Dark Alley of ARGs…
For several weeks this summer, the world was peppered with Randanauting possibilities. People rushed out, phones directing people, to discover their quantum realities, exploring neighborhoods both old and new. For most of July and part of August, it felt like the augmented reality future had finally arrived. To a certain degree, it had. But Randanautica was and is a basic program. Though it started a conversation about how augmented reality works across race and class, it did not force early adopters to confront how manipulation and consent work in mixed reality.
It has always fascinated people to read between lines of what life has to offer; exploiting these sensory deprivations, our gamers and influencers have sought after a novel way of storytelling to appeal to our senses, which may inertly have taken a dark turn.
The term Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is staggeringly complex, implies that players enter an alternate reality. However, the goal of these apps is not to create an alternate reality, but to create a storyline that infiltrates actual life.
They use most ARGs as marketing tools to form a fervent community around a separate, but related product. They achieve this non-viable act by blurring lines between game and reality by incorporating more amicable and clementine ways of familiar games with, elements of scavenger hunts, board games, role-playing games, hacking, performance art, and science fiction — among other influences — ARGs are amorphous, experimental, and seemingly endless, often lasting for months at a time.
This participatory story structure demands collective action — both to construct the story and to solve the challenges and puzzles that allow the experience to unfold. Understanding player and character roles as part of a social network that is creating the story is necessary for the analysis of collective social experiences. The heterogeneity of views across participants, characters, and game designers needs to understand, as they are critical in achieving the collective goals.
The main aim is to evoke a response and more possible, to gain control or change the course control your reality by taking over your actions and decisions of where you walk, how you turn your head, how well you do on tasks, and how you connect socially with other physical people in the room. For example, it led a group of teens to dismembered body parts on the shore led by ‘Randonautica.’
Is this way of experience-based storytelling (ARG) innocently covered in sheets of entertainment to take control of its players? Maybe, or maybe not. However, we are here to discuss how ARGs are changing the face of entertainment itself. It is all about recreating the experience from Lewis Caroll’s Alice in the Wonderland scene of falling down the rabbit hole. We all want to explore what the world has to offer or more likely discover what it is hiding from us. If we can just let the modest ARG sit apart, it just shows we are all one big ‘stupid’ Alice exploring our wonderlands.
ARGs are a novel way of telling stories that more relies on interaction and way less passive than the movie-watching experience. You can use Google websites. Say you need to find something about a person or group of individuals and, bam! You’re in.
The “bam” shows falling through the rabbit hole in this case. Spielberg’s A.I. introduced the first notable worldwide-scale ARG. There were three rabbit holes for The Beast: the trailer-credits, which had wilily included “Sentient Machine Therapist Jeanine Salla” in the poster credits section, when google led to a surreal website concerning Salla, her life, and her employers, which led to the game, called The Beast, and information leading to a struggle for robot rights in the year 2142. Though the pattern of findings and belief in alternate worlds may sound like a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia, the alternate reality games call this an act of “falling down a rabbit hole”.
Be it out of boredom or an inquisitive nature, ARGs and other reality-based game genre apps are popping up worldwide, cleverly cloaked in our everyday lives.
We’ve been wrestling with how perception can get muddled by augmented reality since at least 1996 when researchers vaguely outlined the future of “mixed reality” and how we would see the real and virtual worlds. In the 20 years since neither neuroscience nor our actual selves have evolved far enough to gauge the challenges of being part of this brave new world — it’s difficult to find studies that link how perception affects augmented reality, focusing instead on how we might perceive augmented reality as inferior to its poor visual quality.
This means that our world and our perception of that world could become a distinct thing (more than they already are). There’s an incentive for corporations and groups alike to misinform and deceive, to augment reality specifically and cynically.
That is frightening, given the morally questionable — yet perfectly legal — things you could do with augmented reality. You could tempt a diabetic or heart disease patient to purchase something they shouldn’t. You could take cyberbullying to a completely new level by unleashing a phobia on a victim. You could torture a prisoner in their environment with electric shocks or waterboarding or what have you, without ever touching the prisoner yet intimidating them to the point of confession. The point is this: You could use augmented reality to harm someone psychologically, perhaps physically, maybe even to the point of death — and you could walk away scot-free.
Augmented reality attempts to create a system such that the user cannot tell the difference between the actual world and the augmentation of it. Yet, when they say and do all, and we turn the technology off, many users will want to know what was “real” and what “augmented computation” was.
