Novels have a way of transporting you to another world, a wonderful, exciting place. Reality melts away and is replaced by images conjured from the words on the pages. Your body reacts to the vivid scenes, your heart pounding faster as the tension builds. The novel’s world is the only one that seems to exist…until the phone rings, snapping you back to where you sit. You grudgingly answer. It’s Alex, the main character of the book you’re reading; he needs your help! He tells you where to meet him. Over the next several hours, the book turns its own pages as chapters are rewritten, all based on your actions. The book’s world and your world have suddenly become intertwined.
While this scenario is far from being possible, experiences like it do exist. Known as alternate reality games (ARG), the past decade has seen the birth and increasing popularity of this new form of interactive story telling. An extreme, but perhaps ideal, example of an ARG can be seen in the excellent film The Game. When I first saw the movie, I realized what an amazing concept it was, and how fun it would be to actually be involved in something only half as good. The A.I. ARG was before my days of being technologically adept. I missed out on the Halo 2 ARG, but it put alternate reality games on my radar. I had no interest in the Xbox 360 ARG. But finally, one has come along that I found out about early in the game, and care enough about to participate in.
The Lost Experience, as it has been called, revolves around the deep mythos of the TV series Lost. Thus far, it has been highly entertaining, but not necesarily because of the game aspect itself. So far, web sites, telephone, TV comercials, a newspaper ad, and even an entire book have been used for delivering clues. The clues have been fairly simple thus far, all being solved in minutes or at most an hour, by members of the growing community. The community has actually been more interesting than the game itself. Wild and entertaining theories have populated the several blogs and message boards that have sprung up since the start of the game, and the community holds its collective breath as it waits for each new clue to prove which theories have merit. If used properly by the powers that be, the community has the potential to make the actual gameplay quite interesting. Riddles that require cooperation from every member of the community and dynamic adaptation of the story arc are two things that I really hope this game can offer over its expected summer-long duration. The potential is there, but will they invite us to wander the invisible corridors that somehow lie in both a fictional world and our own?
[...] What happens though, if I can’t come back? Indeed, that is a frightening thought, and I think I may have glimpsed the answer. The Lost Experience, a so called alternate reality game, offers people a new and different portal into the world of Lost. There is something terribly wrong with that portal though. It fails to fully transport its passengers, in either direction, leaving them in the ether between and in worse shape than the castaways of the show. The Experience is constant, grinding away and making itself visible at any and every tick of the clock. There is no page to save with a bookmark, no power button, no theme song or credits to signal the end. What drew me in, the idea of melding worlds, has become the games greatest flaw. [...]