Spring Revival: Alternate Reality Game Breathes New Life into Old Course

Nick Barclay was a man on a mission:re-define the opening week of the Postgraduate Diploma in AppliedManagement at Warwick Business School. The Diploma is an entry-levelbusiness management qualification targeting the Exec Ed market.Designed to give a solid grounding in business for graduates withouta business degree, the course already had a successful seven-yeartrack record, but it was time for an update. Nick stalked thecorridors of the business school, keen for new ideas. He was nostranger to experiential learning and when he’d gone looking forideas for the diploma, one key message had come back to him:gamification.

Gamification is a hotly debated termwithin the game design community. Many traditionalists believe theterm to be derogatory – they feel that claiming that it is possibleto change an experience into a game by adding a few features like theright to earn badges is an insult to their art. But, increasingly, itis being seen as an all encompassing term for the implementation ofgame mechanisms into an experience.

All games are built on a familiarconcept; taking the gamer on a journey towards mastery of the task.Games employ different tactics to achieve this. Some act like puzzlesto be solved, some give out experience points as a measure of effortand completion; others award medals as part of a recognition packageneeded to “level up” and progress to higher levels. Gamificationworks best when it is implemented from day one of development. If youtry to shoe-horn these tactics later in development, the result isoften messy and nonsensical. It is important to set out to make agame, and then look to make it serious, rather than setting outserious and ending up with a game.

Nick Barclay appreciated all of thisand wanted badly to implement such things into his solution, but hehad a problem. He didn’t have fifty grand. Bespoke computer games,above all other attributes, are expensive. Nick’s dream solutioninvolved groups of learners playing a game that simulated thecomplete running of a business while he pulled the strings behind thescenes. Nothing available “off-the-shelf” was up to the task; thegames were either far too simplistic, or perversely, far too complex.For his budget this simply could not be done. Or so he thought untilI introduced the concept of the Alternate Reality Game, or ARG.

A brief explanation of theAlternate Reality Game concept

ARGs create afictional scenario in which your learners interact with people andinformation to play out a story in the form of a game. Imagine arole-play on steroids, where the participants don’t have to pretendto be anyone else, it’s the world around them that changes. Forlearners immersed in an ARG, it becomes increasingly difficult todefine what is actually real and what is faked. For example, youmight give your participants a task that will involve themresearching something online. You know they will almost certainlyGoogle for the answer, so you’ve rigged the system so that aWebsite of your creation comes up first for the term they will searchfor. This game is as real as it gets. Participants in an ARG can takeactions and approaches they might be too afraid to pursue in thereal-world. But an ARG is an environment for safe-failure andexperimentation.

ARGs grew up as a part of viralmarketing campaigns, but today they are increasingly popular in theworld of learning. However, I hadn’t heard of a face-to-face coursethat was previously delivered in a lecture/seminar format beingconverted into an ARG. This didn’t stop Nick going for it; the ideaappealed to him too much to let it lie. What was even better was theprice tag; less than a tenth of the cost involved in building acomputer game.

Building the experience

The induction week of the diploma is animmersion week, designed to get participants fired up to learn moreabout the models and theories that they need to leverage in order tocreate better businesses. As such, we had almost free-range to craftan experience that would highlight the need for participants to knowmore about marketing, finance, operations, and strategy. Initially weformed the basis of the narrative around a case study scenario; afailing water cooler company in need of rescue. We took this premiseand made it epic; jobs would be lost, lives ruined, and a town leftdestitute if the participants failed to save the company during thecourse of the game.

The game would be played over thecourse of four days of the five-day induction week. HT2 (the author’scompany) would act as remote puppet masters; controlling telephonelines, e-mails and other Web-based assets, while Nick and hiscolleague Mark would act as puppet masters “on the ground,”manipulating the game in response to players actions and responses.While the case study acted as a foundation for the game, we wereflexible enough to change the environment as we needed to pushparticipants in a certain direction.

We worked hard to make our ARG a“fully-realized world;” the company in question had a Websitethat worked, with links to other Websites that really existed (see: https://www.campdensprings.com/).Employees had e-mails that worked and that were responded to “incharacter.” Workers also had exposure elsewhere on the internet;Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and personal blogs were all included.While all of this involved a level of effort to set up, none of itcost any real money. The company’s Websites were built withWordPress; the telephone number was actually a Skype number to beanswered on my laptop, the social network presences were all free ofcharge. We took time over developing our key characters, making suretheir names were realistic but unique so that if our participantswere to search for them, our entries would come up first (try RebeccaDellingford). All of this online work was augmented with real-lifeactors brought in to play select company roles in the face-to-faceenvironment as and when we required their intervention.

Running the ARG

On the first day of the ARG,participants were shown a “flash forward” video that showed thepotential future of the company: bankruptcy and disaster. Split intogroups, the participants were then issued a brown paper envelope witha USB thumb drive inside. The thumb drive had a range of materials onit, including a briefing from the chairman of the company, detailedcompany information, and a range of additional services that theycould purchase, should they need a helping hand to piece the storytogether.

The teams then had three days to puttogether a rescue plan in time for a big presentation to the board onthe fourth day. They needed to research, to question, and to analyzetheir findings to come up with a coherent plan of action. As theyresearched and probed, further new clues were unveiled that helpedparticipants to piece the story together. At the end of each day theteams were pitted against each other in games designed to exposeelements of each team’s knowledge to the rest of the group. Many ofthe clues we left utilized QR codes as a means of communication. QRcodes are 2-D bar-codes; square patterns that are readable bysmartphone apps and can store information like a Website URL. None ofthe participants had, to their knowledge, seen one of these QR codesbefore. By the end of the first evening one of the groups figured outthat what the QR codes were, captured one and used it to find an“employee’s” Facebook profile. By day two, all of the groupsknew what they were.

All of this amounted to a hugelyimmersive induction week to the Diploma. Running the experience wasbusy, fast moving, and fun according to Nick, but he also thought theformat really excelled because it was both exciting and capable ofbeing flexed in real-time. Participant feedback was stunning, withplayers commenting that they really enjoyed “discovery throughdoing,” which helped to highlight things not always seen intraditional style courses. Others commented that the experience was“very refreshing;” that they“really learned a tremendous amount,” found the ARG “extremelyenjoyable” and “very realistic,” and that the whole experience“challenged you to think in different ways.” The winningteam also had the honor of becoming the namesakes of our ARG: SpringRevival.

I firmly believe that this approach togame-based learning is both affordable and sustainable. We’ll berunning the ARG again for the next cohort of participants at WarwickBusiness School in the coming months and we fully expect the secondplay-through to be even better than the first.