Alternate reality games

Blind Hemingway

Ancient Iwaku Scum from 2006.
Original poster
MYTHICAL MEMBER
Posting Speed
  1. Slow As Molasses
Online Availability
NEVER
Writing Levels
  1. Adept
  2. Douche
Preferred Character Gender
  1. Primarily Prefer Female
Genres
Surrealism, Surreal Horror (Think Tim Burton), Steampunk, Sci-Fi Fantasy, Spaghetti Westerns, Mercenaries, Dieselpunk, Cyberpunk, Historical fantasies


So after coming across this weird video, I was wondering what the hell is this stuff?

From finding information about this clip, apparently people use their detective skills to find clues hidden throughout various websites and in most cases will find emails or telephone numbers to call to find more clues. People work together to find things out through forums and also through social media like Twitter and Facebook. Whatever This is My Milwaukee was about remains unknown since there has been no new clues since 2009.

Apparently it is called an alternate reality game.

Quoting Wiki: "An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium."

It seems to me like they are mass scale free form RPs, sort of like how we do things on this forum, but applied for the real world.
 
There was a good example of one of these back around 2004.

It was called I Love Bees.

It was an ARG/Viral Marketing hybrid to promote the release of Halo 2. I was not into the series at the time and therefore didn't know of its existence for a long time, but its one of the more prominent examples of an ARG in recent memory.
 
That sounds awesome. I'd love to get involved with one.
 
Valve software did one involving portal 2 .. Lots of clues hidden in websites and YouTube videos.