Alternate Reality Games: Defining Gender through an Updated Taxonomy David Ruiz-García Facultad de Comunicación. Universidad de Sevilla. drumaturgia@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8830-1243 Abstract: Since their origin, Alternate Reality Games or ARGs have presented a great variability in their structures, forms, rules and objectives, compromising a definition capable of describing them in a univocal way. This circumstance has forced writers and designers of ARGs in the first place, and secondly researchers and theorists of the games, to articulate different classifications capable of bringing together all manifestations of the phenomenon. As if this were not enough, the different attempts of classification on the genre have had to face its spirit always tending to contingency, change and transformation according to technological advances or new experiences of use, a fact that forces the constant updating of the categories or sub-genres in which ARGs could be divided. This paper aims to analyze the fundamental characteristics of the different types of ARGs with the intention of proposing an updated taxonomy that covers all cases in a generous and flexible way but trying to delimit the boundaries as clearly as possible. Keywords/Keywords: Alternate Reality Games, Serious Games, Advergaming, Transmedia Storytelling, Interactive Fiction 1 Introduction The Alternate Reality Games are the first-born sons of cultural convergence [1], with a card in the illustrious club of digital incunabula [2], imagined from the first sleepless nights of Homo Ludens [3], a product or perhaps a symptom of the World Wide Web without which they cannot be conceived [4], and at the same time related to a myriad of ancestral narrative forms without which they do not seem to be understood either. ARGs are questioned about everything, from when they were born and what their seminal piece is, to which family they belong, not escaping anyone, but their bastard lineage. Their very name throws up at least two controversial units, the concept "game" and the concept "alternate reality" [4] [5]. 5] From this primary critical reflection, a collection of terminological, structural and thematic divergences unfolds that correlate to its evolution, from its first germinal stage, its subsequent maturity, and the current stage, which we could venture to call a rebirth, in light of its current development. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).