Alternate Reality Games (ARG) tend to have story-driven game structures. Hence, it is useful to investigate how player activities interact with the often pre-scripted storyline in this genre. In this article, we report on a study of a particular ARG production, Conspiracy For Good (CFG), which was at the same time emphasising the role of strong storytelling, and active on-site participation by ...

Alternate reality games (ARGs) are a new genre of transmedia practice in which players collaboratively hunt for clues, make sense of disparate information, and solve puzzles to advance an ever-changing narrative that is woven into the fabric of the real world. This paper highlights the potential for ARGs to promote 21st-century literacy skills. We propose a meta-level framework for 21st-century...

The Alternate Reality Game genre inspires a mode of play in which the participants choose to act as if the game world was real. Jane McGonigal has argued that one of the most attractive features of an ARG is the ‘Pinnochio’ effect: at the same time that the players deeply long to believe in them, it is in reality impossible to believe in them for real. In this article, we study “Sanningen om Ma...

The advent of the Internet has been instrumental in producing new Game Based Learning (GBL) tools where education and games converge. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are one such GBL tool. Interactive narrative games that use the Internet as a central communications platform, ARGs challenge players to collaboratively collate a fragmented story. When used for educational purposes, Serious ARGs pr...

Alternate reality games (ARGs) are a promising new approach for increasing student engagement; however, automated methods for analyzing and optimizing game play are non-existent. We captured the player communication generated by a recent STEM-focused ARG that we piloted in a Los Angeles charter high school. We used shallow sentiment analysis to gauge the levels of various emotions experienced b...