The Daily Grind: Are ARGs MMOs?
by Akela Talamasca 
May 13th 2008 at 8:00AM
Filed under: Real life, Culture, Events, real-world, Game mechanics, Opinion, Free-to-play, The Daily Grind
ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) take the normal boundaries between games and reality and skew them just enough so that the two overlap, offering a new way to think about entertainment interaction. Perhaps one of the most famous of these is the "I love bees" campaign, which was developed to promote Halo 2. Certainly hundreds played, and part of the gameplay mechanics was taking clues from various places on the Web to complete the puzzles and solve the mystery.However, is "hundreds" enough to typify the term "massively"? Given that you could play alone and never see another player, only becoming part of a grander, more widespread team, is that really "multiplayer"? If the entirety of gameplay isn't online, does that satisfy the "O" requirement? How precise does the "MMO" definition need to be?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
RedHatty said on 10:16AM 5-13-2008
Maybe you should look into something more current, like Find the Lost Ring (www.findthelostring.com) which is spanning multiple countries with 1000's of people involved in it.
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Chad said on 10:26AM 5-13-2008
I Love Bees definitely had more than 'hundreds' of players. I don't have actual data, but it was probably in the low thousands.
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Colin Brennan said on 12:58PM 5-13-2008
It was in the low thousands.
And don't make me come over there Akela. You know ARGs are massively multiplayer. I wrote enough of them to know. I'll cut 'chu. :D
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