Building Social Commmunities around Alternate Reality Games

Abstract

In recent years, alternate reality games have entered the mainstream as a new form of entertainment. The Living Stories project is the first alternate reality game in the UK, which addresses environmental issues. Living Stories combines social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter with Second Life, to create a platform, which allows social networking to feed into content creation within a virtual world, and facilitate and encourage real-world behaviour through virtual rewards. The project is funded by Interactive Digital Media IDM, as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Eden Project, Coventry University Serious Games Institute and PlayGen Ltd. The aim of this project is twofold: firstly to engage new visitors and to extend the Eden experience beyond the actual visits, and secondly to increase user participation amongst groups that do not traditionally visit Eden Project. In this paper we describe the unique technical and pedagogic challenges addressed when creating this platform and consider how the state-of-the-art in alternate reality gaming can be applied in an educational ('serious') context.

Green@CU: An environmental game for residential accommodation

“…Games may provide a useful platform for creating the levels of sustained engagement and motivation, and this hypothesis has been explored through a range of projects aimed an energy awareness for households: for example, the Energy Life project [7] focused on the use of pervasive devices for monitoring consumption, forming a game around usage. Other environmental concerns have been tackled through social media; for example the i-Seed serious game [8] sought to create a game within the Facebook platform to promote positive attitudes towards the environment. Other approaches have equally embraced mobile platforms and other emerging technologies to reach audiences with an environmental message [9].…”

Towards a global participatory platform

“…The gaming environment, called the World Game Platform, will be portable to any device, including smart phones and other mobile devices, and integrates new interfaces such as augmented, tactile control, and brain-computer interfaces. This setup allows children to play and learn, testing hypotheses, solving problems and collaborating in social groups in a multilayered gaming environment with high fidelity graphics and realistic game behaviours [4,52]. The introduction of artificial intelligence and virtual agents allows capabilities such as data filtering and on the fly analysis but in a synthesised and seamless dynamic system [57].…”

Transition to 3D Social Networking

“…In [10] Petridis et al analyse the social buildup in order to tackle shared community problems within a number of Alternate Reality Games 9 [11]. They also provide a timeline of ARGs.…”

“…Similarly, Eno et al propose an agent crawler that collects usergenerated content in Second Life 10 and related VWs [13]. Such agent crawler emulates normal user behaviour in order to interact with objects and access crawlable data.…”

“…Real-world behaviour is encouraged via virtual rewards. Petridis et al fully evaluate iSeed from a social collaboration angle in [10].…”