Social Life
// April 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Alternate Reality Games
Social Life is an interactive narrative experience that unfolds in a fictional world online, with elements of pervasive gaming and alternate reality game mechanics. Throughout the semester, as we studied the body of public ARG content, it became apparent that most of the stories were being crafted around the same content, for the same demographic.
Given the social aspect of the medium, and the pervasive elements it taps (facebook pages, blogs, etc) it seemed like a younger, more casual audience would be an interesting audience to target.
As a result, we created Social Life, a mystery surrounding a group of friends that users are asked to infiltrate, and help figure out the unfolding drama through a series of intricately woven narrative puzzles including hacking into (fictional characters’) email accounts, matching data from calendars to credit card bills to see who is telling the truth, and deciphering information from photographs.
The “rabbit hole” and narrative hub of the game is http://www.sociallifeny.blogspot.com, the blog belonging to (the fictional character) Melissa Havergal. Melissa blogs about NY social events, her friends, and her upcoming wedding, and readers share in her devastation to find out she has been betrayed by her closest confidantes. However, the blog is only part of the story. As readers get more involved and start digging around they uncover the full story.
Another aspect we want to play with was trying to make the puzzles as diagetic as possible, unlike some ARGs which tend to follow a format of ‘Solve the puzzle, get a piece of the story’. The puzzles or nodes in Social Life were more woven into the storyline – Like figuring out email passwords and Flickr photo tags to get more content.
Fellow Game Masters: Ramona Pringle, Jonathan Swerdloff and Josh Satbai
Project url: http://www.sociallifeny.blogspot.com
