Dust, an alternate reality game which teaches STEM skills and is aimed at girls and minorities in their early teens.
Just two weeks ago, The Diamondback ran an article on university professor Kari Kraus’ new project, Dust, a part of a relatively new genre of interactive experience known as the alternate reality game, or ARG. ARGs are transmedia experiences, meaning they take place over multiple mediums and are not tied down to one form.
An ARG could happen over websites, books, movies, video games, real-world locations and whatever else the gamerunners can make fit into the narrative of the game. Usually, it will start with a “rabbit hole,” which might be an obscure link hidden in a Web page, leading to more clues, puzzles and other pieces of the story all spread out around the digital and physical world. Communities of players often spring up in order to pool their collective findings in relation to the game and hopefully solve the puzzles.
ARGs task players with being characters in the story itself. They are often required to go out to real-life places, send emails and collaborate, converse with characters from the game and impact the story in a meaningful way. Rather than impacting the story by controlling an avatar in a video game, players themselves are actually characters themselves and not just playing them. That’s an advantage no other medium has, and it can be both exhilarating and occasionally quite terrifying.
That definition sounds a bit nebulous, so to give better context, let’s look at Year Zero. Year Zero was a concept album by industrial band Nine Inch Nails. The album explored corruption, oppression, governmental tyranny and other such dystopian themes, accompanied by an ARG created by NIN frontman Trent Reznor and 42 Entertainment. In addition to the album, clues hinting at something else were embedded in promotional materials, stored in secret flash drives left at their live shows and hidden in the music itself. Also discovered: websites for a disturbing new U.S. government and grainy YouTube videos of supernatural phenomena.
Over the course of several months, a narrative emerged from the unsettling landscape. The community that had arisen around this experience pieced together a timeline. The USA was now a totalitarian regime, using drugs to control the populace and brutally oppressing all ideological enemies. Though set 15 years in the future, the narrative thrust of the game was that scientists had sent this information back to us in the present day so that we could prevent this bleak future.
In 2007, when Year Zero first began, I was a tender 13 years old. On one of the menacing websites for the Bureau of Morality, a bold red font told me to call a certain number in order to “report un-American and immoral activities.” Mustering up some courage, I picked up the landline and dialed the number. Immediately, a rough sounding voice spoke through the other side. “BY CALLING THIS NUMBER, YOU HAVE IDENTIFIED YOURSELF AS AN ENEMY OF THE STATE. BUREAU AGENTS ARE ON THEIR WAY TO YOUR LOCATION.”
I nearly threw the phone across the room.
It was no scarier than anything you might read in a book or see in a horror movie, but the intrusion into reality disturbed me like no other. It was one thing to see scary things happen on television. The phone was off-limits. That was for real people only. Even as a kid, I understood that it was fictional, but something about hearing a man over the phone telling you people were coming to your house absolutely terrified me.
That’s why ARGs can be so effective as storytelling mediums. That intrusion into reality is a powerful tool of immersion. On its own, Year Zero’s plot is not the most groundbreaking stuff. It acknowledges this with frequent references to classic dystopias like Brave New World and Soylent Green. But the clandestine nature of its presentation and the terrifying realness of the narrative set it apart from comparable dystopian plots.
That’s why Kraus’ Dust is shaping up to be a success, though she is using that realness in a less terrifying, more educational way. There have been plenty of educational games for kids, but with Dust, those children will be charged with not just watching an adventure, not just guiding a virtual character through an adventure, but going on an adventure themselves. ARGs are new and different, usually associated with marketing films and other forms of media, such as the ARGs for The Dark Knight and Halo, or obscure and dark plots like Year Zero. With Dust, Kraus hopes to use this new avant-garde genre for a more altruistic purpose.
