The Nine Circles: Adventures across conflicting realities

The Forbidden Code , followed on to promote the release of the Proteus expansion of the game. It included most of the aforementioned design principles. The game included working voice mail phone numbers for characters, clues in the source code, character email addresses, off-site websites, real locations in San Francisco, real people including then-Mayor Willie Brown , and of course a fictional mystery.

In , a year prior to the release of the Douglas Adams ' computer game Starship Titanic , The Digital Village launched a web site purporting to be that of an intergalactic travel agency called Starlight Travel, which in the game is the Starship Titanic's parent company. The marketing for the movie The Blair Witch Project resembled ARGs in many ways and some of its makers went on to create the Audi promotional ARG The Art of the Heist , expanding the world of the movie online, adding backstory, and treating the fiction as reality through real-world media such as fliers and a fake documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel.

However, perhaps in part due to the subject material and the absence of overt metacommunications that this was fiction, it also resembles an internet hoax or attempt to create an urban legend. Electronic Arts' Majestic began development in , although it didn't launch until after the Beast had concluded, in Featuring phone calls, emails and other media that involved players in a multiplatform narrative, the game was eventually cancelled due to lack of players. This was due to many factors, ranging from the monthly subscription fee as part of Electronic Arts' EA Online venture to Majestic' s unfortunate timing and subject matter in relation to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

In , in order to market the movie A. Artificial Intelligence directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Stanley Kubrick 's unfinished project, and also a planned series of Microsoft computer games based on the film, Microsoft's Creative Director Jordan Weisman and another Microsoft game designer, Elan Lee , conceived of an elaborate murder mystery played out across hundreds of websites, email messages, faxes, fake ads, and voicemail messages.

The game, dubbed "the Citizen Kane of online entertainment" by Internet Life , [19] was a runaway success [20] that involved over three million active participants [21] from all over the world during its run and would become the seminal example of the nascent ARG genre.

Definitions Of Fiction Categories And Genres - Writers Digest UniversityWriters Digest University

An early asset list for the project contained files, prompting the game's puppetmasters to dub it " the Beast ", a name which was later adopted by players. Although the Beast ran for only three months, it prompted the formation of a highly organized and intensely engaged community that remains active [25] years after the game concluded. Perhaps more significantly, it inspired a number of its participants to create games adapting and expanding the model, extending it from an anomalous one-time occurrence to a new genre of entertainment and allowing the community to grow even after the Beast itself concluded.

Members of the Cloudmakers group went on to form ARGN, the primary news source for the genre, and Unfiction, its central community hub, as well as designing the first successful and widely played indie ARGs, such as LockJaw and Metacortechs, and corporate efforts such as Perplex City. The years immediately after the Beast saw independent developers who had played it extend the form from a one-time occurrence to a new genre of gaming, and the formation of an ever-growing community devoted to playing, designing and discussing ARGs.

Influenced heavily by the Beast and enthusiastic about the power of collaboration, several Cloudmakers came together with the idea that they could create a similar game.

A Boom Deferred

The first effort to make an independent Beast-like game, Ravenwatchers , failed, [26] but another team soon assembled and met with greater success. With very little experience behind them, the group managed, after nine months of development, to create a viable game that was soon seized upon eagerly by the Cloudmakers group and featured in WIRED Magazine. While the numbers never rivaled those of The Beast, the game proved both that it was possible for developers to create these games without corporate funding or promotion, and that there was interest in the ARG form beyond a one-time audience for a production on the Beast's scale.

Lockjaw marked the start of the ARG as a genre of gaming, rather than simply a one-time occurrence. Shortly before Lockjaw's conclusion, players discovered a game that seemed to revolve around the movie Minority Report. Despite speculation to the contrary, the game known as Exocog was not an official promotion for the film, but an experiment in interactive storytelling by Jim Miller. During this time, Szulborski also created a successful grassroots game not based on the Majestic universe, called Chasing the Wish.

Just before the release of the third and the final Matrix movie, the team that developed Lockjaw launched Metacortechs, an ARG based on that universe. The fan fiction effort was very successful, reached a larger and more active player base than many professionally produced games, and was at first assumed by many to be an officially sanctioned promotion for the movie.

Metacortechs was followed by an ever-increasing number of grassroots ARGs. In the wake of these successful, low-budget independent ARGs, an active "grassroots" development community began to evolve within the genre. While the quality of the grassroots games varies wildly, amateur storytellers, web designers, and puzzle creators continue to provide independently developed ARGs for the active player community.

The term "alternate reality gaming" was first used by Sean Stacey, one of the moderators of the Lockjaw player community, in the Trail for that game. Stacey and Steve Peters , another of the moderators, created the two websites that have become the central hub of the ARG community: Due to their efforts, when Lockjaw ended, the players had a new community resource allowing them to assemble to play the games that were soon to follow.

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UnFiction had over 32, members before its closing due to server costs. ARGN employs a staff of 15 volunteer writers to report on new games and other topics of interest to the community, as well as producing a weekly netcast. Although not considered as a pure alternate reality game, Missing Since January " In Memoriam " in Europe is a video game based on the same principles that appear in an ARG: In Missing Since January , using the internet, the player must attempt to decode a mysterious CD ROM broadcast by the police in order to find two missing people abducted by a serial killer.

More than a hundred sites were created for this purpose. By and large, as the player advances in the enquiry, they are contacted by different characters that send emails. The follow-up, which appeared in under the title Evidence: The Last Ritual " In Memoriam 2, The Last Ritual " in Europe also allowed players to receive text messages and to speak on the phone with certain characters in the game.

Because of their similarities, video games and ARGs continued to be associated through many projects, In , Funcom , a game development studio from Oslo , Norway, hid a gate on its corporate website, which led to an ARG which would be part of the pre-launch campaign for The Secret World , a game released in The gate was discovered only in , therefore requiring the puppetmaster to adapt the scenario to its actual setting.

The ARGs focussed on several different storylines, such as: After the success of the first major entries in the nascent ARG genre, a number of large corporations looked to ARGs to both promote their products, and to enhance their companies' images by demonstrating their interest in innovative and fan-friendly marketing methods. To create buzz for the launch of the Xbox game Halo 2 , [30] Microsoft hired the team that had created the Beast, now operating independently as 42 Entertainment.

The result, I Love Bees , departed radically from the website-hunting and puzzle-solving that had been the focus of the Beast. I Love Bees wove together an interactive narrative set in , and a War of the Worlds -style radio drama set in the future, the latter of which was broken into 30—60 second segments and broadcast over ringing payphones worldwide. In , a pair of articles profiling 42 Entertainment appeared in Game Developer magazine and the East Bay Express , both of which tied into an ARG [40] created by the journalist and his editors.

Designed to help modern audiences connect with the Western genre, Last Call Poker centered on a working poker site, held games of "Tombstone Hold 'Em" in cemeteries around the United States—as well as in at least one digital venue, World of Warcraft ' s own virtual reality cemetery [42] — and sent players to their own local cemeteries to clean up neglected grave sites and perform other tasks. At the end of , the International Game Developers Association ARG Special Interest Group was formed "to bring together those already designing, building, and running ARGs, in order to share knowledge, experience, and ideas for the future.

Fuel of War around peak oil theories where the world is in a crisis over diminishing oil resources. The two major trends that have emerged in this area are support through the sale of products related to the game, and fees for participation in the game. A third possible model is one using in-game advertising for other products, as in The LOST Experience, but at this time no large-scale game has attempted to fund itself solely through in-game advertising. The first major attempt other than EA's failed Majestic to create a self-supporting ARG was Perplex City , which launched in after a year's worth of teasers.

Mind Candy, the production company, has also produced a board game related to the ARG and plans to continue it with a second season beginning 1 March This model was delayed till 1 June, and has again, been delayed to an unspecified date.

Mind Candy's acceptance of corporate sponsorship and venture capital suggests that the puzzle cards alone are not enough to fully fund the ARG at this time. Consumers decipher the codes hidden within the garments and input the results into the game's main website to reveal pieces of a story about the murder of a band manager. Reviving the pay-to-play model, Studio Cypher launched the first chapter of its "multiplayer novel" in May VirtuQuest, a well-known corporate team, also attempted a pay-to-play model with Township Heights later in the year, but despite initial enthusiasm on the part of the ARG community, the game was not well-received due to the design team's use of player Hybrid-Names based on their real life names.

Also the short run time frame was not appreciated by some seasoned players. In June , Catching the Wish launched from an in-game website about comic books based on its predecessor, 's Chasing the Wish. The young-adult novel contains an "evidence packet" and expands its universe through websites and working phone numbers, but is also a stand-alone novel that essentially functions as an individually playable ARG. Neither the cost of creating the book nor sales figures are available although it made both American [45] and British bestseller lists to determine whether the project was successfully self-funded.

It is difficult to judge the efficacy of self-funded ARG models at this time, but it seems likely that exploration of ways to fund large-scale ARGs without using them as marketing for other products will continue as the genre grows. Serious ARGs introduce plausibility as a narrative feature to pull players into the game. People participate to experience, prepare for or shape an alternative life or future. Instead of challenging collective intelligence to solve a game mastered puzzle, World Without Oil's puppetmasters acted as players to guide the "collective imagination" to create a multi-authored chronicle of the alternative future, purportedly as it was happening.

There are possible future Serious ARGs described in fiction. In his novel Halting State , Charles Stross foresightedly describes a number of possible ARGs, where players engage in seemingly fictional covert spy operations. The ARG was by invitation only and players students knew they were going to play a game.

This project is now completed and papers on the project and the resources produced for education a Methodology and Teacher Training guides are available and have been presented at the 3rd European Conference on Games Based Learning. The project is active and allows teachers to rent sophisticated air quality sensors to run the game locally. The game involves players collaborating and competing to produce media artifacts.

In , Reality Ends Here won the Impact Award at IndieCade , presented to games which "have social message, shift the cultural perception of games as a medium, represent a new play paradigm, expand the audience, or influence culture. In December , another indie ARG launched called "Bristel Goodman" which featured creative yet creepy videos made by an internet killer. Eddie Dees, the fictional character who is being sent these videos, posted them at YouTube and other video sharing sites, asking for help.

The ARG community responded and the game began.

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Players were engaged across all of Yahoo! The multi-platform ARG ran for 12 weeks and used websites, email, Yahoo! The game was designed by 42 Entertainment and, due in part to many large-scale real-world events, such as a lavish show at the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas as well as a prizes of a trip into space [58] and having a winner's name engraved on all AMD Athlon 64 FX chips for a certain period of time, [59] received large media attention.

Year Zero, in turn, bled out into the real world through players flyering neighborhoods and creating graffiti supporting the game's fictitious Art Is Resistance movement. The teaser site for World Without Oil , the first major "Serious ARG", was unveiled in March ; the game itself launched on 30 April and ran through 1 June, gathering over videos, images, blog entries and voice mails to document the "Oil Crisis of Hailed as being the single most impressive viral marketing campaign of all-time, [67] it played out over 15 months, concluding in July Millions of players in countries participated both online and taking part in live events, and it reached hundreds of millions through Internet buzz and exposure.

The game was run simultaneously in six languages with new story lines developing in each, encouraging players to communicate with residents of other countries to facilitate sharing of clues and details of the game as a whole. In addition to the messages, documents, photos and puzzles on the website, those following along on 8 August , were given the coordinates of 10 beaches worldwide and told to go there at dawn.

Those who did found objects planted by the game runners designed to look like they had washed ashore from BioShock ' s fictional underwater city of Rapture. Players who wrote letters to Mark, whose address was advertised on the website, also sometimes received items such as wine bottles, records, or masks.

Alternate reality game

Despite all this emotion, however, characters and plot both must be well-developed and realistic: Contrived situations and flat characters are unacceptable. Throughout a romance novel, the reader senses the sexual and emotional attraction between the heroine and hero. Lovemaking scenes, though sometimes detailed, are not generally too graphic, because more emphasis is placed on the sensual element than on physical action.

Romantic Suspense Novel The romantic suspense novel is a modern emergence of early gothic writing. This genre evolved in the s with writers such as Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt.

It is not a detective mystery story because the law police rarely gets involved in the action. It also differs from traditional … suspense novels because it moves more slowly and has more character interplay and psychological conflict than the fast-paced violence of [most] suspense thrillers. Fantasy] Science fiction can be defined as literature involving elements of science and technology as a basis for conflict, or as the setting for a story. The science and technology are generally extrapolations of existing scientific fact, and most though not all science fiction stories take place in the future.

There are other definitions of science fiction, and much disagreement in academic circles as to just what constitutes science fiction and what constitutes fantasy. This is because in some cases the line between science fiction and fantasy is virtually nonexistent. Despite the controversy, it is generally accepted that, to be science fiction, a story must have elements of science.

Fantasy, on the other hand, rarely utilizes science, relying instead on magic, mythological and neo-mythological beings and devices, and outright invention for conflict and setting. Since science is such an important factor is writing science fiction, accuracy with reference to science fact is important. Most of the science in science fiction is hypothesized from known facts, so, in addition to being firmly based in fact, the extrapolations must be consistent.

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Science fiction writers make their own rules for future settings, but the field requires consistency. Techno-Thriller This genre utilizes many of the same elements as the thriller, with one major difference. In techno-thrillers, technology becomes a major character. Thriller A novel intended to arouse feelings of excitement or suspense. Works in this genre are highly sensational, usually focusing on illegal activities, international espionage, sex and violence. A thriller is often a detective story in which the forces of good are pitted against the forces of evil in a kill-or-be-killed situation.

Young Adult A term used … to refer to the books published for young people between the ages of twelve and seventeen. This is the will not to deliberate but to sentence. In the political realm, it has influenced the shape of the current disaster. Its soft manifestations own the therapeutic talk shows, in the sniffling and nose wiping of a Dr.

Phil , where the expert is never at a loss. He will not say: It is cheap, it is amoral, it has no veneer of virtue, it is widely censured and a guilty pleasure, and it can be more educational and truthful and American than most anything else, very suitable for our great republic. Until, that is, one began to see what the capital-rich networks would make of it. For they got into the act, like dinosaurs in an inland sea, and they made the waters heave. They developed the grandiose second ideal-type of filmed reality, courtesy of bigger budgets and serial episodes: The other shows had been cheaply made and served up to UHF and low-budget cable stations by syndication, or, like Cops , run in the early barebones years of FOX and retained.

Big Brother turned the house show, too, into a competition. An even more triumphant microcosm was Survivor —followed, in time, by The Amazing Race. The newer shows that defined the microcosmic reality and blended it with competition adopted the same basic forms of social discovery that had animated the birth of the English novel: Yet Survivor never took up the society-from-nothing isolation of the desert island, which had motivated the original Robinson Crusoe. The shows had no interest in starting civilization from scratch. Nor for that matter were they much interested in travel—on The Amazing Race , you glimpse the blurred locals out the windows of speeding cars.

The shows put together sociable Americans, so they would have nothing left but their group interactions, their social negotiations, to keep them going. Nobody let them starve, nothing endangered them. The sniping and soothing in couples and trios—forming and reforming, betraying and sticking together—were the main things of interest on that show and on The Amazing Race , where it was hard to tell if we were supposed to care, really, that one pair ran faster than another.

How do Americans talk and how do they arrange things, in a completely minimal setting, a little like the office and a little like the home but not totally unlike a sequestered jury? So many of the contestants brought the workplace with them, and they were meant to, since they were identified at every subtitle of their names with their stateside jobs: This was our festival. If we truly all are equals in America, this would be a picture, in ideal form, of how we choose aldermen and selectmen and Congressmen—using our sovereignty to withdraw our sovereignty, that is to say, to focus it in the hands, for two or four years, of individuals who act for us.

By this means the microcosm programs resembled political allegories. And yet many of the reality shows of the microcosmic community were quite deliberately, self-consciously implanted, sometimes by the rules, sometimes by the informal instructions given to players, with an original sin. That sin was the will to power by trickery, the will to deception, which puts the power-mad ahead of the natural leader.

It got confused with the economic or Darwinian model of competition, in which anti-representative stratagems are justified because one wins in the defeat and eradication of all others to gain a single jackpot. As deception and power-hunger are the sins built into the microcosm, so the fixed norm is the flaw introduced into shows of pure judgment. It produces the third ideal type of reality TV: It was latent in the grand-scale dating shows, these contests that brought in the single judge and red roses and arbitrary rules and an image of romantic love from somewhere in the minds of Hallmark: In American Idol , though, you see the strong beginning of the reality show of the third type.

American Idol was the best, and the most insinuating, of the industry shows because it took one of the basic categories of common endeavor, that Rousseau loved well—a singing contest, the commonplace sibling of a beauty or dancing or athletic contest. Everyone sings, if only in the shower—and the footage of the worst contestants made clear that the contest did include all of us, that the equivalent of singing in the shower was being considered, too, on the way to the final idol.

What one really learned was that, unlike a singing contest in the high school gym, the concern of the recording industry was not just, or no longer, whether someone could sing. It was whether a contestant was fitted to the industry, malleable enough to meet the norms of music marketing. The curtain was pulled away from the Great Oz, and the public invited to examine his cockpit and vote which lever or switch to pull next.

As it turns out, it is really no less pleasant to choose a winner to suit the norms of music marketing, than to choose on individual talent. One was still choosing, and the idol would still be ours. An idol of the marketplace, to be sure, but still our representative American idol. The major new successes of the past few years have taught or pretended to teach the norms of other industries. The Apprentice , a show in which one tries to learn skill in business, teaches the arbitrariness of contemporary success in relation to skill.

All this is interesting and revealing in its way. But the final stage is all too familiar: I am thinking of the home and the integral body, underneath the skin. For a final, baroque range of reality shows has emerged in the last two years: The Swan , Extreme Makeover , and, when these turned out to be slightly more than viewers could bear, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and its copycat shows. Ordinary unattractive people, given nose jobs, boob jobs, liposuction, lip collagen, tummy tucks, and chin pulls—plus fifty minutes of therapy—looked like wax mannequins when, alone and imprisoned in a Gothic mansion, the naturally lovely host pulled the velvet drapes back from the mirror, and the rebuilt women, inevitably, began to weep, shocked.