This is not a game

If the instructions “Follow the White Rabbit” or numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 give you a conspiratorial tingle, ARGs may be your bag, assuming you’re not already spending your Saturday nights piecing together clues scattered throughout the Web while your pals shoot JagerBombs.

ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game, a genre that’s pretty much followed the Internet’s trajectory into the mainstream since the mid-90s, with The San Francisco-based game Dreadnot laying the groundwork for the many ARGs that have followed. For the lay-paranoid, ARGs can be thought of as interactive stories played in real time, in the real world, where participants collaboratively piece together clues to an overarching mystery while the games’ “puppetmasters” throw up the pitfalls and paths for gamers to advance forward and backward. The Internet generally acts as the ‘console’, where players find clues and communicate with each other through web sites, email and social networks, but also phones and at physical locations. There’s no fancy suped-up processor, virtual-reality hand held device, or even dice, making ARGs simultaneously cutting edge and simple to learn… >> continued on Metro.