Designing Reusable Alternate Reality Games Derek Hansen 1 , Elizabeth Bonsignore 2 , Marc Ruppel 4 , Amanda Visconti 3 , Kari Kraus 2,3 1 School of Technology Brigham Young University Provo, UT, USA dlhansen@byu.edu 2 Human-Computer Interaction Lab, 3 Dept of English University of Maryland, College Park, MD {ebonsign,kkraus,visconti}@umd.edu 4 National Endowment for the Humanities Washington, DC, USA mruppel@neh.gov ABSTRACT Successful Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), such as The Lost Experience, I Love Bees and Urgent EVOKE have solicited thousands of active participants and, often, millions of spectators from around the world. ARGs require significant resources not only in terms of initial design, but also in implementation, since live, dynamic interplay between players and designers is an inherent aspect of their interactive storylines. This paper outlines a novel design framework for creating reusable ARGs that will help extend the lifespan of ARGs and allow them to permeate new domains such as education. The framework includes three key reusable design objectives (replayability, adaptability, extensibility), each of which can be enacted at different levels of depth. We also identify barriers to reusable ARGs and design strategies for overcoming those barriers, drawing upon ARG designer interviews and existing ARGs. Author Keywords Alternate Reality Games; serious games; design; replayable; extensible; adaptable; reusable. ACM Classification Keywords J.5 Arts and Humanities; K.4.0 Computers and Society: General; K.8.0 Personal computing: Games. INTRODUCTION Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are an emerging genre of large-scale, “immersive, interactive experiences where players collaboratively hunt for clues, make sense of disparate information, contribute content, and solve puzzles to advance a narrative that is woven into the fabric of the real world” [10]. Successful ARGs such as The Lost Experience, I Love Bees and Urgent EVOKE have solicited thousands of active participants and, often, millions of spectators from around the world. They have created highly engaging and interactive experiences in a range of domains including entertainment [16], marketing [21], education [5, 9, 17, 25], and societal problem solving [22]. As new technologies for supporting mixed reality experiences, such as augmented reality and location-aware devices, begin to proliferate, the future of ARGs looks promising. Most ARGs are designed as one-time experiences. While this lends an authenticity and novelty to the hunting and problem-solving elements of an ARG, it limits the number of potential players and reduces the return on investment of time and resources. This is particularly true of educational ARGs, which could ideally be tailored by educators to meet the unique needs of their students and classroom setting (e.g., length of class). Many ARG designers in entertainment, education, and cultural institutions have begun experimenting with ways to make ARGs reusable to reduce costs, to reach more people, or to have greater impact [e.g., 4, 30, 31]. If ARGs are to reach their potential, novel design approaches must be developed that support the unique properties of ARGs, while also recognizing the need to make their content reusable. To some extent, reusable ARGs seem like an oxymoron. How can a genre that prides itself on the improvisational interplay between game designers and players be replayed? How can those replaying ARGs, which require online research and participation in online communities, shield themselves from the puzzle solutions and story spoilers that are scattered across the web? How can ARGs that rely upon geography be authentically ported to other locations? Is it possible to individually experience ARGs when their very nature requires collective problem solving and experiences? Can an ARG be “repackaged” or even archived in the first place, given that it plays out in such a multitude of media platforms? These questions highlight the challenge of designing authentic, reusable ARGs. Though a handful of ARGs have identified these challenges (see Background section), no one has yet provided generalizable principles or concepts to aid designer attempts to create reusable ARGs. In this paper, we provide a framework for designing reusable ARGs: ones that can be replayed, adapted to new environments, and/or extended for new audiences. After introducing the framework, we identify barriers to creating reusable ARGs and then provide specific design strategies for overcoming the barriers using our framework as a backdrop, drawing upon expert interviews and a review of existing ARGs that have some reusable component. BACKGROUND In narrative terms, ARGs are a genre of transmedia storytelling [16] because their core mechanic is to engage players in scavenger-hunt-like missions to collectively uncover, interpret, and reassemble the fragments of a story Copyright 2013 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the U.S. Government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only. CHI 2013, April 27 – May 2, 2013, Paris, France. Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-978-1-4503-1899-0...$15.00. Session: Game Design CHI 2013: Changing Perspectives, Paris, France 1529