Lately I’ve been reading a lot about alternate reality games (ARGs) and I haven’t liked what I’ve seen. I’m researching a book about why “immersion” is so hot right now, so I’m interested in how different media have immersed viewers across history, like classical Roman frescos, 19th century painted panoramas, narrative writing, cinema, installation art, immersive theatre, video games, and LARPs.
I was surprised and pleased to see so many scholars namecheck ARGs. After their starry debut with The Beast in 2001, a promotion for Spielberg’s movie A.I., ARGs became a promising way to capture young people’s attention, fractured as it was across the internet and multiple media. I was a moderator on the main player community for The Beast and wrote a 100,000 word walkthrough for the game. Later, I led the design of the Perplex City ARG from 2005-2007 and made lots of ARGs for TV shows, books, games, and bands, all of which is to say: I know a lot about ARGs.
Books about immersion cite ARGs as a brand new kind of immersive media, so powerful that its players can’t distinguish between game and reality, or at least pretend not to. The problem is that these books frequently get basic matters of fact wrong. I’ll include three examples, starting with this passage in Marie-Laure Ryan’s otherwise excellent Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 (2015):
ARGs, like all games, are inherently interactive, but their interactivity does not concern the story itself, as the participants do not play a role in the storyworld and the plot is entirely scripted by the puppet masters (the producing team). Players may, however, influence the plot indirectly—for instance, when they solve the riddles too fast and force the puppet masters to add some episodes to lengthen the game or, conversely, when the riddles are too hard, and the puppet masters have to introduce more clues … The passion that some players bring to participating in ARGs demonstrates their immersivity, but while the games revolve around a story, this immersion is not properly narrative but ludic and social. The appeal of ARGs does not reside in the story being discovered but in the activity of solving the mystery by collaborating with other players.
This is flatly incorrect. Yes, most ARGs’ plots are scripted to some degree, but players absolutely do play a role in the storyworld and have done since the very first ARG. Their actions – emailing and phoning characters, engaging in role-play, creating in-world online resources – affect and change the plot. In fact, ARGs’ live nature permits and requires uniquely improvisational performances that mean players can have more influence on the plot than many traditional video games.
It’s also bizarre to assert ARGs’ appeal doesn’t reside in the story when so many ARGs are practically only story, like Neurocracy and Field Studies Institute. I struggle to understand how the author got ARGs so wrong; perhaps she thinks they’re more like hypertext novels?
Next, we have Lindsay Brandon Hunter’s Playing Real (2021). Hunter says that the following series of assumptions from The Beast’s makers “have since become canonical standards for ARG play:”
1. The narrative would be broken into fragments, which the players would be required to reassemble. That is, the players, like the advanced robots at the end of the movie, would be doing something essentially archaeological, combing through the welter of life in the 22nd century, to piece a story together out of fragments.
2. The game would—of necessity—be fundamentally cooperative and collective, because of the nature of the internet. [Co-creator Jordan Weisman’s] belief, which we all shared, was that if we put a clue in a Turkish newspaper at dawn, it would be under discussion in a high school kids basement in Iowa by dinner time.
3. The game would be cooler if nobody knew who was doing it, or why. Therefore, secrecy was very tight. Almost nobody at Microsoft would know what the hell we were doing. Jordan had brought in old pal Pete Fenlon to subcontract writers, artists, and web designers, for the sake of speed and staying under MS’s own internal radar.
4. The game would be cooler if it came at you, through as many different conduits as possible. Websites. E-mails. Phone calls. Newspaper clippings. Faxes. SMS messaging. TV spots. Smoke signals. Whalesong.
It’s true that many ARGs adopted at least some of these standards, especially those coming immediately after The Beast. However, each was also almost immediately challenged by fans and creators.
The fragmentary narrative is the one that’s survived longest, coming as it does from traditions of experimental literature, but even that’s not canonical. PBHere, an ARG on TikTok, was wholly linear and very easy to follow, as are other virtual escape room-esque ARGs. Alice & Smith’s ARGs such as The Black Watchmen are also quite easy to follow. Their video game-like ARGs, while retaining some multiplayer elements, required much less collective work than The Beast, a game that was practically incomprehensible unless you joined the Cloudmakers’ mailing list or read player resources. Other recent ARGs have followed this trend.
As a matter of commercial reality, very few ARG makers have cloaked themselves in secrecy the way Microsoft did. Whereas movie producer Kathleen Kennedy supposedly approved Jordan Weisman’s pitch by telling Warner Bros.’ head of marketing, “I’m sending Jordan over. I want you to write him a very big check. And don’t ask what it’s for,” (The Art of Immersion), most ARGs are expected to have a direct and tangible return on investment. They have to make it crystal clear when their game is launching and how to play it, which requires them to admit that they are, in fact, games. I suspect there’s a close correlation between the secrecy of ARGs and the expectation of monetary return, which explains the mystery surrounding the launch of The Jejune Institute and The Latitude Society, both of which were art projects, at least to start with.
Finally, we have the transmedia nature of ARGs. This went away partly due to the technical and logistical challenges of multiplatform storytelling, but mostly because it’s hard for all but the most dedicated players to keep up with a game that’s split across so many places. Many of the ARGs I’ve already mentioned are on just one or two platforms.
My third example is from Sarah Atkinson’s Beyond the Screen (2014), which argues that to date, ARGs were traditionally “a facilitating vehicle for advertising.” I am somewhat sympathetic to this argument since the biggest and most well-known ARGs have been promotions for TV shows (Lost), video games (Halo 2), and movies (The Dark Knight).
That said, a more complete examination of ARGs would reveal the rich history of art projects and “indie” ARGs like LockJaw and Metacortechs that didn’t promote anything, and Perplex City, which was wholly independent and made money by selling packs of “puzzle cards” with clues to the bigger story. While Atkinson mentions the Perplex City wiki in her book, she suggests the Cloud Chamber ARG – launching almost a decade later – was unique in directly monetising itself, becoming the “main attraction” rather than a promotion for something else. What are we, chopped liver?
Books get things wrong: news at ten. But why are scholars so fascinated by a medium that, even at its height, was never very popular, while also misunderstanding it?
Here’s my theory. A lot of writing about ARGs cites two papers by Jane McGonigal, both from 2003: ‘This is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play and A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play.
‘This is Not a Game’ argues The Beast’s participatory, transmedia, reality-blurring nature created an unusually powerful immersive experience. This is illustrated by quotes and examples of players (including me) enjoying being immersed in the fiction, not wanting to be spoiled, sad that it’s over, etc.
The paper was quickly followed up by A Real Little Game, which correctly rebuts fears that ARG players are dangerously credulous, saying players only pretend to believe the game is real (i.e. suspension of disbelief). Both papers argue that ARGs players’ collective problem solving behaviour is “a great opportunity in the near future for ambitious and successful social and political action.” Despite many attempts by McGonigal and others over the past two decades, this utopian vision has not been borne out – in fact, the opposite has happened, as I argue in my book, You’ve Been Played.
What remains influential from these papers, however, is the description of shockingly immersed ARG players. But is it surprising that the first-ever ARG had this powerful, unsettling effect on players? What would be surprising is if the effect persisted on the tenth game or the hundredth ARG – but because scholars continually cite these two papers from 2003, which necessarily cover initial reactions, and because they rarely bother to cover player reactions to later ARGs, we never find out. In these books, ARG players are forever frozen in astonished immersion, exotic objects of curiosity.
Even if one were to confine analysis of ARGs to The Beast, a cursory examination of the community mailing list would demonstrate just how unimmersed players were. We spent a lot of time speculating about the meaning of clues and where the story might go, but with the dual consciousness of people who knew they were playing a game. Depth of involvement doesn’t equal depth of immersion, unless you think fans theorising about the next Avengers movie on Reddit are highly immersed.
What’s bizarre about this entire discourse is how it ignores Oliver Grau’s well-known Virtual Art, where Grau notes that immersion waxes and wanes as new media are invented and become commonplace. In 1895, audiences shrieked and screamed at a film of a train arriving at a station in La Ciotat, thinking (or pretending) it was real; less than a decade later, it was old hat. Why would anyone think it would be different with ARGs?
After The Beast, ARGs shed many of the tricks required to sustain the pretence of “this is not a game”. Designers and players pushed back at the supposedly canonical conventions as the initial thrill of immersion wore off and the sobering reality of having to compete for new players (let alone paying players) descended. How do you get someone to pay for your ARG if you don’t admit it’s a game? Do your terms and conditions pretend your company was incorporated in 2142?
ARGs were born from a flush of no-strings-attached money and they’ve had to battle the bad habits it caused ever since. I Love Bees, the ARG promoting Halo 2, got $1 million by “an accounting sleight of hand.” Chris Di Cesare, a Microsoft Games Studios exec, recalled, “No one invests a million dollars in an unproven medium for a marketing effort you won’t admit exists. Especially when its success is measured in PR.” (The Art of Immersion).
Halo 2 went on to make $125 million on its first day. The Dark Knight was also promoted by a high-profile ARG and did similarly well at the box office. It’s hard enough to measure the effectiveness of traditional advertising and marketing, yet everyone – including scholars – saw causation where there was only correlation. The wholly unfounded conclusion that ARGs “work” to generate positive return on investment can only be explained by a supremely powerful suspension of disbelief amongst ARG makers and scholars, both having an interest in making their field look as successful as possible. Fantastically high self-reported audience numbers were routinely as fact, so the party went on.
Until it didn’t. Games publishers and movie studios stopped handing over million dollar checks to ARG makers a long time ago. Why? Writers usually throw their hands up at this point, saying “Poochie ARGs died on the way back to their home planet”, exhibiting zero curiosity about why such an amazingly immersive and powerful medium isn’t more popular, or how that fact might contradict their larger points on ARGs and immersion.
Scholars have failed ARGs. Too much analysis has relied on the same few papers and the same few ARGs, generating the same few conclusions. Their treatment of the medium is as superficial as film historians basing their opinions solely upon the screams of first-time La Ciotat viewers. It’s an important moment, but only the start of the story.
ARGs’ extended, real-time nature makes them hard to write about. You can’t replay them like video games and movies, and they don’t have long runs like popular installation art and theatrical productions. In many ways, they’re similar to LARPs in how much they can demand of players. But that’s not an excuse for scholars to rely on second and third-hand reporting; we would expect someone writing about immersive theatre to have attended at least one production, or a theme park academic to have visited a single Disney park. At the very least, ARG scholars should put far more emphasis on reports from players.
A major focus of my research on immersive experiences is on Nordic LARPs. It’s an unusual tradition, and as such, vulnerable to misunderstanding and projection, which is why I’ll be trying my best to play a range of LARPs before writing about them. Nordic LARP players and designers also love writing about their tradition, which I’ll also be leaning upon.
This essay is my own small and long-overdue contribution to ARGs, a field I love. It deserves better than the treatment I’ve described here. Today, Michael Andersen’s ARGN has the smartest coverage of ARGs, and I hope others join him in chipping away at the mistaken orthodoxy of ARG scholarship.
Why aren’t ARGs more popular? Why did they stop being multiplatform and transmedia? Is “This is Not a Game” really as dead as I think it is? How have ARGs influenced other game genres and media?
The reality of ARGs has far more interesting questions to answer than the fantasy of scholars’ imagination.
mssv 