WeQuest

Abstract

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are interactive narrative experiences that engage the player by layering a fictional world over the real world. Mobile ARG stories are often geo-specific, requiring players to visit specific locations in the world. Consequently, mobile ARGs are played infrequently and only by those who live within proximity of the locations that the stories reference. In this paper, we describe an ARG platform, WeQuest, that addresses the geo-specificity limitation through end-user content generation. An authoring tool allows end-users to create new ARG stories that can be executed automatically on geo-location aware mobile devices, leading to greater numbers of available stories to be played. An intelligent process called location translation makes geo-specific ARGs playable anywhere in the world.