Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) allow players to participate in a form different from video or board games. One players enter the “magic circle” of an ARG, the world of the game begins to meld with day-to-day life.In Reality Is Broken, McGonigal suggests that players are able to engage with ARGs more than day to day life because “reality is hard to get into” (124) while games are not. McGonigal argues that participating more fully means happier, more effective players and “because ARGs are played in real-world contexts, instead of in virtual spaces, they almost always have at least the side effect of improving our real lives.” (126) In contrast to the clear boundary between video games and “real life”, ARGs blur the lines which allows the skills and lessons from a game translate more fluidly to day to day life.
Ultimately, this is meaningless if players behave the same in ARGs as they do in the rest of their lives. Throughout the course, we’ve looked at a lot of ways which games change how players behave. While the observation that ARGs are fun and easy to get into begins to address ways in which players may behave differently in ARGs, it doesn’t do far. Elements of gamification can certainly incentivise completing an otherwise unappealing task, but it would seem that it would players desire that same incentives outside the game. Although McGonigal seems to focus on ARGs that gamify aspects of day to day life (and how players behave within them), there’s many ARGs that function without systems of points, progression, or competition.
My only experience with a large ARG falls into the second category. For the release of the Rise of Iron expansion to Destiny, Bungie created a ARG called Owl Sector. The ARG started when an in game effect appeared on a player while streaming on Twitch and an account named owl_sector posted a link to a website appearing to be from the future some time before the events of Destiny. As the player engaged with other players in multiplayer, the effect spread to them as well, and within days almost every player was infected. The Owl Sector website revealed pieces logs from engineers creating a robotic parasite called SIVA. Eventually players found a connected page which provided an encrypted block of data. Over the next weeks, thousands of players collaborated to share their data, code, and theories about the game. The game concluded when players successfully assembled and decrypted over a thousand data blocks into a map showing the key to open a hidden chest in game. This scale of collaboration is something that most players would never consider, and involved dedicated huge amounts of time with no promise of any rewards.
This type of fearless problem solving is not out of place for games. In Games to Fail With, Anabel argues that games are conducive to risk taking without the same fear of failure. When players take this behavior from games into their day to day lives, they exhibit what McGonigal refers to as “urgent optimism” - “the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.”
Anable, Aubrey. Playing with feelings: Video games and affect. U of Minnesota Press, 2018.
McGonigal, Jane. "Gaming can make a better World." TED. Feb. 2010. Lecture.
McGonigal, Jane. Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. Penguin, 2011.