Alternate reality games

Abigail Crowe, the antagonist of GAME: Torchwood Mission Game.

Alternate reality games, often abbreviated to ARGs, are in their simplest form, a genre of multi-media storytelling.

Definition

A precise definition of an ARG is somewhat difficult to find agreement on.

A given alternate reality game will be oriented around "unfiction", a type of fiction that attempts to convince its readers that is isn't actually fiction but reality, and often uses two other important elements: the interactive elements, which make up the "game", and the fictional narrative conveyed by the plot and themes and the growth of said plot in response to audience interaction. However, it has been observed that a specific definition of what constitues an "alternate reality game" varies between people, and therefore the best definition of the genre is to not define it.

Many commonalities of alternate reality games is how they involve "real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community", often utilising "involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper advertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more", to deliver parts of the narrative. Additionally, ARGs are often used as marketing mechanisms.

ARGs and Doctor Who

The chatbot feature as utilised in GAME: Cybus Spy.

The BBC, in the early to mid-2000s, used the alternate reality genre to promote both Doctor Who and Torchwood, often making heavy use of tie-in websites to host parts of the alternate reality games.

The BBC's earliest DWU-related alternate reality game was Cybus Spy on the Defending the Earth! website, launched on 13 May 2006 to promote series two of Doctor Who, specifically the story Rise of the Cybermen. The alternate reality game had the player interact with a chatbot, the core element of the ARG that binded it narratively and functionally together, being sent across multiple websites to search for clues and to solve cryptic puzzles to find the code that unlocked the more conventional Adobe Flash game Airships. The Cybus Spy alternate reality game was also bookened by the webcast Secret Code.

The BBC then launched a Torchwood ARG on 16 January 2008, that had instalments released once per week, concurrent with the series two of Torchwood, often referencing that week's television story but building up to its own story arc. This ARG was more difficult, including more complex puzzles and problem solving, and the ARG even included numerous live action webcasts. However, as of 9 January 2022 (2022 -01-09), most of this ARG is lost media.

Notably, a decent amount of DWU content was hosted on the Cheapserve website, linked to by other tie-in websites; the Cheapserve website had actually been created in 2005 for an alternate reality game unrelated to the DWU, Jamie Kane.

However, after the decline in Doctor Who websites, it would be in late 2021 that another Doctor Who alternate reality game was launched, a whole fourteen years later, named #FindTheDoctor. This alternate reality game coincided with Doctor Who: Flux, the thirteenth series of Doctor Who.

In an online bonus chapter to The Black Archive reference book Dalek by Billy Seguire, he stated that the connectivity between the Who is Doctor Who?, U.N.I.T., and GEOCOMTEX websites formed an alternate reality game.