[arg_discuss] What *is* an ARG?

[adam]

I'd been talking to some people about ARG's, and when someone asked for 
an example game, someone else suggested Second Life probably was.

This was also a conversation that came up at the london social event: 
What is an ARG? What is not an ARG?

It's also a question that we could do with answering more helpfully on 
the igda.org/arg site, rather than the very brief description there 
already. Incidentally, that description was intentionally vague and 
brief to try and avoid treading on anyone's toes :).

Anyway, to kick it off, here's the answer I gave:

"Second life is a highly immersive Virtual World, but not an Alternate 
Reality.

A key differentiation is that the former is very much a 
computer-generated simulation of a non-existent, fictional world (with 
generally relaxed laws of physics etc), and the latter is very much a 
real-life experience with no simulation, which just happens to come 
together as a complete game, indistinguishable (within legal and ethical 
bounds) from your own everday life."

One of the Holy Grails of games-developers is "more immersion!", and 
this they try to achieve by taking a fake, electronic approximation, and 
endlessly trying to improve it and make it more faithful, a better 
simulation, a more believable reproduction of reality. We have 3D 
graphics cards that render beautiful, lush, photo-realistic environments 
in real-time (I recommend everyone who hasn't yet to have a look at Far 
Cry's tropical island, and try crawling through the undergrowth). We now 
even have physics-engines-in-hardware, on a plugin card. All purely for 
gaming, purely for increasing the fidelity of the simulation.

But that's a losing race: soon it will move to almost weightless 3D 
goggles, then haptics, and all-over body-suits to provide more, better, 
more physical feedback and harder-to-ignore immersion. And then it will 
have to deal with smell, gravity/orientation, etc.

And, in the meantime, the question becomes more and more pertinent each 
year: are games designers losing site of the game, in their endless 
pursuit of "immersion" and "fidelity"?

Alternate Reality Games come at things from an orthogonal perspective: 
they subsume the real world as the "platform" for delivering the content 
- the game, the challenges, the narrative, the story within which the 
player explores and has fun. There is no barrier between simulation and 
reality: you have absolute fidelity "for free". It's relatively 
effortless to provide enough content at a high enough quality to immerse 
your players - as anyone who's tried to build a 3D simulation of just a 
small part of a world can testify (art, sounds, 3D models, physics, 
rendering, control system ... the list of work needed goes on and on).

...but I know Andrea disagrees ;), so I'll stop there and let her take over.

Adam