I’ve been asked by a couple of different clients and partners to put together a summary description of pervasive gaming. Lots of people mean many different things when we talk about this (or transmedia, or alternate reality games, or really whatever you want to call it). This is what we mean, in a handy imaginary interview format:)
So go on then, what is pervasive gaming?
A pervasive game is anything that takes a story into the world and allows people to engage with it – to become a part of it.
This can be as simple as a game of real-life Pacman played on the streets of New York or Ninja Dodgeball under the arches of London Bridge, or as complicated as a three month long global treasure hunt across the internet and real world.
Whatever form it takes, pervasive gaming allows people to become key players in an evolving storyline, encouraging them to be extraordinary , to be the hero all the time chronicling and celebrating the experience across as many media as possible.
Wikipedia has, of course, summarized the experience more succinctly:
‘An alternate reality game (ARG) is is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions’
More details here, and a wider definition and more examples are also here…
Ok, hit me quickly with a bit of theory. What’s driving this?
The natural progression of technology is towards increasingly fluid and natural interactivity.
There’s only so far you can take interactivity before it becomes playful.
So there’s only so far we can take technology before we start playing with it.
The more people play, the more engaged they become.
Bring it back down again – what does this mean for us?
This playfulness is adding a whole new dimension to our consumption of entertainment, which is becoming increasingly interactive. Instead of being the passive recipient of stories and fictional worlds, we are active players within them.
Sometimes we are the very centre, the star and in control of the story we are telling (as with video games), at others we are still watching from the side, but with the opportunity to delve deeper, to find out more and to join the conversations that are happening and potentially influence the outcome (as with voting-based reality television from Big Brother to the X Factor, or television franchises that are supported by social media communities of its characters, such as Skins or Mad Men).
And sometimes it is taken even further, with the fanbase extending the fictional world way beyond the limits that were initially set by its creators – with blogs, fanfiction, fan art and community discussions building out a universe that you could spend forever in.
Finally, now that mobile phones allow us continuous links with the internet, combined with sophisticated interactions with the world around us, we need never leave these worlds. We can carry them around in our hands and in our heads, and can constantly be feeding into them with our own activities and information.
And what are you going to do with it?
The goal of pervasive gaming is to take advantage of all of these developments in technology and the trends in both entertainment and communications that have gone with them, and to use them to tell the same story across platforms, channels and places. Also – crucially – to allow people to respond, to engage with it as little or as much as they feel comfortable and in the spaces and formats that they wish.
And of course we don’t want to restrict the narrative or the experience to online. Bringing the action out into the real world is the key to engagement – to let people know that something is really happening, and that they could go along and get involved.
Ultimately what this means is that once you have signed up to whatever story is being told or game being played it could start happening around you at any point – a random email that looks like junk mail, a friend of a friend who you get introduced to at a houseparty, a youtube video that seems to contain a puzzle, a man walking down the street looking for his dog – all could be a way in to the narrative, a challenge to be met, an invitation to get involved…
Which we will be issuing for various games and campaigns this year, starting next month. Watch this space to play.
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