History of alternate reality games

Alternate reality games are a modern genre of gaming often consisting of an interactive, networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. Most of these games are either independently run or used as a viral marketing campaign by a company or brand.

Due to factors like "the curtain", attempts to begin games with "stealth launches" that fulfill the TINAG (This Is Not a Game) aesthetic, and the restrictive non-disclosure agreements governing how much information may be revealed by the puppet masters of promotional games, the design process for many ARGs is often shrouded in secrecy, making it difficult to discern the extent to which they have been influenced by other works. In addition, the cross-media nature of the form allows ARGs to incorporate elements of so many other art forms and works that attempting to identify them all would be a nearly impossible task far beyond the scope of this article.

G. K. Chesterton's 1905 short story "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" (part of a collection entitled The Club of Queer Trades) seems to predict the ARG concept, as does John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus. Ludic texts such as the popular Choose Your Own Adventure children's novels may also have provided some inspiration.

The plot of the British television drama serial The One Game, broadcast in 1988, was entirely based on the concept of the ARG (referred to as a "reality game" in the script).

William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition includes a recognizable example of a modern ARG, although it was published after the development of the genre began in earnest. Reader-influenced online fiction such as AOL's QuantumLink Serial provides a model that incorporates audience influence into the storytelling in a manner similar to that of ARGs, as do promotional online games like Wizards of the Coast's Webrunner games. Live action role-playing games (LARPs) are a major influence on the ARG concept, particularly those such as played by UCLA's Enigma group, the MIT Assassin's Guild, and Dead Earth Productions (a horror LARP company in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1980s to the mid-1990s), although most notably White Wolf's "Vampire: The Masquerade." LARPs have often extended into the real world, where players can encounter actors and clues that further a real-time gaming plot.

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