History Of Alternate Reality Games
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History Of Alternate Reality Games
Alternate reality games are a modern genre of gaming often consisting of an interactive, networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. Most of these games are either independently run or used as a viral marketing campaign by a company or brand. Before 2001: Influences and precursors Due to factors like "the curtain", attempts to begin games with "stealth launches" that fulfill the TINAG (This Is Not a Game) aesthetic, and the restrictive non-disclosure agreements governing how much information may be revealed by the puppet masters of promotional games, the design process for many ARGs is often shrouded in secrecy, making it difficult to discern the extent to which they have been influenced by other works. In addition, the cross-media nature of the form allows ARGs to incorporate elements of so many other art forms and works that attempting to i ...
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Alternate Reality Game
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players' responses. It is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by an AI as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones and mail, but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium. ARGs tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g., collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City) or through promotional relatio ...
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Sfgate
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco. The paper benefited from the growth of San Francisco and had the largest newspaper circulation on the West Coast of the United States by 1880. Like other newspapers, it experienced a rapid fall in circulation in the early 21st century and was ranked 18th nationally by circulation in the first quarter of 2021. In 1994, the newspaper launched the SFGATE website, with a soft launch in March and official launch November 3, 1994, including both content from the newspaper and other sources. "The Gate" as it was known at launch was the first large market newspaper website in t ...
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Elan Lee
Elan Lee is an American game designer, developer, and creator. He has designed games for the Xbox; helped create the world’s first Alternate Reality Games; and with Matthew Inman created the card game ''Exploding Kittens'', whose Kickstarter campaign was the most-backed of its day. He and Inman founded the Exploding Kittens company in 2015. Biography Lee began his career as a character designer at Industrial Light and Magic, where he worked on several movies, including the computer special effects for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Lee was then hired by Microsoft Game Studios as Lead Game Designer, designing and directing games for PC and Xbox. While working for Microsoft, he was the Executive Producer and Lead Designer for '' The Beast'', one of the world’s first Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) used to promoted the Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Lee has co-founded several gaming start-ups. In 2003, he co-founded 42 Entertainment, whose alter ...
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Jordan Weisman
Jordan Weisman is an American game designer, author, and serial entrepreneur who has founded five game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry. Biography Weisman graduated from Francis W. Parker High School, in Chicago, Illinois. He went to the Merchant Marine Academy and briefly attended University of Illinois at Chicago, before leaving school to pursue his business interests. In 1980, Weisman founded role playing game publisher FASA Corporation (short for the Freedonia Aeronautics & Space Administration, named after the fictional country in the Marx Brothers film '' Duck Soup'') with partner L. Ross Babcock. Weisman and Babcock printed up a few hundred copies of Weisman's early adventures for the pen and paper role-playing game, '' Traveller'', and sold them to a local Chicago store before sending them to nationwide distributors. Although working out of Weisman's basement, he and Babcock were looking for outside talent and brought Willia ...
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Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washington, United States. Its best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2019. It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to do ...
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Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The '' Oxford English Dictionary'' of Oxford University Press defines artificial intelligence as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as che ...
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Majestic (video Game)
''Majestic'' was one of the first alternate reality games (ARGs), a type of game that blurs the line between in-game and out-of-game experiences. ''Majestic'' was created by Neil Young.The Game Archaeologist: EA's Majestic
, www.engadget.com
It debuted on July 31, 2001. While noted for its unusual concept, it did not fare well commercially.


Gameplay

''Majestic'' was a thriller based on a shadow gove ...
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The Art Of The Heist
The Art of the Heist (aka Stolen A3 or Art of the H3ist) was an advertising campaign and an alternate reality game created to promote the Audi A3. The promotion In order to promote the new A3 model in 2005, Audi, instead of featuring the car at a show as scheduled, in the car's place they put an announcement that it had been stolen and a request that the public report clues to their website. The car had not been stolen, but they wanted the public to participate in an elaborate nationwide game where clues were planted in public places to hint at where the "thieves" had taken the car. On their website, they posted evidence and the public was encouraged to view the website as actors followed the car over a period of time. The entire program was praised as an innovative advertising campaign. As a game, it falls under the classification of Alternate Reality Game, or ARG. The game involved, loosely, three layers of interaction: character development and back story, file and password cr ...
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The Blair Witch Project
''The Blair Witch Project'' is a 1999 American supernatural horror film written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (director), Eduardo Sánchez. It is a fictional story of three student filmmakers—Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard—who hike into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland, in 1994 to film a documentary about a local myth known as the Blair Witch. The three disappear, but their equipment and footage are discovered a year later. The purportedly "found footage" is the movie the viewer sees. Myrick and Sánchez conceived of a fictional legend of the Blair Witch in 1993. They developed a 35-page screenplay with the dialogue to be improvisation, improvised. A casting (performing arts), casting call advertisement in ''Backstage (magazine), Backstage'' magazine was prepared by the directors; Donahue, Williams and Leonard were cast. The film entered production in October 1997, with the principal photography taking place ...
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Michael Bywater
Michael Bywater (born 11 May 1953) is an English non-fiction writer and broadcaster. He has worked for many London newspapers and periodicals and contributed to the design of computer games. Biography Bywater was educated at the independent Nottingham High School and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was a long-running columnist for ''The Independent on Sunday'' and an early futurist for ''The Observer''. He spent ten years on the staff of ''Punch'', where he wrote a regular computer column and the anonymous "Bargepole" column. He wrote regularly for ''The Times'' and had been a contributing editor to ''Cosmopolitan'' and ''Woman's Journal''. He also writes regularly on high-tech subjects for ''The Daily Telegraph'' and a wide variety of technology magazines. He is termed a cultural critic for the ''New Statesman''. In 1998 he was part of BBC Radio 4's five-part political satire programme ''Cartoons, Lampoons, and Buffoons''. He also supervises on the ''Tragedy'' paper for a ...
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Monty Python
Monty Python (also collectively known as the Pythons) were a British comedy troupe who created the sketch comedy television show '' Monty Python's Flying Circus'', which first aired on the BBC in 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the television series into something larger in scope and influence, including touring stage shows, films, albums, books and musicals. The Pythons' influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles' influence on music. Regarded as an enduring icon of 1970s pop culture, their sketch show has been referred to as being "an important moment in the evolution of television comedy". Broadcast by the BBC between 1969 and 1974, ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' was conceived, written and performed by its members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Loosely structured as a sketch show, but with an innovative stream-of-consciousness approach aided by Gil ...
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The Digital Village
The h2g2 website is a British-based collaborative online encyclopedia project. It describes itself as "an unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything", in the spirit of the fictional publication ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' from the science fiction comedy series of the same name by Douglas Adams. It was founded by Adams in 1999 and was run by the BBC between 2001 and 2011. The intent is to create an Earth-focused guide that allows members to share information about their geographic area and the local sites, activities and businesses, to help people decide where they want to go and what they may find when they get there. It has grown to contain subjects from restaurants and recipes, to quantum theory and history. Explicit advertising of businesses was forbidden when the site was run by the BBC, but customer reviews were permitted. – ''No Spitting. The lawyers wanted to know what rules we needed, and we said 'The usual ones, plus "No spitting" pl ...
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