Alternate Reality Games, typical of the culture of the 21st century, are a fringe phenomenon which fail to conform to the canonical definitions of games created in the 20th century. ARG are characterised by multimediality, information acquisition, massive participation resulting in collective intelligence, an illusion of reality, and an idiosyncratic form of narrativity. The article highlights the distinctive features of ARG as gleaned from the analyses of the prototypical ARG The Beast, as well as from formal definitions suggested by ARG practitioning scholars, and discusses them in the light of contemporary game definitions.
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