Scaling Mobile Alternate Reality Games with Geo-location Translation

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are interactive narrative experiences that engage the player by layering a fictional world over the real world. Mobile ARGs use geo-location aware devices to track players as they visit real-world locations to progress the story. ARG stories are often geo-specific, requiring players to visit specific locations in the world and, as a result, ARGs are played infrequently and only by those who live within proximity of the locations that the stories reference. We present a solution to the geo-specificity problem called location translation, which transforms ARG stories from one geographical location to another, making them playable anywhere. We show that location translation addresses fundamental scalability challenges that arise from geo-specificity. 1 Alternate Reality Games Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) have recently emerged as a new genre of games. ARGs are interactive narrative experiences that engage the player by layering a fictional world over the real world; as players act in the real world their actions influences the state of the fictional world. With the advent of geo-location aware mobile devices, ARGs make use of the actual, physical world as the environment for which the game plays out [5]. Typically, a game master runs the game and monitors players from remote in order to make adjustments to the narrative arc or trigger branching points as necessary. Many ARGs utilize confederate actors planted throughout the physical world to interact with players. The ARG genre is limited in two significant ways. First, supporting an ARG is effort-intensive on the part of human game masters and confederates. Second, ARG stories can be geo-specific—they reference real world geographical locations and landmarks requiring visits to these places to advance the narrative. Consequently, a particular ARG story is fixed to a specific region of the real world; a story set in New York City cannot be played in London without substantial reauthoring. Taken together, the scalability limitations result in a situation where ARGs are played infrequently and can only be played by those who live within proximity of the region in which the game story is set. How can one reduce the need for human confederate actors and game master? The use of virtual agents, exemplified by the tour guides described by Lim and Aylett [3], can replace confederate actors. However, such systems do not