ARG Community

When gamers interact with their environments… probing often takes the form of seeking out the limits of the situation, the points at which the illusion of reality breaks down, and you can sense that it’s all just a bunch of algorithms behind the curtain.

                                                      Steven Johnson (2005), “Everything Bad for You Is Good for You”

I have not written this blog for a long time. This does not mean that nothing has happened around my research for my dissertation. 

I finished my last post with Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky’s concept of Zone of Proximal Development and scaffolding. What seems to be quite an appropriate choice to understand how and why the ARG community works.  However, in order to support my psychological line of dissertation I have found another psychologist Erice Berne. In his book “Games People Play: The psychology of Human Relationship” he investigates motives behind our relationships and exploring the role that we try to play and also the social connotation between our behavior and roles we are forced to play. I know that seems to be irrelevant to my subjects but I am looking for a general psychological explanation of the needs to act in real life, find the motivation behind playing in real life, and look closer at social interrelation (in the aspect of a game). Also for the same reason I will look at other book “Man. Play and Games” by Roger Caillois, the French sociologist, who was studying the sociology of play and game. 

Very inspiring and helpful turned out article 'This Is Not a Game': Immersive

Aesthetics and Collective Play’ Jane McGonigal (2003), which is fully dedicated to the phenomenon of the first ARG community and studying their motivations and behaviors during their first immersive (ARG) game and their aspiration after that.

Among many of papers about ARG I have found the massive work of International Game Developers Association named “Alternative Reality Game White Paper” (2006) to be very useful.

This is a collaborative work of scholars and game expert considering in depth many aspects of ARG such as types, methods & mechanics, business models, studying audiences, and educational & philosophical aspects of ARG. 

Another paper “Participant Roles in Socially Expanded Games” from two Scandinavian scholars Markus Montola and Annika Waern discuss an issue that is very close to my subject. In this research they study how pervasive games have invited bystanders into participation and general social expansion in pervasive games.

‘Collective Intelligence’ in ARG is a subject of study of three other scholars, Kenton O’ Hara, Hazel Grian and John Williams. In their work “Participation, Collaboration and Spectatorship in an Alternate Reality Game” they analyze how the narrative is produced and progressed through collective player interaction and how the experience is created through a collaborative suspension of disbelief. This paper explores aspects of collective participation among players, the motivations underlying such participation and the factors that shape these contributions, and this is going to be my main line of dissertation. But my final title will be read in next few days.

I have just received a book that I have been waiting for a couple of weeks, and now it is time to start to read it.

Ryan, Marie-Laure(2001), “Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media”