WeQuest: A Mobile Alternate Reality Gaming Platform and Intelligent End-User Authoring Tool

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform. An ARG layers a fictional world over the real world such that, as a player moves through the real world, a narrative structure plays out. Typically a puppetmaster monitors players from remote, making adjustments to the narrative arc as necessary (analogous to a branching storyline). Many ARGs utilize actors planted throughout the area in which the game is being played to interact with players in real time. Geo-location enabled mobile devices, such as smart phones, are increasingly being used to track ARG players and to deliver content from the fictional world. Although ARGs are growing in popularity, they are significantly limited in several ways that prevent ARGs from being utilized by mainstream game players. First, there is a substantial cost in running an ARG if puppetmasters and confederates must be hired, limiting the number of players that can participate in an ARG at any given time. Second, ARG storylines reference real world geographical locations and landmarks in the real world to advance the narrative structure. Consequently, a particular instance of an ARG is fixed to a specific region of the real world. For example, a conspiracy story to be played in New York City cannot be played in London without substantial re-authoring. As a result, participating in an ARG is not a common entertainment activity for most. In this paper, we introduce a suite of technologies designed to overcome scalability issues of ARGs by automating the puppetmaster and by encouraging end-user authoring of new location-specific storylines. Our suite consists of: