Alternate Reality Game - Scholarly Views On ARGs

Scholarly Views On ARGs

Overall, academics have been intrigued by ARGs' potential for effective organizing. Across the board, a diverse range of organizations, such as businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and schools “can learn from the best practices and lessons of ARGs to similarly take advantage of new media and collective problem–solving.” As such, implementation of ARGs in these different settings involves finding best practices for honing the collaborative, transmedia elements of ARGs for these respective institutions.

Much of this scholarly interest stems from the evolving media ecology with the rise of new media. In sustaining cooperative online communities, ARGs build off of “an alignment of interest, where problems are presented in a fashion that assists game designers in their goal while intriguing and aiding players in their goals.” This returns to ARGs’ framework of transmedia storytelling, which necessitates that ARG designers relinquish a significant degree of their power to the ARG’s audience, problematizing traditional views of authorship.

The majority of the scholastic review on ARGs analyzes their pedagogical advantages. Notably, in the classroom, ARGs can be effective tools for providing exigence on given topics and yield a collaborative and experiential learning environment. By the same token, weaknesses of classroom learning through ARGs include the need for a flexible narrative conducive to collaborative learning in large groups and a sophisticated web design.