I’ve googled the description of an ARG/Alternate Reality Game, but I am still needing it broken down a bit more to fully understand the whole picture. Thanks!
In: Technology
[Here’s](https://youtu.be/A19R2mJPP9w) MatPat’s explanation of this they did their for the Theory channels on YouTube. You aren’t limited to just that sort of stuff. As far as I am aware, an ARG just has elements that link both a game and the real world
Bungie did one for Destiny that, I can’t remember a lot about. It involved some kind of buff or something that passed between characters in game, and ended up leading to people looking at lines of code somewhere, leading to images that made a map of a secret room in a raid, to unlock one of the exotic weapons or something.
ARG uses meta references to immerse the player in the subject’s world because it extends to real life. It makes an experience more immersive, sometimes even giving the participant(s) choices that could affect the outcome.
The Dad youtube channel is a good example. Nathan Barnatt plays the “Dad” character and he sets up the ARG as he sprouts a new channel featuring the Dad character and denies all ties that it’s him and talks about how someone is impersonating him and his character on his original channel, all the while posting strage videos on his dad channel, completely in character. Although it’s obviously him, he sets up the premise that the whole thing is a real, giving audience reasonable evidence to believe it is at face value.
ARG is a type of game that requires players to participate across multiple forms of real-world media, or using non-traditional storytelling mediums. The game may be fully based in the real world, or may have expanded into it from some other medium. The important part is that the game continues the story-telling charade across its multiple forms, and usually requires experiencing most/all of the media in order to fully complete the ARG. Fantasy and Sci Fi genres are the most likely candidates for ARGs, as they heavily rely on creating a rich fictional universe can be expanded upon for promotional and entertainment reasons.
To give some examples to demonstrate the point:
* A scavenger hunt or [geocaching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching) game is not an ARG
* But, a scavenger hunt or geocaching game that integrates some kind of fictional story element is an ARG
* Escape rooms are usually ARGs, you aren’t just given a random sequence of puzzles to solve, you are given some kind of back story and theme linking the puzzles
* A video game that expands its story universe into fiction novels, is not an ARG
* If the novels come with cheat codes to the video game, it’s still not an ARG
* But if the books provide some kind of hidden secret for the game hidden in its story, it could be considered an ARG
* If a video game contains a real-world [phone number you can call to get hints and tips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Power_Line), it’s not an ARG
* But if the video game contains a phone number you can call to hear a message from an in-game character that helps you find a secret in the game, it’s an ARG
* If a game has secret content in it that wants you to call phone numbers to talk to in-game characters, visit the real-world websites of the fictional organisations from the game, go to real-world locations to obtain in-universe artifacts and so on, that’s an ARG
* They’re not exclusive to video games, TV shows (Lost, Mr. Robot) and movies (Cloverfield, Blair Witch Project) have done them too.
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