8 Tips for Designing an ARG (as a Learning Experience)

In November 2009 myself, Brandon, and Dolly published an article about Alternate Reality Games in the eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions e-magazine (download a copy here).

Since the article was published, several instructional designers have asked us to pull out some practical tips on how they can get started designing their own ARG. For this post, we thought we would reference eight key tips from the article that provide a starting point for you to consider as you embark on your ARG design.

1. Establish Clear Goals	Document what are you trying to achieve with the game. What are you trying to get your audience to experiment with or learn? After all, participants should be learning something while having fun. The Threshold, a game designed by Cisco had clear goals from the beginning, generating very positive feedback from players: "The Threshold was a four-week long alternate reality game designed to build teamwork, build awareness of Cisco products and services, and to provide an entertaining and fun experience."
2. Tell a Meaningful and Entertaining Story	Make your story relevant to your audience and engage them in the unfamiliar by tapping into what is familiar to them. Don't get too carried away with the story to a point you forget it's all about the audience. The designers at LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production, Australia) felt that an intriguing story about the school's production studio would motivate new students to participate in their game. The "Safesets, Sabotage and Madame Blash" mini ARG (mARG) is an excellent example of a game that has a relevant setting and background story that is sure to entice players.
3. Don't Become Overly Attached to Your Story and Characters	Be quick to adapt to your audience's responses. Let them participate in the design process as the story unfolds. Interact directly with them (via non-player characters), respond to their reactions, be prepared to change strategies, puzzles, and/or storylines to conform to how the audience is changing the game. The Cloudmarkers were a self-organized group of players involved in the famous ARG "The Beast." They initiated a Yahoo! group in order to discuss the latest findings in the game. Their discussion was closely followed by the developers and, since ARGs are normally developed as they are delivered, the developers would often include members of the group in the game plot as it unfolded.
4. Plan, Plan, Plan	Even though you need to be flexible, lay out a plan of the events and outcomes. For instance, create a flowchart of the action items such as clues, puzzles, characters interactions with the players, next moves, etc. This will make it easier for you to visualize and strategize how the game is going to be played and will give you a better idea of when, what and how to adapt. Here is an example of a flowchart being used to plan the actions in Ascendency Point, a live event for the game Perplex City.
5. Create a Reward System	No matter how cool your game design is and how engaging your characters and story are, chances are you may still have difficulty getting people to participate. Instill competitiveness and collaboration by offering rewards. Make it fun. In the Duke's Quest ARG we created, it was a challenge to get players involved without a reward system. This can be a challenge when organizing small group ARGs which tend to involve even those who might not be interested in games just for "fun's" sake. A reward system might be that extra incentive they need to get involved. The Dark Knight ARG (developed for The Dark Knight movie), had a message from the Joker requesting players to submit photos of themselves in Joker make-up in order to receive a mystery package in the mail.
6. Leverage Social Media	Consider using social media utilities to both design and deliver the game. Services such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others can serve as a medium for puzzle delivery and for players to interact with each other and non-player characters.
7. Have Closure	It's OK to have cliffhangers for a next instance of the game, but make sure your game has closure. Players need to feel like they've achieved something at the end. This can be a live event at which players gather with characters for a final announcement, conclude the game going over their achievements, distribute rewards or even set up expectations for a segue.
8. Play an ARG	It is true, the best way to design something effective might be to actually get your hands dirty. If you want to know how to design a good ARG, play an ARG. By actively joining a game you may learn how to relate to your audience's feelings and expectations when designing your own ARG. You can find active ARGs and read up on old games on websites and communities like ARGnet.

I hope these tips can help you get started designing your own ARG. The potential for active engagement is inherent to ARGs and may help you deliver a truly effective and experiential learning activity. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on ARGs in general. Please feel free to contact me or add to the comments here with your responses to these questions:

• Have you designed or played an ARG before?
• Was it specifically designed to teach or motivate the audience to experiment with technology or a concept?
• What are your best practices and advice for those interested in using ARGs for learning?

Comments

[Randall Fujimoto]

Hi,

Great article! I am designing an educational social studies ARG about the Japanese American experience during World War II. I have been developing the game for the past few months and am doing a trial run with 16 participants starting next week and running for 3 weeks. Here is an overview and promo teaser video: http://www.goforbroke.org/learning/arg

The game is designed for high school and possibly higher ed students (and maybe even to adults that are interested in the subject).

I have had to give the game somewhat more structure than a typical "This is not a game" type ARG in order to meet the learning objectives in a specific time period. I struggled with this aspect quite a bit, but eventually I decided in favor of more structure and less open-ended gameplay. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on how to ensure that learning objectives are met while still providing the freedom of a typical ARG.

I can let you know more about my ARG if you're interested. Thanks again for posting your insightful article. It gave me some good things to consider during my development process.

[Enzo Silva]

I'm glad you think the article was useful to you.

When most ARGs we see out there are created for marketing reasons, it's good to see more educators like you trying to tap into this innovative game genre to create learning experiences that are engaging and meaningful.

First of all, I'd like to understand better what you mean by adding more structure to the game in order to meet learning objectives.

But I can tell you a few things we learned with our experience: people are busy and if they think the game is irrelevant or doesn't hold them accountable, they will either not join or leave after a while.

In order to try to go around this problem we introduced a point system and divided them in groups hoping other members of a team would hold the others accountable for helping complete the activities. Having an establihed "social network" where players can easily get in touch with one another and exchange information is crucial.

Make every activity/puzzle relevant and *link* it to the next step in the game and the overarching storyline.

Something we did NOT try (and we want to in the next game we develop) would be multiple-part puzzles that can be distributed over a certain period of time. We found out that if you sent a puzzle to be solved in itself (with no need to wait for other pieces to put it together during the course of, say, a week) players might quickly solve that puzzle and "disengage" as they wait for a new puzzle...

Example, if you put out a video, make sure it has a clue to the next step or event in the story.

Whenever possible, add a few live face-to-face events. We found that most people will participate more actively in F2F activites than Web-based ones when they have a chance to. Perhaps because they feel more accountable for participating.

My colleagues (and others) my have more experiences to share with you here in the comments.

There are so many things we learn every time we design/implement a game. I'm sure you will have a lot to share with us too.

Please do let us know more about your ARG.