Patrick Jagoda: Transmedia Contagions: Alternate Reality Games as Engines of Networked Collectivity"

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a form of experimental games that originated in the early twenty-first century. Most games in this category, including Microsoft’s The Beast and 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees, function as collaborative experiences that use the real world 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, live streaming, and live performance. In ARGs, players interact directly with characters, solve puzzles to advance the narrative, and build a collaborative community to coordinate real-life and online activities.
This presentation examines two science fiction ARGs, entitled A Labyrinth and ECHO, which I co-directed with Heidi Coleman and developed with the Fourcast Lab. These games were created from the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as a networked response to this emergent and unfolding crisis. These ARGs used techniques of performance, gaming, and networked media cultures to co-create a sense of community that was shaken during this period. The media flailing of transmedia production became a collective and affective response to an uncertain historical present. Instead of making a game that represented the pandemic or merely shared information about it, this game sought to invent new freedoms through shared play and improvisation.

Patrick Jagoda is Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and English at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab. He is also co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab, and a member of the Fourcast Lab collective. Patrick's books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), and Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020). He has also co-edited several volumes and journal special issues, including "Surplus Data: On the New Life of Quantity" (Critical Inquiry 2021 with Orit Halpern, Jeffrey Kirkwood, and Leif Weatherby), "American Game Studies" (American Literature 2022 with Jennifer Malkowski), and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science Since 1900 (2020 with the Triangle Collective). He is currently working on his next book, Story Lab: Narrative Methods for a Transmedia Era. He has also designed numerous alternate reality games, video games, and board games about issues that include climate change, public health, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrick is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.