Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to fellow ARG freak, Jackie Kerr, about whether or not ARGs were games. It’s an interesting question and I understand why people would doubt that or think that the genre was misnamed. Not only is the genre mantra “This is not a game”, but so many of us talk about the importance of story and how these are great interactive narratives. In fact, the first thing that I say in my Alternate Reality Gaming - A Definition is “Alternate Reality Games are, essentially, a big collaborative story.” If they are just a big collaborative story, are they really a game?

In The Study of Games, Brian Sutton-Smith says, “Each person defines games in his own way - the anthropologists and folklorists in terms of historical origin; the military men, businessmen, and educators in terms of usages; the social scientists in terms of psychological and social functions. There is overwhelming evidence in all this that the meaning of games is, in part, a function of the ideas of those who think about them.” That’s not unreasonable. We all bring our various biases to whatever we are defining. When the word “game” is mentioned, it will have a very different meaning to a football star than a poker player or board game enthusiast or video gamer. Though the difference between football and World of Warcraft may be great, they have some common traits. Traits that are also seen in Alternate Reality Games.

Alexander Galloway provides us with a rather simple definition of a game in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. “A Game,” he starts off the book with, “is an activity defined by rules in which players try to reach some sort of goal.” Where the football player has the ultimate goal of scoring the most points in a specific amount of time, the World of Warcraft player may be attempting to reach level 60. In Alternate Reality Games, the goal is to piece together the collaborative story.

But what about rules? It’s not uncommon to hear ARG players exclaim that there “are no rules.” Frankly, that’s just not true. Beyond the general social rules that preside in any community, the Puppetmasters do provide rules for their players. They aren’t necessarily stated as such, but they do exist. One of the most common rules is “work together”. I Love Bees did this quite blatantly by requiring players from all over the United States to collaborate in answering phones. If nobody answered the phones, the game could not have continued (at least not as it was designed). So, not only did the game have the rule of “work together” it also had the rule of “answer payphones”. When players state that there are no rules, what they really mean is that the rules will likely vary from game to game and make no preconcieved notion on what the rules may be.

For a long time, I had problems with something put forth by Espen Aarseth. In the first issue of Game Studies, he wrote that “[g]ames are both object and process; they can’t be read as texts or listened to as music, they must be played.” Like many of you, I suspect, I wondered what this meant for the majority of ARG players. They are lurkers. They, essentially, do read the games as texts and they do not take an active role in building the collaborative story. I was a lurker during The Beast. While the game was live, I did not make a single post to the community site. I rarely attempted to solve a puzzle. I, essentially, looked at what others did and read the story. Yet, when telling people about the game, I would say that I was playing it. In some way, that was how I initially related to the idea that it was a game that was not a game. But what I misunderstood was that I was not just reading them as a text. While I was not taking an active role in the collaborative work of building the story, I was gathering the pieces of the story in my own way. I was visiting the websites and I was gathering the various story clips. I was taking that information and adding it to the speculations and finds of other, more vocal, players. I was playing. Alternate Reality Games may just be big collaborative stories, but they require action on the part of the reader to do so. That action turns the readers, whether they are actively collaborating or not, into players.

Chris Crawford has been rather vocal on the idea of puzzles versus games. Where puzzles are static - giving players the clues and structure to complete the objective, games are dynamic and change because of player actions. For the sake of argument, let us assume that there’s a great term for the more static narrative forms such as novels and films and throw that in with the puzzle category. Much like puzzles, novels and film are static. They may be a means in which to tell a story but they do not change and adapt to the players. They are not dynamic narrative. Alternate Reality games, on the other hand, do. The stories change and grow because of the player actions and input. Entire subplots have been created because of player input. Characters have lived or died based on player actions. In building the story, it is often integral for players to take information from one website or character and give it to another character in order to receive more story information and/or propel the story forward. They are not just stories and they are not just puzzles, but they are games.

When it comes right down to it, I don’t see that there is much of an argument here. It may be a game unlike any you have ever played, but it is certainly a game.