From alternate to alternative reality : games as cultural probes / Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, Peter McDonald, and Ashlyn Sparrow -- The game did not take place : this is not a game and blurring the lines of fiction / Alan Hook -- Alternate reality games for learning : a frame by frame analysis / Anthony Pellicone, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Kathryn Kaczmarek, Kari Kraus, June Ahn, & Derek Hansen -- Promotional alternate reality games and the TINAG philosophy / Stephanie Janes -- The coachella disaster : how the puppet masters of art of the h3ist pulled a victory from the jaws of defeat / Burcu S. Bakiolu -- Designing and playing peer-produced ARGs in the primary classroom : supporting literacies through play / Angela Colvert -- Games beyond the arg / Jeff Watson -- Methods : studying alternate reality games as virtual worlds / Calvin Johns -- A typology to describe alternate reality games for cultural contexts / Diane Dufort and Federico Tajariol -- Sociability by design in an alternate reality game : the case of the Trail / Roinioti Elina, Pandia Eleana, Skarpelos Yannis -- Ingress : a restructuring of the ARG or a new genre? : an ethnography of enlightened and resistance factions in Brazil / Thaiane Moreira de Oliveira

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) challenge what players understand as “real.” Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay is the first collection to explore and define the possibilities of ARGs. Though prominent examples have existed for more than two decades, only recently have ARGs come to the prominence as a unique and highly visible digital game genre. Adopting many of the same strategies as online video games, ARGs blur the distinction between real and fictional. With ARGs continuing to be an important and blurred space between digital and physical gameplay, this volume offers clear analysis of game design, implementation, and ramifications for game studies. Divided into three distinct sections, the contributions include first hand accounts by leading ARG creators, scholarly analysis of the meaning behind ARGs, and explorations of how ARGs are extending digital tools for analysis. By balancing the voices of designers, players, and researchers, this collection highlights how the Alternate Reality Game genre is transforming the ways we play and interact today.

Using textual analysis, interviews with game designers, audience surveys, and close analysis of player forum discussion, this book examines the unique nature of the producer/consumer relationship within promotional Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). Historically, ARGs are rooted in advertising as much as they are in narrative storytelling. As designers often have to respond to player actions as the game progresses, players can have an impact on the storyline, on character behaviour, and potentially on the final resolution of the narrative. This book explores how both media consumers and producers are responding to this new reconfiguration of the producer/consumer/prosumer dynamic in order to better understand the diverse advertising experiences available to media audiences today. With a focus on participatory culture and the political economy of promotional communications, this in-depth analysis of ARGs will appeal to academics and researchers in the fields of games, film, advertising, and media and cultural studies.

The first almanac, covers virtually all aspects of childhood and children, from the history of childhood, legal changes and attitudes to contemporary subjects.

Published to accompany the 2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Contemporary Photo-Media, 28th February - 30th May, 2004.

Conceived by Atkins as an artist's book, the main body is a collage of imagery, text and graphical elements. Ed Atkins (Oxford, England, 1982) makes videos, draws, and writes, reflexively performing the ways in which contemporary modes of representation - from bathetic poetry to computer-generated animation - attempt to do justice to powerfully emotional and embodied experience. Atkins' work is at once a disturbing diagnosis of a digitally mediated present day and an absurd prophecy of things to come. It is skeptical of the promises of technology yet suggests that it is possible to salvage subjectivity through a kind of sincere burlesque of love and hate, suspending a hysterical sentimentality within the desperate lives of the surrogates he creates. This catalogue, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio, accompanies the exhibition developed as a collaboration between Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. With new essays by the editors and by Irene Calderoni and Chiara Vecchiarelli, the book is accompanied by a scholarly timeline and an anthology that includes a selection of the artist's unpublished writings, plus critical writings by Kirsty Bell, Melissa Gronlund, Martin Herbert, Leslie Jamison, Joe Luna, Jeff Nagy, Mike Sperlinger, and Patrick Ward, together with interviews by Katie Guggenheim, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, and Richard Whitby.