# Alternate Reality Game **Domain:** Game Studies / Transmedia / Network Culture **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed **Collection:** [[collections/Gamification|Gamification Collection]] ## Definition An **alternate reality game (ARG)** is an interactive narrative or puzzle system that uses ordinary media, platforms, objects, and locations as surfaces of play. Rather than confining the experience to one application, an ARG may distribute clues through websites, social accounts, phone calls, email, video, printed material, public space, or live events. Many ARGs preserve the aesthetic known as **This Is Not a Game**: the work minimizes explicit framing and behaves as though the story world were continuous with ordinary reality. This can intensify immersion and collaborative discovery, but it also makes the fiction boundary an ethical and epistemic issue. ## Structure An ARG may include: - a “rabbit hole” that initiates participation; - puzzle and narrative fragments distributed across media; - unequal roles and information sets; - collective intelligence, because no individual can solve every layer; - live adaptation by designers in response to player behavior; - tiered access, reputation, or hidden channels; and - persistent artifacts and relationships after the formal experience ends. The visible puzzle is not necessarily the whole system. Participation can also allocate attention, reveal skills, form networks, produce mythology, or test how people behave under ambiguity. ## Boundary with open events Not every strange online event is an ARG. Similar forms can arise through decentralized fandom, rumor, propaganda, political mobilization, scams, intelligence tradecraft, or coincidence. Before naming an event as an authored game, distinguish artifact, owner account, chronology, design evidence, participant interpretation, and later appropriation. [[wiki/Cicada 3301|Cicada 3301]] is preserved in this vault as an open research root precisely because puzzle culture, recruitment hypotheses, cryptographic practice, political mythology, and later interpretations must not be collapsed into one settled explanation. ## Consequence and literacy An ARG can be fictional at the narrative layer and real at the behavioral layer. It may create durable friendships, money flows, reputational consequences, archives, technical artifacts, or ordinary-world actions. [[wiki/Playable Systems Literacy|Playable systems literacy]] is the capacity to read those layers without either treating every prop as literal evidence or assuming that play has no consequence. ## Sources - International Game Developers Association, [Alternate Reality Games SIG](https://igda.org/sigs/alternate-reality-games/). - Jane McGonigal, [*This Might Be a Game*](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xq7j7cm). ## Routes [[wiki/Playable Systems Literacy|Playable Systems Literacy]] · [[wiki/TINAG|TINAG]] · [[wiki/Ong's Hat|Ong's Hat]] · [[wiki/Cicada 3301|Cicada 3301]] · [[wiki/Megagame|Megagame]] · [[wiki/LARP Structure|LARP Structure]] · [[wiki/Participatory Propaganda|Participatory Propaganda]] · [[wiki/Collective Intelligence|Collective Intelligence]] · [[wiki/Information Asymmetry|Information Asymmetry]] · [[wiki/Provenance|Provenance]]