Saturday, November 10, 2007


ARG, Matey! That's Alternate Reality Gaming!


Last night's episode of Numb3rs was awesome as usual. I love the interplay of the charactes as the relationships have to be sorted through on a regular basis.

However, the episode also mentioned ARGs, alternate reality games. For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, they're games that involve computer gaming combined with the real world. GPS handhelds and WiFi figure into real-time geographic locations.

For instance, you can beat a section of an on-line game and get the coordinates to a physical location that involves a physical prize. Perplex City, (http://www.perplexcity.com/) as shown above, offered card sets to players at different times.

Geo-caching was one of the earliest real-time, real place games that allowed real players to interact with each other. I think more of this will go on as computer equipment gets smaller and WiFi is more prevalent.


Those of you who are interested can check it out at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game).

1 comment:

Katie said...

wow. that's cool. I've never heard of it.... would make fun stuff for a book.