Alternate reality games, "Experience IT" track, at the ELI 2006 conference

These are materials for a session on alternate reality games, in the "Experience IT" track, at the Educause ELI 2006 national conference, San Diego.  We will draw in part on a small demo ARG in progress, starting with Caleb Navidson's Livejournal.
Please post questions, comments, suggestions in the comment box.

0. Introduction

John Borland, "A novelist turned gaming innovator."  CNET, December 15, 2005.
Sean Stewart, The A.I. Web Game.
Dave Szulborski, This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming.  Pennsylvania: New Fiction, 2005.
Brooke Thompson, ARG Quick Start Guide.
Jesse Walker, "Games People Play: Life invades games, and vice versa."  Reason, August 29, 2005. 

I. ARG Storytelling Aspects

Mystery
Characters
Timeline (staggered)
Sites for/as/about characters

• MetaCortechs, Paranormal Studies Journal
• ILoveBees, Last Call Poker
• Find Araya

II. Structure

Workflow

• Project Mu Web design chart

Preloaded content

• Media pieces (Mu: photo, Flash)
• Platform structure
  • Controlled hosting
  • Web services (a Flickr example)

Dynamic content

Nongame content

• Google and links
• The world's intrinsic weirdness: numbers radio

ARG arc

1. Trailhead and rabbit hole (Tulse Luper)
2. Collaborative play (Fora [Unfiction], p2p, web publishing, f2f, lurk)
3. Closure (MUcredits)

III. Puzzle pieces

Site identity
Hidden text like this - easy, isn't it?

• Bad Wolf disclaimer
• Schedoni.info

Anagrams (I, Rearrangement Servant)

Binary (Nick Ciske's delicious binaries)

Morse code (Stephen Philips' resource)

• Stop Polarneft

ROT-n, or Caesar cipher (Unfiction ROT machine)

• Try this one: h zptwsl pklh aoha dpss johunl aol dvysk

(Perplex City)   

Vigenere cipher
    Sharky's Vigenere, Christopher Nevison's

Steganography
    JPHide, Camoflague, CameraShy    

Word frequency (Web Frequency Indexer)

Comments

[Nick Noakes]

Hi Bryan. I hope you will podcast this too!

[Gardner]

I've got an Edirol R-1 going. I hope its battery holds out longer than my laptop's--15 min. and counting.

[Bryan]

Thanks, Nick, for the thought. And thank you for the recording, Gardner - how'd it go?

[Jon Breitenbucher]

Bryan,

I am curious about how the crypto stuff fits in to ARG. I teach a crypto class on an every other year basis and have had the students code all of the classic crypto systems with Maple or other programming languages. It would be nice to expand those projects to include game components if possible.

[Jamie Gautreaux]

I love this page, and I've been operating my own ARG-player resource site for a bit over a year now.
Are you the type that likes to cross-link, join projects, or further the genre in any way?
It's becoming less and less often these days I've seen people actually give the initiative to form resources..

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