Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are an art form that originated in early 21st-century information culture. Most games in this category, including Microsoft’s The Beast and 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees, function as collaborative narrative experiences that use real-world urban spaces as a platform, blurring the lines between games and reality. To accomplish this fusion, these games incorporate a wide breadth of everyday media types including text, video, audio, print, phone calls, websites, email, social media, locative technologies, and live performance. This presentation offers a case of an ARG called the parasite. A design team at UChicago developed this ARG to augment the orientation for the class of approximately 1,750 incoming undergraduate students.
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