{"id":1315,"date":"2011-04-26T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2011-04-26T15:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2011-04-25T21:16:34","modified_gmt":"2011-04-26T01:16:34","slug":"alternate-reality-games-as-authentic-history-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1315","title":{"rendered":"Alternate Reality Games as Authentic History Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

Museums are increasingly turning toward alternate reality games (ARGs) as way to engage visitors and draw broader audiences to their collections. If you’re unfamiliar with the term ARG, Wikipedia’s entry<\/a> provides an adequate working definition: “An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.”<\/p>\n

Some of the earliest ARGs were viral marketing campaigns, such as I Love Bees<\/a>, a game\/promotion tied to the release of Halo 2<\/em> in 2004, or Year Zero<\/a>, an ARG connected to Nine Inch Nails in 2007. The Smithsonian Institute ran one of the first museum-based ARGs in 2008, called Ghosts of a Chance<\/a>, and followed up in 2010 with Pheon<\/a>, a mission-based multimedia scavenger hunt played both online and in real life at the Smithsonian American Art Museum<\/a>. The premise of Pheon <\/em>is literally out of this world:<\/p>\n

A variation on the classic game Capture the Flag, Pheon <\/em>is a competition to obtain the game’s virtual talisman, the pheon, to restore balance to a virtual world called Terra Tectus. Players first determine their alliance to one of two groups: Staves or Knaves, and then complete various missions focused on the museum’s art collections, exhibitions, and programs to earn points and propel the game.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Setting Pheon<\/em> within a fictional universe isn’t all that remarkable. After all, it is an alternate<\/em> reality game. Many other ARGs likewise place an emphasis upon alternate<\/em>: I Love Bees <\/em>involved futuristic AIs, Year Zero<\/em> takes place in the year 2022, Superstruct<\/a> (created by I Love Bees<\/em> community lead Jane McGonigal<\/a>) begins in 2019, and imagines humans have only 23 years left until extinction.<\/p>\n

But what happens if a game switches the emphasis from alternate <\/em>to reality<\/em>, as in a game soundly rooted in actual historical reality? I’m thinking of The Jewel of the Valleys<\/em>, a Civil War-based alternate reality game that will launch in May. Hosted by the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, The Jewel of the Valleys<\/em> seeks to link history and technology. As the ARG’s blog<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n

The game will kick off with a \u201cQR code\u201d and web address being sent to educators and students around the country. The website will detail a dark and mysterious puzzle to be solved through the use of Civil War era communication technologies and authentic Civil War documents in the Museum\u2019s archives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The game’s target looks to be middle school and high school students, and it sounds thoroughly engaging, what I’d call an authentic history game. Given the topic—the Civil War—I can’t help but make the connection to the way many other Americans have encountered the Civil War, through reenactment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Civil War Reenactors in Northern Illinois Civil War Days (2009)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I wonder—and I have only tentative answers to these questions—what are the differences between an ARG truly set in an alternate reality and an ARG that takes place in our reality, but in the past of that reality? In the case of The Jewel of the Valleys<\/em>, what are the differences between a historically-driven alternate reality game about the Civil War and a reenactment of a Civil War battle? Is a Civil War ARG simply the gamification<\/a> of reenactment? Or is there more to an ARG on an epistemological, narrative, and performative level? And finally, what can our questions about ARGs tell us about the relationship between games and our cultural heritage?<\/p>\n

[Six officers of the 17th New York Battery<\/a> Photograph by David Knox, courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division; Civil War Reenactors<\/a> Photograph courtesy of mctheriot \/ Creative Commons Licensed]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Museums are increasingly turning toward alternate reality games (ARGs) as way to engage visitors and draw broader audiences to their collections. If you’re unfamiliar with the term ARG, Wikipedia’s entry provides an adequate working definition: “An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world asContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[119,124,125],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["entry","author-sample","post-1315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-args","tag-civil-war","tag-museums"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1331,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions\/1331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}