than the appreciation of the players. I honestly never thought I’d have the opportunity to get paid for making these things when I first started experimenting with this storytelling form and the fact that I have is something I consider myself incredibly lucky for. It’s wonderful to be able to make a living doing something you truly love and enjoy.

You’d be wrong to assume that marketing companies are the only people intrigued by ARGs, though. The academic world has grown increasingly more interested and involved in ARGs over the last few years, with ARGs being recognized in many books and in many university programs as a new and legitimate form of digital storytelling. ARGs have been featured topics at academic conferences around the world, where their potential for interactive cross-media narrative has many experts and enthusiasts excited.

Even in the fields of entertainment and gaming, ARGs are being intensely studied right now as a way of enhancing more traditional entertainment and communiucation mediums, and as a means of adding true and meaningful interaction to narrative-based digital games.

2) ARGs “mess with people’s heads”.

Again, this is by and large completely false, as well. Yes, there’s no denying that ARGs are fictional narratives, presented in cross media formats that are designed to evoke a feeling of realism for and engagement with the fictional world in within they are set. But this is no different than any other form of storytelling or art. Each strives to tell a story that feels real within the limitations of the media. If the simple act of writing a fictional story and presenting it to the world is “messing with people’s heads”, all forms of storytelling would have to be considered guilty, not just ARGs. So, if you are someone inclined to agree with the sentiments expressed in the quote that started this piece, you’d better stop reading books, watching TV, and going to the movies if you don’t want your head messed with.

3) ARGs are hoaxes or deliberate attempts to deceive the public.

Admittedly the argument given above about ARGs being the same as any other fictional story, doesn’t address what some people consider the “hoax” aspect of ARGs, meaning that people who come across an ARG’s creative content and aren’t aware that it’s part of a fictional narrative could believe it is real. The same could be said, however, for any form of storytelling when you take one small bit of it and present it out of the context it was meant to be experienced in. Any passage from a novel or scene from a film could be excerpted from the entire work and delivered in such a way as to look real rather than fictional. That’s certainly a realistic danger with Alternate Reality Games, when the various elements of the story are deliberately broken up and spread around the Internet and the real world, with each being made to look as realistic and believable as possible.

I have some rather humorous personal experience with this very thing happening, from an independent game I created in 2003 called Chasing The Wish. For that game I created a website for a fictional town in New Jersey, which I named Aglaura. I thought the site was fairly well done, in that I modeled it after several real small town websites that I researched, but it still certainly was lacking the depth of content and history one would expect from a real site of such a nature.

Nevertheless, about two thirds of the way into the game’s six month live run the site began receiving emails from the state of New Jersey, asking Aglaura to provide directions to their municipal offices so that the town could be added to the official state tax roles and records. It seems they had been trying to find the town for about a month or so, presumably by actually sending people out to look for it in the wilds of the New Jersey Pine Barrens where I had set the fictional community.

I realize that the people who believe there may be some “dark side” to ARGs are jumping out of their chairs at that example, saying that it proves that ARGs do indeed deceive and mislead people. But that doesn’t recognize the bigger picture that’s in question here, which has to do with intent. The statement that ARGs mess with people’s heads implies a deliberate intent to deceive or fool the participants, which was certainly never my goal for making the faux town website in Chasing The Wish. In the naiveté of my inexperience at the time, I honestly never even considered the fact that anyone would be fooled by the website in that manner and to that degree, so there was never any intent to try and do that at any point. Instead, my goal was to make a site that looked and felt real to the people who were enjoying the Chasing The Wish story. The authenticity and believability of the site were a means of enhancing the immersive story experience, not tools to deceive the unaware. And again I would argue that it’s no different than what artists in other media do all the time, to the limitations inherent within each particular storytelling genre.

There’s no denying or avoiding the critical role intent plays in ARGs, especially in the cases the quote above seems so worried about – corporate funded ARG campaigns. In my experience, games sponsored by large corporate clients are often extremely more worried about the possibility of being perceived as a hoax and about blurring the lines of reality and fiction than many grassroots games are. The goal is not entertain people and you don’t do that by leaving the participants feeling deceived or fooled in any way. While ARGs may be particularly effective in changing people’s perceptions of a brand or company, it’s never done in a subliminal or fraudulent way, and I’d defy anyone to present an example where it has. In every single large scale ARG the corporate sponsor and the product they are promoting (if any) has been known to the players at some point, more often early in the campaign than not.

The bottom line is this. Almost without exception, the participants in an ARG know they are playing a game. That’s actually one of the things that make Alternate Reality Games so potentially exciting to marketing firms and their clients, the fact that the audience actively and willingly seek out and engages in content they know is part of a marketing campaign. If you think about it, that’s the exact opposite reaction that most people have to advertising content. But there’s nothing tricky or deceptive about it at all. It’s simply good and effective marketing.

Now if your complaint is with companies doing marketing in general, that’s a whole different issue and discussion.

There’s another great explanation of why ARGs aren’t hoaxes here if you need further convincing.

Next – The Hidden Elements: The Dark Side of ARGs – Part 3

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Redefining The Real

James Curcio

Reality as fiction? Fiction as reality? In this day and age, it seems we need to re-evaluate what these things even mean. We have moved beyond post-modern ponderances of “the reality of the simulacra” (or copy) to something more immediate – are our relationships with individuals, conducted through electronic medium, any more or less valid than those that occur outside of those confines? Should we feel just as hurt if they die? Feel just as cheated if it turns out their death was merely a part of some elaborate game, or conversely, if real deaths are written off as part of a game of a more sinister kind?

One of the first articles we ran here on Alterati (Guising Along The Web) made reference to this distinction, at my request. A character in a virtual world (SecondLife, in this case) is approached by another. They talk briefly,and then, because of a hotspot that the characters happen to be standing near and an accidental mouseclick, one of the characters is giving the other a sensual body message. “Stay back you jerk!” the other screams, disengaging and then quickly leaving the location. Most likely, she will never speak to him again, and on some level, she feels, or plays at feeling invaded. What actually happened here? The event may be virtual, but the emotion is as real as any other. So then, to what extent are our emotions themselves learned games? How real is the ‘reality’ of Reality TV to the participants? Obviously these things raise more questions than we can answer.

Let’s not just deal in the abstract though. Allow me a moment to give you a first person account of something that may have been along these lines… Several years ago I was contacted by an individual referring to himself as Agent 222. Some of you may notice that this follows the idea of “evolutionary Agents” from ;Join My Cult!, as did he. Yet, he claimed, he had been using a very similar concept to the “Mother Hive Brain” himself, and had a growing clan in Argentina. We went back and forth from there for months, collaborated on many projects, including the Bedtime Stories With the AntiChrist Show #2 (his band submitted the guitar and vocal track playing under my ’ritual’ for Agent 156). Our initial back-and-forth even made it into Fallen Nation. He asked me to send updates, which he dutifully translated for his group down there.

Then a message appeared on an earlier incarnation of Frequency 23. Someone claiming to be his friend wanted to let all of Ray’s friend’s know that, while exploring underground tunnels of some kinds with several other members of the group, the area flooded and they all drowned.

This was obviously something of a shock. I experienced the same emotions anyone would experience when a unique acquaintance unexpectedly dies. After exploring the sites associated with the project more deeply (back then, there was one up in English which no longer appears to be active), I started to get a strange queasy feeling in my stomach. It seems that for weeks leading up to their death, they spoke of a ‘reckoning’ of sorts, and of making “the ultimate sacrifice.” Was my friend ‘Ray Khalidbahn’ a.k.a. ‘Agent 222′ creating a fictional drama to practice a ritual of death and rebirth, was he a fool kid, or another Jim Jones? Was it coincidence? After some processing on the matter, I put this outcome into Fallen Nation as well, either in homage to him, or simply as a record of the event, I am not entirely sure.

All the same, the rules of the story had to be upheld. That sub-plot had to resolve itself. Now am I playing “the game” too? Did I fictionalize a real event, or realize a fictional one? Fuck if I know.

The questions that these events bring up are seemingly endless. Had these individuals martyred themselves for real or in effigy as the culmination of a work of art? Did I really have a friend named Roy at all? How could any of us find out, not knowing the real names of these people, separated from us by thousands of miles? The only thing I knew was that bothering to find out, to really dig in and research this, would turn me into one of the crazies. I decided that I experienced what I experienced from him, and he was as real (or unreal) as anyone else we fool ourselves into thinking that we know. Take what you can from the experience, move on.

For my part, I’m all for integrating fiction and “real life” in new and original ways, and I think the surface has really only been scratched with that as a living, evolving art-form in many ways- but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about the possibility that I was being ”tampered with.”

I didn’t like the feeling that the death of someone you develop a relationship with, even one just through the Internet (and something of a language barrier), could just be a plot point for someone. Suppose for a moment he was fictional… Did that make his death unreal?

The emotions were there. Where is the line?

Some might say that the line is in the intent. If someone knowingly intends duplicity, for instance developing a relationship as a part of a story, then it is a lie. Those who unknowingly play their games are being real. But that doesn’t hold up. Don’t we say the aware individual knows what he’s doing? What if the intentions of the former are genuinely attempting some sort of positive change, for instance through the “play acting” of a ritual or interactive theatrical performance, such as what the Foolish People do?

See, all of this raises many uncomfortable questions. They aren’t questions I can answer, but I do feel that there’s a real value in asking them, and exploring it. Not everything in life that is comfortable is good for us, and not everything uncomfortable is bad.

I have one final thought on this. If fictional reality can be swapped out for reality, the inverse is also true. This is something else I played with in Fallen Nation. The character Agent 506 tries to create an “alternate reality game” about a kid who gets locked up in a mental asylum on trumped up charges (of a sort), hoping that some fanatical gamer will be nuts enough to break the very real individual out of the very real mental asylum (thinking it’s just part of the game).

This, of course, was itself within a work of fiction, a play in three acts, after which everyone, even the dead, brush themselves off and prepare for another role. Rather than suggesting this as evidence of the “Dark Side of ARGs,” replace the words “fanatical gamer” with “fanatic,” and consider recent world events and tragedies. The War in Iraq. Katrina. Scientology and other mind control groups… How likely is it, do you think, that we are living inside Wag The Dog?

If the real is what we experience, then the real is what we collectively make it to be. It would seem that soldiers, police men, and criminals alike are playing a much higher stake and more ‘immersive’ game than any ARG players I have ever encountered, including the shifty, obsessive ones. Even in the social sciences, we often refer to cultural roles as ”games,” we talk about children establishing the rules, the boundaries, from those around them. From there we enter the world of grades, we enter the world of financial concern, yet these too are games- games which often yield results very different than what nature herself would yield. You ace the video editing final, but fail because you didn’t show for class four times and you get an automatic F if you miss more than three. You get straight F’s in Jazz Harmony ear training tests, and yet ace the class because your prof sees you as a talented soul who just won’t ever develop perfect pitch. (Both of these happened to me, obviously.) The world of office politics or drug smuggling, all games with the laws of nature often taking second chair to the game dynamics we humans impose. The winners are not determined by what is right, they aren’t even determined by what is real- they are determined, by definition, by the rules of the game. Sometimes, nature plays umpire. But other times, as I mentioned, she turns a blind eye.

Again I ask, where is that line?

What if there isn’t one at all…

(I will be exploring some of these questions soon with John Harrigan, the artistic director of Foolish People, in relation to their own explorations of the line between fiction and life.)

Editors note: If you are here in relation to the ‘conspiracy’, we also recommend reading this series when you are finished. There is a link to the next part at the bottom of each installment.

The Blame Game

The Dark Side of Alternate Reality Games? – Part 1

Dave Szulborski

It’s finally happened.

In some ways, I’m surprised it took so long.

Someone has at last discovered the darker side and true hidden purpose of Alternate Reality Games.

I admit, I laughed when the subject first emerged last week in a comment posted here on Alterati to my entry entitled “The Rise of the ARG.” Even though the subject matter itself was no laughing matter, it’s hard to take anything seriously when it’s brought up by someone who chooses “Uncle Humpasaur” as a preferred on-screen identity. Seriously, if you just happen to come up with something that’s really meaningful and quotable, is that really how you want to be known?

Almost as ludicrous was the comment itself, especially the way it tried to attach a secret, darker purpose to ARGs:

“ARG is a lot more than ‘neat fun’ — there’s probably more dark undertones than there are bright, shiny overtones. ARG inevitably model themselves after actual conspiracy-theory rabbit-hole experiences, like the Mucho-Disturbing game El Centro, which was steeped in some really gruesome shit, like the Monarch mythos and of course, MKULTRA.”

I’ve been working professionally making ARGs for several years now, and have personally created several games in which exposing secret government mind control programs was the main focus (3 ARGs about a fictional musical group called the ChangeAgents), so you could say I have a little bit of personal knowledge about this subject. I also confess to working in a limited capacity on the “Mucho Disturbing game El Centro” in the interest of full disclosure. In reality though, the actual Alternate Reality Game for El Centro hasn’t really even taken place yet. There were some preliminary materials created and posted online, with a small degree of narrative and interactivity, but it certainly wasn’t a full-blown or prolonged ARG experience. So I can say with complete confidence that Uncle Humpasaur doesn’t have the slightest clue of what he is talking about. His comments betray such an ignorance of the genre that I couldn’t help but laugh at them.

I’m not laughing anymore.

If I thought Mr. Humpasaur had strayed off the correct path a bit, the person blogging at this Dreamsend site has completely left the planet.

In case you didn’t follow the link above, the image included above pretty much sums up the situation. That’s the cover of my 2nd book – Through the Rabbit Hole: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Alternate Reality Games – used in conjunction with an article theorizing about a possible connection between ARGs and the sudden, mysterious deaths of two young and apparently quite talented artists, Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.

I guess if I were only interested in selling books I’d be happy, as the prominent placement of the cover on this Dreamsend blog and the subsequent interest and coverage it has generated has resulted in a surge of sales in both this and my first book. But under these conditions it just doesn’t feel right. I’d rather not have the sales created by this blogger’s insensitive and often just plain stupid speculation about the deaths of these two people.

As you might imagine, this entire topic has touched a nerve with me and I’ve got quite a lot to say about it, more than one entry here at Alterati will contain. So this is just the beginning of a reply of sorts to the Dreamsend articles (there’s a whole series of them there; in fact the writer has just created a separate annex of his site to house them) and there will definitely be more to follow.

I’m going to start though, by calling the guy on his shit.

Several times in the various blog entries he mentions how he’s never spoken to anyone who’s played an ARG or has been involved in any way in making them. At one point he even goes so far as to construe the fact that no one from the ARG world has contacted him as proof that he’s on to something.

“I’ve never, for example, received any communication from any of the architects of the major ARGS such as Majestic. With a couple of exceptions, I haven’t received communications from anyone who has even PLAYED an ARG, much less who claims much expertise on the subject. Odd, that. If I were that off target, I’d expect ridicule from them.” from an August 11th entry

Now wait a minute. If this guy is trying to pass off his series of articles as a serious journalistic expose, isn’t it incumbent upon him to seek those very people out who might just have some knowledge of the subject he intends to write about? Of course, it’s not as easy to just make facts and conclusions up if you do that, is it?

He certainly never tried to contact me, even though I have email addresses and phone numbers publicly available from my website. He’s obviously aware of me and my connection to ARGs, since he used the cover of my book on his site, without even bothering to ask permission, I might add. So how serious was he about wanting to learn the truth about Alternate Reality Games?

On top of that, it seems he’s either got a bad memory or he’s not completely telling the truth, because an August 6th entry to the same series bemoans how “mean” the ARG designers have been to him. Six days later he’s claiming he’s never talked to anyone remotely connected to ARGs, either making or playing them. Which is it?

I could (and probably eventually will) pick apart a lot of the other facts and information about ARGs that this guy has included in his articles, since much of it is just downright false or misleading, but there’s another angle I’d like to address first.

To many people, myself included, it sure feels like the person behind the Dreamsend blog is using the deaths of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake as a way to generate attention for himself and his site. In many ways, his speculation is just as bad as the expected but still shameless sensationalism of the N.Y. Post’s coverage. But even that is just skimming the surface of the real issue, since it’s nothing new to have parasites trying to achieve some form of personal gain from other people’s tragedies.

There’s another layer or level of tragedy going on here though, in a mentality that thinks any unexplained mysteries are part of a larger grand conspiracy, allowing the writer to see these deaths as nothing more than a potential part of a game that needs to be exposed. This form of delusion used to be a fairly private Hell, until the Internet provided the public forum via blogs to share it with the world.

There’s a “truth be damned” attitude that’s frightening to see in such a paranoid worldview spawned from this victim mentality. It’s apparent not only in the writing on Dreamsend, but also in the writer’s repetitive statements asking people who disagree with him just to leave him alone and stop commenting on his blog. He says numerous times during the course of this series, “I wish I could just turn off the comments” or something very similar.

Sorry, Dreamsend, you opened this door. You’ve enjoyed your fifteen minutes of fame at the cost of others. You’re not going to be able to just bury your head in the sand and wish this all away.

Perhaps most frightening of all is to see the idea just one iteration down, spreading like the meme it threatens to become, in the form of the Humpasaur comment. It’s transformed already from maybe some dark and twisted ARG played a part in the tragic deaths of these two people to all ARGs have dark elements or some form of mind control. How easy it is to blame something you neither understand nor care to learn about, when getting to the truth might take just a bit of work.

Next: The Dark Side of ARGs – Part 2

Related Posts

• Transmedia Talk 40: Snow Town
• Dave Szulborski: World’s Most Prolific ARG Developer
• ARGNetcast, Episode 128: Thomas Dolby and a BIG Announcement

If you haven’t been lucky enough to experience the unique thrill of immersing yourself in an Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) yet, you couldn’t pick a better time to do it than right now. ARGs are literally popping up everywhere, from major marketing campaigns for cool new movies and books, to social awareness campaigns designed to educate people to the perils of global warming, over-dependence on oil-based energy, to innovative and experimental games sponsored by universities and academic organizations, exploring the possibilities inherent in this new form of digital storytelling. Even my step-daughter’s college is holding a mini-ARG as a way of introducing new students to each other, the campus, and the nearby town. For a genre that is still really only in its infancy, ARGs are quickly spreading throughout the marketing, entertainment, and academic worlds, and stand on the verge of breaking through to the awareness and consciousness of the general public.

So, like I said, now is the perfect time for YOU to discover the wonderful world of Alternate Reality Games, and I am going to use this entry to run through some quick introductions to a few ongoing campaigns in hopes that you do just that.

There are two potentially huge ARGs going on right now, both for MAJOR entertainment properties, one proven and one brand new. The first has been nicknamed IRIS and is a promotion for the upcoming release of Halo 3, the latest entry into one of the biggest-selling video game franchises of all time.

Besides the official Bungie game site linked above, the ARG also includes a weird and intentionally amateurish site called The Society of the Ancients, and the gameplay involves accessing hidden information locked away on the various servers on the Halo 3 site. There’s a great Wiki produced by one of the game’s fans to help catch you up on what’s happened before here, so you’ve got no excuse to dive right in and experience the Halo universe like you never have before.

The second new ARG campaign that has everyone buzzing, both in the existing ARG fan communities and on many of the entertainment news and trend-watching web sites is called 01-18-08, named after the trailhead site that was found from a mysterious movie trailer played at the end of the recent popular Transformers movie. This article has a great description of the trailer itself and an explanation of how he ARG has been linked to the new J.J. Abrams movie project codenamed Cloverfield.

For those who don’t know, J.J. Abrams is a film and television producer, the man responsible for the hit show Alias and the mega-hit LOST. His latest creation is a yet-to-be-named (at least officially and publicly) monster movie, whose Blair Witch style trailer has the Internet abuzz.

The puzzling web site at 1-18-08.com doesn’t reveal too much and neither does an odd companion site called Slusho, but those, along with seven MySpace pages for characters from the upcoming film, have been more then enough to fuel hundreds of pages of speculation about the campaign at the Unfiction Forums, the largest active ARG fan forum site on the Net. There’s also a very good Wiki with everything that’s been discovered about the game here.

Besides major film and video game properties, ARGs are currently being used to promote everything from perfume – a recently launched campaign featuring Sarah Jessica Parker’s new perfume Covet called The Case of the Coveted Bottle – to books – Christopher Forrest’s new release called The Genesis Code.

One of the great things about Alternate Reality Games is that you don’t necessarily need a large budget or any advanced computer programming skills to create one. Consequently there are always at least a handful of smaller independent ARGs running at anyone time which can be just as well done and entertaining as the larger commercial campaigns. Some of the games that look to be the work of such amateur creators going right now include Tomorrow Calling, Tom Tooman, Adam Worsley, and Brent’s Destiny.

One recent indie game deserving of special mention, for all the wrong reasons, is being called The Red King Project, the premise of which is a direct rip-off of a plot arc I did in one of my earlier games, Urban Hunt, over 3 years ago. For that game I created a web site called Dream Projector, featuring a fictional device that supposedly read and recorded people’s dreams, so that they could be played back and watched as video clips. And guess what the premise of the new Red King Project is? That’s right – a device that can read and record dreams. Sheesh. Sometimes you just can’t win. I really couldn’t tell you if the Red King game itself is good or bad, because it’s rubbed me in such a wrong way that I refuse to spend much time with it at all, although I can honestly say that Urban Hunt pulled off the concept of the actual device and its videos much more convincingly than what I’ve seen of the new game’s assets.

There are many other ARGs of all sizes and flavors running currently as well, so there’s a real good chance you can find one that both tweaks your interest and has a theme, execution, and subject matter that draws you in even further. You can find out about the latest ARG news and game launches at a site called ARGN so there’s no excuse not to get started discovering an alternate reality that suits you now.

Related Posts

• Transmedia Talk 40: Snow Town
• Dave Szulborski: World’s Most Prolific ARG Developer
• ARGNetcast, Episode 128: Thomas Dolby and a BIG Announcement

When I’m speaking to groups eager to know more about Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), I often begin by trying to explain how the name isn’t really a very good match to the experience offered by many ARGs. For one thing, they don’t look and feel like what most people think of as a game, and the good ones aren’t really about alternate realities at all. Instead, they try and make you feel as if you’ve just wandered into a new and exciting part of your own reality that you never knew existed, like you’ve rounded a corner and walked smack dab into the center of a mysterious and thrilling adventure.

Sure, many ARGs do incorporate fantastic themes or concepts into their story, such as advanced AIs from the future or mystical beings who can grant wishes and the like, so as to give the initial appearance that they may be set in some alternate world or reality. But the goal of the creators and the art in making a well-crafted ARG is getting the players to accept and believe that such things can indeed happen right here, in their own real world. That’s when the Alternate Reality Game becomes powerful and meaningful for the participants, and the experience transcends the realms of gaming and storytelling.

It’s exactly that feeling in the beginning of an ARG that engages and hooks me, when I find a wonderfully deep and well-made “bubble of reality” perfectly enmeshed with my own slice of the real world. That feeling doesn’t happen very often in the real world for me anymore, although I’m also certain it’s the same thrill I used to get when I’d discover like the ideas and fictional worlds of Michael Moorcock or when I saw the original Star Wars movie for the very first time. So when that very same feeling did happen recently in my real, everyday world, it was an amazing and almost surreal experience. I fell through a real life rabbit hole into the worlds of Stanislav Szukalski.

Szukalski, not to be confused with Szulborski, was a sculptor, painter, and philosopher, who was celebrated as Poland’s Greatest Living Artist at one time, before spending his final years penniless and unheralded in Southern California, drawing maps for an aerospace company just to survive.

Oddly enough, I had never heard of Szukalski despite our common Polish heritage and my taste for eclectic and often obscure artists, and was actually introduced to him by a fan of my work who asked me in Szukalski was a creation of mine, perhaps someone I created for use in one of my yet to be unveiled Alternate Reality Games. After all, they explained, there was such a similarity between the names and some of the crazy undertakings that it seemed logical (to them) that Szukalski might be part of some fictional backstory I had created for a future ARG character. As in any denial about a yet-to-be-done ARG, I’m not sure the player actually believed me totally, and I had to laugh as I went off to look into this “Szukalski guy” the person had brought up.

It was when I started this research that I had that “falling through the rabbit hole” experience, where I sat literally for hours searching out and reading thoroughly enything and everything I could find about Szukalski. I’m pretty certain that my mouth was hanging open in amazement for at least half of that whole time, too. I admit to wondering at least once if this was indeed part of some elaborate and beautifully constructed alternate reality game, even though I knew that I had no hand in it.

According to a website declaring itself the “official online source for all things Szukalski”, Stanislav Szukalski was born in 1893 in Warta, Poland, where at the age of six he carved a figure so realistically into a pencil that he was hailed as a local art prodigy. Szukalski immigrated to Chicago as a teenager and by the 1920′s two large monographs had been published about his work. Lured back to Poland in the 1930′s by their declaration of him as their Greatest Living Artist and the offer to dedicate an entire museum to him, Szukalski returned to Poland just as World War was engulfing the country. He fled the country during the German Siege of Warsaw in 1939, leaving behind his entire collection of life work, almost all of it either destroyed or stolen in the process. He didn’t know it yet but his legacy had also been pretty much destroyed along with his works.

The handful of sample images I posted above barely begin to introduce you to the breadth and scope of his work and although much of what he created has been lost, there are still some wonderful images to be found on the Internet to give a glimpse of the visionary and transcendent nature of his creations. Interestingly, while a majority of the physical items he created may have been destroyed, the things you’d suppose would be more ephemeral and fragile, the creations of his mind as embodied in his philosophical and scientific words and writings live on.

One concept in particular, a creation he called Zermatism, based on Szukalski’s theory that all human culture and language derived from a single origin on Easter Island after the biblical Deluge of Noah, still has advocates and followers, often garnering heated discussion to this day. Szukalski’s pseudoscience filled 39 volumes, and puts forth the argument that all languages derive from a single source, which he calls the Protong, and that all art is a variation on a few themes inherent in and embodied by a handful of universal symbols.

Unfortunately, some of the philosophy of Zermatism, such as his claims that the diversity in modern humanity was the result of “pure humans” interbreeding with a race of Yeti, quickly led many of his contemporaries to label him crazy, in no uncertain terms. Undeterred, Szukalski passionately defended his ideas no matter how wrong others thought they were. In fact, he often attributed the rejection of some his ideas to the fact that many people couldn’t understand his intense passion and commitment.

And so I’ve spent the last couple of weeks exploring the world of Stanislav Szukalski, feeling much more kinship to him than our common Polish heritage could create. There are many things in his ideas as expressed in Zermatism that I don’t agree with, and some of his pseudoscientific arguments don’t stand up to the discoveries and advancements man has made since his time, but there is an undeniable noble spirit and visionary mind expressed in much of his work, and a fascinating story about the whimsical natures of fame and fate for anyone just interested in a few hours diversion from reality.

Just like an ARG, I’ve poked and prodded the new world I’ve found, sending email to websites and “authorities” I’ve discovered, following up the slightest leads and new bits of information with hours of intense Internet searching, and grinned in sheer wonder and delight at the depth and drama of the world of Stanislav Szukalski. And, in the true spirit of ARG synchronicity, I couldn’t stop laughing when I learned that one of Szukalski’s own handwritten works / journals was entitled World Remade.

I work so hard some times to try and make the ARG experience real for players; it’s truly wonderful when the same feeling manifests serendipitously in my life.

Related Posts

• Transmedia Talk 40: Snow Town
• Dave Szulborski: World’s Most Prolific ARG Developer
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Interactivity in media is an under developed, over hyped concept, thanks in part to our over-zealousness in the 1990s regarding the web as a medium. The true potentials there have yet to be fully mined, and we are in desperate need of more multi-media pioneers to lead the way. With all of this in mind, I talked with Krishna Stott about his interactive film Crimeface, and about the trials, tribulations, and rewards that are involved with producing any kind of media- but especially something so involved.

How did you get into interactive media?

I came to interactive media as a film maker- making short films using very basic digital video technology for low budget post production purposes from 1995. As a way of making a living I would train people using the knowledge I had gained in banging my head against the screen with no manuals. I then got involved with a digital arts team in Manchester called IDEA. Through them I hooked up with programmers and became obsessed with the possibilities for narrative and film available through interactive authoring. A little later as broadband and firewire DV took off the general rise of video media as a means of communication became another fascinating side to it all.

I got into media in a similar way myself, which is pretty much trial and error. I’m sure you’re aware of the possibilities that were first encoded into DVD technology- multiple camera angles which could provide different narratives and so on. One thing that’s always stuck out to me is that just because a technology is there doesn’t necessarily mean that people will use it, or use it in an interesting way. So I love it when I find someone who does. Do you find that it’s difficult getting people involved? Specifically people who are raised on ‘passive media’?

I do and the only way around it is to make the interactive thing work without a user having to interact, so it has both sides (and really the story should be strong enough to facilitate both). The percentage of people who just watch Crimeface without looking at the extra stuff astounds me but then I remember that I have a vested interest hence I want to interact. Thankfully Crimeface does work in a linear way and you can just let it play through like a film. In general with any of this stuff I think less than 10% of people interact so you have to try and make whatever it is compelling anyway.

What do you see as future of interactive media?

Story telling is a basic human need- to tell and listen. It finds its level on any new means of communication. I can’t predict the future for this kind of work and I don’t think that Crimeface is right- it

Last time I loosely defined ARGs as a form an interactive story, and further broke them down into their core components

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In early June last year four people, brought together by nothing more than the Internet and their desire to help two strangers in dire straits solve a complex mystery, boarded a small boat in the Chicago harbor at midnight. Also on board the boat was a man they had good reason to believe might be involved in a multi-million dollar criminal enterprise, and who they also suspected had been directly responsible for the death of at least one man. The final passenger that night was one of the two strangers they had come to help, a woman named Nisha who they were blindly trusting to protect them if anything went wrong. With no training and little preparation, they stepped aboard the rocking boat, scared but anxious to see what the next hour might bring.

What would make someone do that? They were all playing a game. An Alternate Reality Game, or ARG, more specifically. Not all ARGs go to the lengths which that particular game, an Audi sponsored campaign called the Art of the Heist, did to engage and entertain their audience. But regardless of their scope or complexity, the “Chicago Mission” (as it came to be known by the players) is a perfect example of what ARGs do best, in a way no other media or storytelling genre can – they make the story and fictional world a part of the player’s real life, by artfully blending and blurring the boundaries of reality and fiction. Although they are primarily delivered through the Internet, a well done ARG often transcends even that boundary and becomes a pervasive part of the engaged player’s life, even when they don’t include elaborate real world live events like the Art of the Heist.

This is the experience of “falling through the rabbit hole” that an ARG tries to create. It really isn’t so much about discovering an alternate reality (despite what the name implies) as it is about seeing the same world, the real world, from a new perspective, with intriguing new areas or fantastical elements you never knew existed. Or turning a corner and walking into the middle of someone else’s mystery and adventure story, which you come to play an important part in.

I’ve been an avid consumer of games and stories of all types and in all forms throughout my life, and its my deeply held conviction that no other game or interactive entertainment medium has the power to emotionally affect players or change the way they actually think and act like an Alternate reality Game can. I’ve born witness to it personally many times.

So what are ARGs, and what makes them so unique and potentially immersive and powerful?

At its core, an ARG is simply a story, a sequence of plot events involving characters that, when put together sequentially, tell an entertaining tale. The “when put together sequentially” part is important because ARGs are also, by their very nature, presented in segmented pieces distributed across various websites, communication methods (email, IMs, etc.), and even through various forms of media, both on or outside of the Internet (letters, newspaper ads, magazine stories, and so on). So an ARG is often very much like a mystery or large puzzle that tells a story once it is correctly assembled.

Saying an ARG is just a story though is a huge understatement, since there are many aspects that make them far different than the usual conception of “story” you might have based on your experience with printed media. First, ARGs are interactive. Yeah, I know that word hardly has any meaning any more; it’s been applied to so many different activities in the last few years. But in the case of Alternate Reality Games, interactive truly does fit because the player interacts with not only the media he’s reading the story through – by clicking on web pages, sending IMs or emails, etc. – but he also interacts with the people and the world in which the story is set. Again, that’s still a bit of an understatement or loose definition, because it’s the nature of the interaction within an ARG that truly sets it apart from other forms of games or storytelling.

To help understand the difference, think about any other form of game or play that you might enjoy doing, and how you actually interact within the context of that experience. How do you interact with the game itself? In traditional games, there are always items, whether real or digital, that you use to actually play the game – dice, board game pieces, icons on the computer screen, even a football. They are all items that, while necessary and natural within the confines of the game, are all extraneous to your everyday life. The very use of them reminds you on many levels that you are playing a game, reinforcing the artificiality of the experience and acting as a boundary of sorts between the world of the game and the real world.

An Alternate Reality Game, broken down to its basic parts, is made up of items and activities that aren’t artificial or contrived; they are all already things you do or interact with in your daily life. In the course on an ARG you find and read webpages, you send emails, you make phone calls, and so on, things all of us do in the course of everyday living. So doing them as part of an ARG feels completely natural and real, meaning they don’t remind you as you do them that you are playing a game. You interact with an ARG, its characters, world and storyline, in the exact same manner that you interact with the real world, therein lies their power and potential.

Excuse me while I throw out the obligatory disclaimer here. I’m not talking about ARG players not being able to distinguish the fictional nature of the game and its content from their real life, in some “gaming addiction” or urban mythos Dungeons and Dragons kind of way. None of the players on the boat in the Chicago harbor brought a weapon because they actually thought their lives were in danger in any way, no matter how real or exciting the mission was to them. But it’s not just about the willing suspension of disbelief, either. There’s something about the subtle integration of the fictional game experience into the substance and routine of the player’s life that allows them to become emotionally invested in the story, the characters, and the overall work unusual to gaming and / or entertainment experiences.

And while I’m trying to clear up possible confusion and misconceptions before going on, let me address another common ill-conceived reaction I sometimes get when explaining ARGs to people for the first time. “Wow, that sounds way too complex for me.” Well, yes and no, depending on what exactly you mean by complex. ARG stories can certainly be complex sometimes, as some of the ones I’ve written and produced certainly illustrate, but story complexity doesn’t necessarily mean hard-to-follow or enjoy. Look at the television show LOST, for example. It certainly has a complex storyline (although one could argue it’s due to lack of clarity and cohesiveness rather than intentioned and skillful writing) but has also been enormously successful, meaning that people enjoy watching it. And that’s the key – they simply watch it. The way they interact with the experience isn’t complex at all but very, very simple. That’s the other aspect of complexity – complexity in interaction.

Side note: This is further evidenced by an ARG-like campaign the show creators came up with for LOST called the Lost Experience. Although many of the show’s fans tried to play it, in the end the number of players that went through the entire experience was a small fraction of the overall show audience. Why? In this case, although the creators tried to make an ARG – they’ve even called it such many times – they instead created something required people to pour over advertiser’s websites looking for clues that eventually led nowhere, or to go out and look for certain candy bars with items hidden inside at live events, where sometimes they (the candy bars) never even showed up anyway. The things and activities that made up the game weren’t realistic or natural, and what the player was asked to do to get through it all was too complex.

So the complexity of an ARG story doesn’t really matter at all. If players are experiencing or being asked to do are non-contrived and realistic in nature – in other words, if the ways in which they are interacting with the game are simple and part of their everyday life – the story can be as deep and involved as the creators like. Of course, this presumes that the game creators have the skill to make a believable, multi-layered, and consistent fictional story environment. If it wasn’t for the way in which the Art of the Heist writers told the story before the Chicago Mission, the volunteer retrievers would have never shown up or enjoyed the experience the way they did.

Next: Part 3 – Living the Game

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Since I’ve already contributed a couple of very different articles, it’s probably about time I introduced myself and explained my reason for writing here on Alterati. As you can gather from the heard above, my name is Dave Szulborski, and my main goal in writing here is to discuss Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and other forms of emerging game-based new media, and along the way I’ll be sharing my experience and insight gained from working professionally in the genre for several years now.

By way of a very brief introduction, I have created or worked on ten ARGs in the past 6 years, beginning back in 2001 when I was a beta tester on Electronic Arts’ Majestic, one of the first commercial ARG efforts.

The games I’ve created or worked on include:

ChangeAgents – Rogue Chip (2001), Operation Mindset (2001), Out of Control (2002)

Chasing the Wish (2003)

Urban Hunt (2004)

ARGTalk (2005)

Audi’s Art of the Heist (2005)

General Motor’s Who is Benjamin Stove? (2006)

Catching the Wish (2006)

Magnolia Pictures – Monster Hunter Club (2007) for their film The Host

Additionally, I have been involved as a consultant / interactive content and / or puzzle creator on several other major marketing campaigns recently, including online games for:

• a Hewlett Packard promotion called Hedgegames for Dreamworks’ 2006 film Over the Hedge

• the Travelocity “Missing Gnome” campaign (2006)

• a M&M’S promotion for the 2007 Shrek the Third film from Dreamworks entitled Fairy Tale Ransom

• the Chevrolet Rise of the Autobots campaign for the Dreamworks / Paramount film Transformers

Finally, I am also the author of This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (2005, New Fiction Publishing), the first book about this new genre of entertainment, marketing, and storytelling and the only book examining the history, creation, and real-world application of ARGs written by an actual game creator. As you can see, I have a bit of experience in both creating and analyzing Alternate Reality Games, both on an independent level and as part of multi-million dollar marketing campaigns for some of the biggest and most progressive clients in the world.

In the next few weeks I’ll be giving you an introduction to Alternate Reality Games, what they are, how they are made, and why myself and so many other new media artists and theorists are so excited about their potential. I’ll also be giving you a few exclusive glimpses behind the curtain of ARGs, into the world of the Puppetmaster, sharing with you some personal examples how ARG players often find these games transformational, inspirational, and life changing.

Next week: Part 2 – Into the Rabbit Hole.

In the meantime, please check out the many Beginner’s Resources about ARGs on my website, including a mini ARG with a complete walkthrough guide and a PDF version of the first two chapters of my second book, Through the Rabbit Hole, a beginner’s guide for ARG players.

Related Posts

• Transmedia Talk 40: Snow Town
• Dave Szulborski: World’s Most Prolific ARG Developer
• ARGNetcast, Episode 128: Thomas Dolby and a BIG Announcement