Online NW, 2008
Lonelygirl and the Beast: Alternate Reality Games as Immersive Marketing, Art and Information
Rachel Bridgewater and Anne-Marie Deitering
22 February 2008
REFERENCE TOOLS
Glossary of ARG terms (Unfiction.com)
The Unforums at UnfictionARG’S AND GAME FORUMS
This link goes to the Wikipedia article for the game. Until a few days ago, the best place to find out about The Beast ARG was at the Cloudmakers’ website (http://cloudmakers.org). There’s a notice now saying the site was suspended and no word whether it will be back up. Before it came down, this site included links to archived copies of the game websites, a guide to the narrative and puzzles, and a lot more.
- iamtryingtobelieve.com
- Year Zero research on the NiN wiki
- Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games. (Wired Magazine, 16.01, 12/20/2007)
- Year Zero flickr pool
- World Without Oil: Democratic Imagination?
- World Without Oil community on LiveJournal
- World Without Oil guides for teachers
- First Blog/ Dorkiness Prevails
- LG15 YouTube channel
- Lonelygirl15’s MySpace
- The Secret World of Lonelygirl (Wired Magazine. 14.12. December 2006)
- LGPedia, the wiki
Heroes Evolutions (formerly Heroes 360)
FURTHER READING
The Meta forum at Unfiction ARGNET - Alternate Reality Gaming Network Christy Dena’s bibliography for “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games” (Convergence, 14:1, February 2008) Jane McGonigal’s Research page
[…] A couple of weeks ago, Rachel Bridgewater and I gave a presentation at Online Northwest called Lonelygirl and the Beast: Alternate Reality Games as Immersive Marketing, Art and Information. And the student project described here goes beyond the creation of a “fake web site.” It has a lot in common with an ARG. But at the end of the day, this is a bad attempt at immersive marketing, and not an ARG. The more I think about it the clearer it seems that the very issues with how this class was conceived and created mean that it could never have accomplished the real immersive alternate reality that an ARG can. At the same time, I think the ways in which this was much less than an ARG can illustrate why a different kind of ARG experience has really interesting potential for teaching and learning. […]
[…] One of the overarching points here, and one that came up as well when Rachel and I talked about Alternate Reality Games at the last Online NW, is that good games and good game environments are really, really hard to do. There are people who spend all of their professional time, every day, creating these games and environments and sometimes even they fail. Librarians have other jobs being librarians and do we really have time to create the types of games that will be engaging, that will contain within them whatever it is that makes success within the game environment an end in itself to players? […]