Kim Ng, the chief executive officer, who is also your boss, collapsed just a few hours ago after a day of intense business negotiations. You have less than thirty minutes to get to her office to retrieve her briefcase, decode the combination, and access critical files needed to continue the negotiations.
You will need to coach a member of the negotiation team via the phone on specific information in the files. Note there are competing teams trying to close the same deal, so you need to be sure you can effectively communicate your company's position to seal the deal. Your team members on the other end are relying on you to be able to translate Kim's notes.
Although this scenario might read as a script from a TV drama, instead it is the task facing a player engaged in an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). In this ARG, participants compete against each other by engaging in real-world and virtual activities designed to teach and reinforce business negotiation skills. ARGs can be defined as "immersive, massively multiplayer experiences that unfold in the course of people's real lives for days, weeks, or months" (McGonigal, 2008).
ARGs enable players to engage both in physical and virtual environments to learn skills, perform tasks, collaborate with peers to earn an achievement, and share information. ARGs can create experiences that facilitate collaboration and add greater authenticity and interest to training interventions. Well-designed ARGs combine activities that take place in public spaces, multimedia, and social networking to create real-world learning experiences such as the one mentioned above.
Businesses can use ARGs to facilitate cooperative learning experiences, which enable collective intelligence – a "shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals" creating vital and relevant learning experiences. Jane McGonigal, a leader in the field, states that, "ARGs train people in hard-to-master skills that make collaboration more productive and satisfying." Furthermore, playing ARGs allows individuals' skills to be identified and utilized effectively, and it allows individuals to quickly test, reject, or accept possible solutions. (McGonigal, 2008). ARGs in a business setting can allow players to assume different roles than the ones inherently dictated by their job titles, and previously unidentified group dynamics and soft skills to emerge.
Games for Learning
ARGs are a particular form of game. The use of games designed specifically for learning can increase engagement and motivation. Sales, leadership, and technical training often use such games. Research is in a nascent stage, but it is thought that purposefully designed games, blended with carefully constructed learning objectives, can improve learning outcomes.
Games in general must contain attainable goals, rules, consequences, and competition. The majority of team-based games contain structured play (play with rules and goals). ARGs, unlike many other game types, can merge structured play and unstructured play (play devoid of rules or goals). Elements may be evident in ARGs when players interact spontaneously to determine roles, tactics, and/or actions to take. Hence, players have the ability to help drive the game, build its ultimate structure, plot, and assets, and even dictate and recruit participants.
ARG Examples
ARGs vary in size and scale, from those that are played over several months with participants in the millions, to more focused experiences lasting weeks or days with smaller numbers of players. Game designers can also create ARGs that facilitate product marketing, training, and specific community-driven initiatives. Examples include:
The Beast
"Evan Chan was murdered. Jeanine is the key."
This sentence, and slightly different variations, appeared in movie trailer credits and on promotional posters for Steven Spielberg's movie A.I. The sentence also enticed people worldwide to slide down the "rabbit hole" and join The Beast, an ARG designed by a small team at Microsoft to promote the movie. The ARG was launched approximately three months prior to the movie's release and had players visit many fictitious Websites, listen to phone messages, and conduct in-person conversations with actors playing game characters – all to uncover new clues and pieces of the story in their investigation of Evan's mysterious death.
Players created online communities, such as the Yahoo group The Cloudmakers, so they could work together to uncover clues and solve puzzles surrounding the murder. The community groups often influenced the ARG designers to consider incorporating novel elements in the game as it was being played, including in-game direct mentions to these groups, players, and some of the content they created. The Beast was arguably one of the first well-known ARGs to prove that collective intelligence is indeed something that can be leveraged for a common goal during an ARG.
World Without Oil
In World Without Oil, a 2007 ARG created to call attention to a possible near-future global oil shortage, players had to figure out how to live in a world with extreme shortages of oil.The World Without Oil ARG launched on April 30, 2007, and concluded on June 1, 2007. It gathered over 1,500 in-game player stories during those 33 days, in the form of blog posts, online videos and images, and voicemails. Players made decisions about how to modify their lives to compensate, and documented those experiences on the ARG site. Players formed teams to collaborate on finding innovative solutions to help deal with the "crisis." Part serious game, and part collaborative play, this ARG demonstrated that role-playing could indeed motivate people to work together to solve "real-world" problems (or at least uncover ways to adapt to life-altering events).
Year Zero
ARGs have been successful in the entertainment industry as marketing and promotional devices. 42 Entertainment designed the Year Zero ARG for a recent Nine Inch Nails (NIN) album release. At NIN concerts, clues were hidden in merchandise; fans would later enter those clues on a Website in order to receive cryptic messages. As fans discovered more subtle clues on t-shirts and other memorabilia, they began to form social networks to share the clues, and to talk about what all the clues meant. Not all the activities were virtual. USB drives were stashed in public restrooms in concert halls. The drives contained messages that often required collaboration among players to decipher, facilitating goal-oriented interactions between fans both online and in real life.
