Crossing Over: How Alternate Reality Gaming Fulfilled a Childhood Dream
Just over a year has passed since I discovered Alternate Reality Gaming, a genre of gaming and storytelling that allows me to not just read great tales but to live them. January 4th was my first anniversary as a member of unFiction, and I wanted to make a post to commemorate it, since unFiction and the ARG community has had such a strong influence on the changing direction of my life.
Waiting for The Moment
As a little girl, I always had an emergency bag beside my bed, packed with a change of clothes, a pair of old shoes, matches, a flashlight, a granola bar or something of the sort, string, and other things I thought might need if a portal to another world opened up for me while I was in my pajamas. I don’t remember when I started keeping this bag near my bed; it might have started in my Saturday morning fantasy cartoons phase. I loved shows like “Wildfire” and “Dungeons and Dragons”; and Nickolodean’s “The Third Eye”; and “The Tomorrow People”. I firmly believed in the existence of other worlds, and just as firmly I believed that one day, if I just watched closely enough, a door would open, or a space ship would swoop out of the sky, and off I’d go to explore some Other Place and maybe even become the heroine of a great adventure.
I don’t remember when I stopped keeping that bag by my bed, but I know that it was long after Santa Claus was shuffled into the Myth category, and I believe I was well into my teen years before I gave up hope on finding that door.
Searching for Other Worlds
Those magic years of wonder and watching and waiting deeply influenced my adult psyche. Space exploration fascinates me, as does theoretical physics such as string theory and M-theory and related topics. My favorite fantasy novels - A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, anything by Charles de Lint, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Guardians of the Flame, The Neverending Story and many others - all center around the theme of “crossing over”, stepping out of the mundane world into a magical or fantastic realm.
I discovered video games very early - Atari games didn’t provide much of a story, but it wasn’t very many years after I got my first Atari that Nintendo came out with The Legend of Zelda. Much later, in my college years, the first computer I ever bought with my own money was purchased just so I could play Myst.
Role-Playing Games, too, I discovered in my very early teens (my mom actually gave me a copy of the Star Trek Role-Playing Game, and I still have those lovingly-worn books tucked away somewhere safe), and these games put me in touch with other people like myself who loved to imagine themselves in another world as another person.
The Door to Another Reality
My first encounter with Alternate Reality Gaming came in a chance mention of LonelyGirl15 in a commentary on how young women in the media eye were ruining normal teenage girls by being bad influences, how this lonelygirl15 had been revealed as a lying phoney, blah blah blah. It was a lousy commentary column. But I seized on “lonelygirl15″ and took my curiosity to the Oracle that is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is sort of like that palace of doors in The Neverending Story - the one Bastian has to go through to get out of the Desert of Colors. You pick one door. That leads to a room with two more doors. You pick another. And you get two more. Except Wikipedia leads you through rooms with hundreds of doors… and you always end up in some other place after a trip through it.
So, looking up LonelyGirl15 in Wikipedia led me inevitably (and maybe because I was looking for it without even knowing it, just like Bastian) to the entry on Alternate Reality Games. I read it.
That door I was waiting for, all through my childhood and even in my teen years? I could see it, right there, on my computer screen.
Oddly enough, earlier that year I’d read a little tale called The Dionaea House, which piqued my interest in distributed narrative and interactive fiction. I’d planned for my NaNo-novel that year to be something of the kind, only with pictures and blogs and a main website cataloguing evidence of the story I was planning to tell. Sadly, I didn’t have the time to put together something so immense, and I discovered the ARG world not long after November.
As a writer, the idea of taking a story and deconstructing it into parts, then making readers work for the pieces, appealed to me. One of my favorite novels is The Woman in White by Wilke Collins. It’s written in a modified epistolary style, with each character contributing a piece of the narrative through journals, testimonies, letters, even the rubbing of a gravestone. It is one of the most suspenseful novels I have ever read, and the structure of the tale heightens the suspense by asking the reader to act as judge. ARGs take that same sort of structure and add to it the immediacy of character interaction for the reader/experiencer.
The most appealing aspect of this new genre of game/story, to me, was the community of people, the kind of people the games attracted. People from all over our vast-yet-tiny world, with different skills, different ideologies, all dedicated to solving the mysteries and participating in the experience of each game. After reading through game guides for The Beast and ilovebees, I found that the players and the way they shaped the story by their actions and interactions with one another as well as the story-world, fascinated me as much as the story itself. The community experience created a second, shadow-story that followed alongside the same path as the game’s narrative. I’d seen this same effect in my role-playing groups, but never to this extent - hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, all deeply affected by playing the game and by their associations with each other.
The Door Opens
Each Alternate Reality Game creates its own unique experience as the story is revealed. These are not games that you can go back and replay over and over again - they happen once. For some of the games, players have gone to great lengths to chronicle and preserve the experience as much as possible, creating game guides or summaries. For other games, the preservation extends only to a string of posts in a forum, or perhaps a lingering blog, now silent, or a trail of emails in the inbox. Some puppetmasters for larger games now create a “meta-site” to help new players catch up and join in, and to create a place where the game can be looked over and appreciated after the end.
One of the first grassroots games I read through on unFiction was Sammeeeees, which had been carefully chronicled by Konamouse in the Story So Far which was created to help new players catch up with the game. The story was whimsical, dark and serious yet oddly tongue-in-cheek - a name like Spoocheeeee could seem ridiculous and horrifying both at the same time. Mr. Alan Johnson seemed the archetypical cackling black hat villain, but no less frightening for all that. A ritual involving an axe and a block of cheese (among other things) seemed not silly but essential; even though I laugh every time I see Konamouse circling the disk backward, waving her arms, my heart also clenches in a fierce triumph, for on that day, the Sammeeeees defeated Spoocheeeee for all time. I wasn’t there, but I tell you, I got into the story just reading through all the stuff that happened!
Reading the experience, visiting the websites and blogs that players discovered, watching the videos, attempting to live the story as the players and the characters must have lived it together, was magical for me. If I regretted missing The Beast or ilovebees or Metacortechs, I regretted missing Sammeeeees ten times over. I think I loved the game as much because of the small yet deeply devoted (one might say fanatically devoted) player base that the game attracted as for the beautiful story that Jan Libby told in Sammeeeees. I wanted so badly to be a Sammeeeee, too!!
My chance came in the spring of 2007. I saw the name Sammeeeees appear in the “News and Rumors” forum of unFiction. Peeps was having a garden party! The characters were stirring - the world of Sammeeeees, which had only narrowly escaped the clutches of the evil Spoocheeeee and then destroyed it forever, was becoming visible again. Through spring, I watched, waited, chatted with the Sammeeeees; in summer, Mr. Alan Johnson’s ghost rose from the grave to wreak revenge on his destroyers. The game had begun, but it felt indeed like “play for mortal stakes” - would we be able to save our friends?
The part of the game (it didn’t feel like a game AT ALL, mind you) I most enjoyed was the plot twist that had us players committing our souls to a dark temple in order to foil Mr. Alan Johnson’s (now known as The Eidolon) plans. The way Jan worked this part of the story let us all pretend that we were, in fact, IN the dark temple, or some part of us was, anyway. Even when I was at work, I would smile and think to myself, “My soul is really locked away in my Raven Cell, conspiring against the Eidolon.” To advance in the temple and in the Eidolon’s trust, we created audio files, videos, and photos to add to our Raven Cells - player-created content.
For the entire summer, I lived in that Other World, the world of Sammeeeees, inhabiting the Dark Temple, finding secret passages and doorways, decoding evil plots, praying to a god named Mithras, and working to protect our friends’ souls that the Eidolon had stolen away. In the end, we triumphed, and the moments of the final rescue - a (virtual) run from the temple through a portal into a motel room in El Portal, Nevada, were thrilling. When the game ended, I, too, was finally a Sammeeeee.
Only after the game was done and my first year in the world of Alternate Reality Gaming was 3/4ths over did I realize that my childhood dream had come true - I’d stepped through a door into another world and become part of an amazing story. The hardest thing about crossing into another world is that one always has to return to the mundane world when the task is complete. But I’m always on the lookout these days for another door, another portal that might open at a moment’s notice and sweep me off to another adventure.





