ARGs often employ multiple forms of media, like written text, websites, objects, video, or more to immerse players in a story or experience unlike traditional games or works of literature. Escape rooms, murder mysteries, and IRL treasure hunts are super simple examples of an alternate reality game. However, most ARGs tend to be a little more complex and mysterious. Junko Junsui is a famous example of an ARG. After watching a strange video, players must go to “174. 133. 240. 117,” find “the enemy” and add a series of fake Facebook accounts to solve a cryptic mystery and defeat a fictional cult.
Your game doesn’t need a crazy complicated plot to be interesting. Geocaching is an ARG, and it’s got no plot whatsoever! For example, your plot could be about a secret organization trying to vet potential detectives by having them solve increasingly complex problems. You can also have a branching narrative where the player’s decisions or success/failure can change the story.
Some ARGs don’t have time limits—it’s up to the user to determine when the story stops and starts. The video game Pokémon Go is a popular example. Many ARGS are played as archeological projects—every game element is present from the beginning and it’s the player’s job to solve or reassemble each piece. If you’re going to go for a nonlinear narrative, take the complexity of each task into account when you monitor the timeline.
“They are communicating to us through the radio. Download the app and find the right frequency. More instructions will follow. We can fight them together. ” “All around you are hidden messages. Signs that we are being invaded by body snatchers who look just like you or me are everywhere. Will you stand up for humanity?” Players are presented with a strange image of an octopus pointing at a stop sign in your city. If players go to that exact stop sign, they’ll find an ad seeking out underwater explorers with “take one” tabs containing a URL to the puzzle.
Building a website. Create a simple web page to share narrative bits, puzzles, or clues. Recording audio files. You might encrypt audio files with clues and puzzles, or use found snippets to tell a story. Making IRL objects. You could hide origami objects as clues, or make fake artifacts from a lost civilization for players to find. Writing false documents. False documents are a big part of many ARGs; they refer to letters, bank statements, legal documents, and other written materials that come from fictional characters.
If your story revolves around defeating an otherworldly demon, your player might need to find runes in an area and then place them in the right pattern to save the world. In this example, players are creating the story with you by either locating what they need and solving the puzzles, or failing and letting humanity collapse! While some ARGs are designed to be single-player experiences, most are meant to be played socially if the player so chooses. They might collaborate together on puzzles or share evidence they find. For example, The Backrooms is a popular narrative ARG about a hidden world people can “clip” into on accident. Players roleplay online by sharing new discoveries and pretending to be trapped there.
When you’re testing the game, ask your younger brother or sister to try it first if you have any siblings. They’ll give you a good sense for whether your game is too complicated. Since you aren’t going to be standing next to the player to answer questions or provide hints, you can’t help them if they get stuck. For example, you could have players to solve a puzzle where they have to solve complex equations to discover a passcode that they enter into a website to access secret files.
For example, if you’ve got a cyberpunk thing going on in your game, you might solicit friends to dress up for photos or videos and incorporate those in your game. Your ARG might have a villain. If it does, what do they want? Why are they in conflict with the player? ARGs rarely have traditional player characters. The player in each game is typically the biographical player.
For example, if your players are fighting a pandemic virus, you might have their puzzles become increasingly confused or hard to solve as the player gets sicker and sicker. This is why escape rooms are such popular ARGs; the time limit combined with the fact that you’re locked in somewhere contribute to the feeling like you’re trapped! When gameplay and the theme of the story don’t line up, it creates ludonarrative dissonance—a feeling of being “lost” or “off” when mechanics don’t make sense. A good example of this is Michael in Grand Theft Auto 5. His character is supposed to be trying to reform himself as a family man, but he spends every mission killing people.
In many ARGs, the loss state is simply not knowing what happens at the end of the story. It is totally okay to have no win or loss state if your ARG isn’t time-bound or the loop can be repeated infinitely. To go back to narrative resonance and gameplay for a second, if your game is mainly narrative, the win state should be narrative. If the game is about puzzles, the final task should be a super compelling puzzle.
In other words, if you’ve got a great idea for a plot point and you don’t know how to convert it into a player task, don’t even try! Give the player the material in written, video, or digital form and then move on. They don’t always have to be doing something. Many ARGs do not feel like games to players. They feel more like community storytelling or experiments with a puzzle element. Murder, for example, is basically just a choose-your-own-adventure story that involves you doing a few things at home.
