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

Abstract

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. 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, 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. In this paper, we introduce a suite of technologies designed to overcome scalability issues of ARGs by automating the delivery of the game and by encouraging end-user authoring of new location-specific storylines.