While doing research into Alternate Reality Games prior to pitching the idea to Simon Brookes in the Portsmouth Centre for Enterprise, I found that most ARGs were quite organic and freeform. They allowed the player to dip in and out as they wanted did not require the player to really submit much (if any) information about themselves, rather concentrating on a player’s ability to contribute to what Jane McGonigal calls in her paper “Why I Love Bees”, the “collective intelligence”.
I was concerned that by trying to adopt an ARG model into an Enterprise unit would perhaps infringe on the freeform nature of the game when considering the student assessment criteria that would be necessary,. So it was reassuring that when Superstruct launched a couple of days age (www.superstruct.org) to see that ARGs can be implemented with a slightly more defined structure.
The game uses a registration process that includes a “survival profile” essentially gearing players towards the goals that McGonigal et al wish to achieve, the identification of how people will live in 2019 and how they will deal with the 5 global issues identified by her and her team.
Posted by craigharkness 
