What are Alternate Reality Games?
(…and why should we care about them?) The idea was that the fiction should jump the dike. A book you can close, a movie happens in a theater–but the Game should evade those boundaries. If our imaginary world called you on your real phone, wasn’t it at least as real as the telemarketers doing the same thing? Realer, because you would have seen pictures of the imaginary people calling you. You’d know things about their childhood, their hopes and disappointments, their taste in food. -Sean Stewart (2003) * * * When pressed for a concise definition of alternate reality games (ARGs), many players and researchers will refer to them as “playable fictions” or “transmedia stories,” definitions that are on par with describing composition as “the teaching of writing.” While technically correct, such broad characterizations gloss over the fact that there have been nearly as many approaches to composition instruction as there are instructors; likewise, there have been as many approaches to alter
