unforum

[ize]

Q: Geographical location

[Phaedra]

Hi, and welcome to Unfiction!

Most ARGs can be played completely online -- they're collaborative, so if there's a live event and it's not in your area, you can generally rely on other players to attend and let you know what happened. But generally the bulk of what happens occurs over the internet, and is therefore accessible regardless of where you live.

Of course, you might incur additional international calling charges for calling phone numbers in the game, or things like that, but in general, other than the live events and the fact that updates for, say, a U.S.-based game might occur while you're asleep, you should be able to play just like anyone else.

And, as ARGs become more popular, the chances of a game based closer to you increase.

[ize]

Thanks for the reply Phaedra. It explains things.

ARGs caught my attention as I read the story of the finding of the cube in Perplex City. The end-game was specifically tied to a geographical location, hence my "worries". From an outside point of view, the idea of being able to make (relatively) short travels and experience live events certainly seems like one of the more fascinating aspects of ARGs.

After reading your post I went ahead to try umedia, but earlier clues on feelbelieve.com were gone after an announcement of a possible live event, and the umedia trailhead seemed quite dead after the live event was missed or not happening. This all from a beginners point of view at least.

So, perhaps I'll give Deus City a shot instead. However, it doesn't appear to really have started yet. Reading it again, it's actually your post in this thread. That's some months ago, so things may have changed

To revisit my earlier post and the idea of posting it here. As a beginner, I feel the factor of geographical location should be a part of a player tutorial. In my case, it was the first thing on my mind, and certainly not the first I could find an aswer to.

[notgordian]

Deus City is definitely in gear...although the jury is still out on whether or not it constitutes an ARG. Either way, I'm still playing it. (They started earlier than they originally planned).

There are a lot of ARGs going on in various stages...browse the "ARGs with Potential" and "News and Rumors" sections to find out about active games. Some of the big ones that came out recently seem to be Monster Hunter Club ("The Host" promo), MeiGeist, Studio Cypher, and "Year Zero" (NIN promo).

There's a lot more going on that I didn't mention...in general, ask around to get a general idea of the feel for games going on in the threads here, in IRC, or by checking out ARGNet

[Phaedra]

Heh, I just posted a more updated post of currently-running ARGs, which I'll just quote here:

[Giskard]

In addition to what Phae posted above, you could say that besides being a treasurehunt for the cube, PerplexCity also had a lot of ARGish components, which could be played from all over the world, because they were mostly webbased.

Then there were the puzzlecards, which you had to physically possess to participate in the leaderboard competition, but could be ordered from all over the world essentially.

PXC also had a couple of live-events, which were mostly in the UK and in San Fransisco, so yeah, in that area us European-mainlanders haven't been too lucky up till now (but the more Europeans start playing ARGs, the more attention we will hopefully get )

This thread in the META section also touched this subject for a bit.