Key Principle
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are "narrative-driven transmedia games that unfold across a series of different media, involve multiple players, and do not explicitly announce themselves as games, thereby maintaining uncertainty about their formal status." (Chapter 7: Improvisation) Their critical function is not novelty of form but ontological: "Both participation in and reflection on an ARG remind players that a reality that is constructed or a world that is made is no less real for its original artificiality." (Chapter 7: Improvisation) ARGs are the book's design proposal — the form that operationalizes problem-making improvisation, dissensus, and the rupture of consensus reality from within existing media infrastructure.
Why This Matters
The dominant mode of improvisation in contemporary culture has been colonized by business: improv classes for finance professionals appear to solve the problem of future uncertainty — the same uncertainty that neoliberal debt systems are designed to neutralize. This produces problem-solving improvisation: emergent tools deployed toward a preset plan, reducing uncertainty toward a predetermined objective. The distinction that matters is problem-making improvisation: staying open to values, worldviews, and ways of living not available at the outset, constructing new temporary objectives rather than reaching preset ones. Without this distinction, ARGs read as elaborate team-building exercises. With it, they become experiments in making consensus reality visible as a normative construction that could be otherwise.
Dissensus (Rancière) is the political mode that corresponds to problem-making at the design level: "the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself" — placing "one world in another," making visible what had no reason to be seen. (Chapter 7: Improvisation) Diversity-and-inclusion problem-solving works by quantifying representation; dissensus works by producing qualitative confrontation with structural inequity. ARGs enact Rancière's formulation at the level of game form.
Good Examples
- The parasite ARG (UChicago): Players analyzed blurry Twitch livestream footage, identified the design space location, staged a break-in using a parent as cover, and photographed the full 121-object list and early RUUN sculptures. The design team improvised in response: covering windows with a fictional public art exhibit, creating a new character (the Engineer) distributing 11 encoded letters, rewriting the ending. "Not only did the player improvisation create new puzzle content and characters that did not preexist the action, but this episode also altered the eventual ending of the ARG." (Chapter 7: Improvisation) The distinction between designer and player collapsed; the game became a dialectical event: thesis (designers' starting conditions) → antithesis (players' discovery) → synthesis (cocreation exceeding preexisting givens).
- S.E.E.D. ARG (2014): ~70 high school students. In the context of Black Lives Matter and the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, players organized an improvised protest within the game's world. The design team honored context over controlled experiment, enabling the protest and rewriting the final days of the game. Proof that context is not a platitude but a design methodology. (Chapter 7: Improvisation)
- Dissensus vs. diversity/inclusion framing: The parasite ARG began as a "diversity and inclusion" problem-solving exercise; this framing was insufficient because quantifiable representation does not touch qualitative confrontation with structural inequity and campus climate. Shifting to dissensus enacted the Rancièrian version — making visible what consensus reality rendered invisible. (Chapter 7: Improvisation)
Counterpoints
- Cultural probe rejected: The author explicitly rejects the "cultural probe" metaphor (Nigel Thrift, after William Gaver) for ARGs. A probe is invasive, instrumentalizing, and carries the logic of colonial extraction and controlled scientific experiment. An ARG is a collaborative problem — not controlled, not replicable in the scientific sense, not aimed at isolated independent variables. (Chapter 7: Improvisation)
- Practical jokes as contrast: Practical jokes operate through an ecology of embarrassment — staging a false world and then discrediting it by exposing the naive dupe's credulity, reinforcing the game/reality boundary. ARGs invert this: the constructed reality stays real; the boundary dissolves. (Chapter 7: Improvisation)
- Problem-solving improvisation: "Yes, and" deployed toward a preset organizational objective is still conditioning under another name — it reduces uncertainty rather than expanding possibility. The test is whether the improvisation can exceed the designer's original intentions, as in the break-in episode.
Key Quotes
"Both participation in and reflection on an ARG remind players that a reality that is constructed or a world that is made is no less real for its original artificiality." — Patrick Jagoda, Chapter 7: Improvisation
"Freedom is not chosen: it is invented." — Patrick Jagoda, Chapter 7: Improvisation (citing Massumi)
"Not only did the player improvisation create new puzzle content and characters that did not preexist the action, but this episode also altered the eventual ending of the ARG." — Patrick Jagoda, Chapter 7: Improvisation
"The ARG itself is not a product but a process of collective consciousness, imagination, and realization of a world." — Patrick Jagoda, Chapter 7: Improvisation
Rules of Thumb
- Problem-making improvisation succeeds when player actions exceed designer intentions — design for that excess, not against it.
- The test for dissensus vs. diversity/inclusion: does your design quantify representation (problem-solving) or produce qualitative confrontation with structural conditions (problem-making)?
- ARGs should not announce themselves as games: the uncertainty about formal status is the mechanism, not a marketing choice.
- Parasitic media operates immanently — inhabit existing media infrastructures to make them feel "unfamiliar, indeterminate, and thus transformable," rather than building alternative platforms.
- "Context is everything" is a design methodology: when players bring real-world events into the game world, honoring that context is a design decision, not an interruption.
Related References
- Failure, Precarity, and Play Style - failure-as-play-style feeds into ARG improvisation as its collective extension
- Joy vs. Fun - ARG problem-making produces joy (collective intensification) rather than fun (tension relief)