I discovered that I’ve encountered many things in my life without knowing their names. When I was in college I dated a cutter. I didn’t know he was a “cutter” -- I just thought he was a slightly freaky young man who hurt himself in an attempt to impress and/or control me. (That was fun.)

Later, I fell into a mailing list that I thought was for Babylon 5 fans -- older and wiser, I now realize that a good many of them were furries, as one of their pastimes was to talk about which characters on B5 would make good animals. I followed along like a foreigner caught in a protest who yells the sounds she hears around her to fit into the crowd, the passion moving me without actually wondering if I’d really like to fuck an anthropomorphic fox who vaguely resembles Marcus Cole.

I wouldn’t, for what it’s worth.

And I heard about alternate reality games (ARGs) way back in the day before they were called that, when the failed EA game Majestic was announced. I thought this were a terrible idea. A game that went into the real world, that called you and emailed you? I was working closely with the Electronic Software Ratings Board at the time to create a privacy policy for the computer gaming company I worked for, and privacy was a huge thing on my mind. Didn’t this just break all those rules?

Yeah, I know. And I thought the iPod was a stupid idea too. I’m willing to admit I’m wrong.

EA screwed up because they required payment for the game, and canceled it for lack of players -- not the huge privacy kerfuffle that I had anticipated, but I suck at predictions. Regardless, online privacy and ARGs was just discussed in the ARG Netcast, an excellent weekly podcast about ARGs featuring some of the big names in ARG creation today.

I am slow to catch on to things like this, I admit. (See above iPod comment.) I finally heard about ARGs in 2007 and became fascinated by the idea. See, an alternate reality game is a game that claims it is not a game, but has a central narrative, often on a website or within a novel, with a paths, or ‘rabbit holes’ that lead elsewhere: other websites, phone numbers to call, even places to visit for messages. Each path will offer more information, a puzzle, or a clue. ARGs can have hundreds of pieces of extra content to discover, and it's as immersive as you can make it. The first successful ARGs were devised as marketing material for existing licenses or products (The Beast was connected to the film AI: Artificial Intelligence), but they've expanded since then.

Some ARGs happen in real time, with a definitive start and end. The Beast was one, running three months and engaging three million people. But as I am a late-comer, I’ve been more interested in the ARGs that connect with books. What I’m finding about novel ARGs is that they allow you to be as lazy as you like. The good ones are solid, stand-alone stories that you can enjoy at a casual level, or you can delve deeper and get intensive with your investigation. My first true ARG that I played was with my six-year-old daughter when we started reading the kids’ books, The 39 Clues. We follow two orphans as they discover they’re part of a very powerful family who are all searching for clues that will lead to great power. We have read two novels, and gone online where we took a quiz to see where in the family we belong (there are four branches of the family, resembling closely the four houses of Hogwarts….) Since then we’ve done research, figured out puzzles and played games to learn more about the secrets of the family, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Now that I’ve exposed my wuss characteristics, that I had to play the kid’s game to get into ARGs, I’m more and more interested. I got the Urban Sleuth app for my new iPod Touch, which is doing big time ARGs for major cities, but also allows for other ARGs to be uploaded and played for those of us in the non-important cities. It also allows for people to create their own city-based games, and I’m hoping to check out the content creator tools.

But my first real "big girl" ARG will be out shortly, and I can't wait. I got a chance to check out an advanced copy of the new ARG, Personal Effects: Dark Art, a novel about an art therapist who works with the criminally insane. The story was strong, creepy, and a decent stand-alone product, but I was curious about the ARG standpoint. I didn't get to see any of the extra content that comes with the retail version of the book, and this content is central to the ARG.

When I visited the science fiction convention Balticon in May, I got to hang out with author J.C. Hutchins and see the final book itself. Personal Effects like most ARGs has clues, numbers and websites in the book, but it stands alone because also comes with a lot of extra content such as ID cards for characters in the book, birth certificates, death certificates, notes, and, since the main character is an art therapist, reproductions of art pieces in the book. The amount of extra content was surprising, and I think putting the rabbit hole in your hands (like a portable hole from D&D) instead of making you search it out on the web will be a stronger pull -- the clues in your hand will likely pique your curiosity and make you seek out more answers.

(When I say "you" I mean "me.")

The book also has another phenomenon: one of the supporting characters is actually a person online, and has been interacting with people since fall '08. She’s a gamer and a blogger, quite active on Twitter. Whether she’s real or not is a matter of contention -- clearly there’s someone charming and whip-smart on the other end, and her game writing is well-informed. And as ARGs have been telling us since their birth: this is not a game.

I'll purposefully leave her name out of it. You can find her if you read the book, and if you're already reading her and you don't know she's fictional, then it really shouldn't matter to you, should it?


Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.