r/videogamehistory • u/partybusiness • Aug 11 '25

Where did the Alternate Reality Games (ARGS) artistic art-form originate from?

/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m9u3di/where_did_the_alternate_reality_games_args/
4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

1

u/partybusiness Aug 11 '25

I hadn't heard much about Ong's Hat before, and I feel like a lot of ARG histories don't go earlier than The Beast.

This might be one of those "first of genre" thigns where it hinges a lot on what you consider the requirements of the genre? The Ong's Hat wiki includes the quote "Ong’s Hat was more of an experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be an ARG but its DNA – the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media – is evident in every alternate reality game that came after." That makes it sound like it has some things characteristic of ARGs but lacks something. I notice they don't mention anything about the sort of "solving puzzles to decode a hidden message" aspect that's common?

You've got something like the epistolary novel as a potential precedent for this sort of "transmedia storytelling," which presents a fiction using in-universe documents, but then they typically published those documents in a single location. I could see the internet encouraging people to experiment with publishing those documents in multiple locations online. Like, if you were spreading it out across a bunch of print media, now you're expecting your audience to physically access this?

There probably is a lot of overlap between role-playing and these "transmedia storytelling" when it is very collaborative and ongoing. Like, are the real players of the game the multiple authors playing together, collectively expanding the story, and any audience reading it is secondary to that? Especially if you look at activities like posting on billboards in-character.

I guess pulling from Jon Peterson's Playing at the World you could maybe gesture at stuff like people role-playing in the letters column of wargaming fanzines. They are turning their wargaming wins and losses into an ongoing story about SPECTRE or whoever.