It’s not a game to me
ARGs, Game Design & Secret Agents in the Schoolroom
The Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry (AGOG) is a sort of narrative wunderkammer of an alternate reality game (ARG), a “cabinet of curiosities” combining a rich and oftentimes mysteriously fragmented historical tapestry with what Rob MacDougall has called “playful historical thinking.” By incorporating counterfactuals and re-imagining the past, AGOG is designed to lead players into a newly enfranchised relationship with history, teach them STEM and information literacy skills, and help them discover the secret stories outside most history books. In the first full-fledged season of the game, middle school players raced against time to gain cryptographic, archival, cartographic, and inventor skills that would help them prevent a dangerous rift in the course of history. In today’s talk, attendees will also take part in an activity. With each season of the ARG based around a different intriguing lost invention from the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry, there’s always a new story to uncover, a new rabbit hole to fall down–and it’s never too late to change the past! The AGOG ARG was part of “ARGs in the Service of Design and Education,” an NSF-funded study of the design process and educational use of ARGs. The purpose of the ongoing research around the ARG is to better understand how transmedia storytelling experiences can be used as novel educational activities and how experts and novices create transmedia experiences and experience them. The AGOG team includes Kari Kraus (iSchool/English Dept.), Beth Bonsignore (iSchool), and Amanda Visconti (English Dept.) at UMD, Derek Hansen at BYU, and Ann Fraistat. Read more about the game and the research behind it at ArcaneGalleryOfGadgetry.org.
Speakers
Kari Kraus is an Assistant Professor in the iSchool and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, transmedia storytelling, and game studies. Kraus is a local Co-PI on an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant for preserving virtual worlds; the PI on an IMLS Digital Humanities Internship grant; and, with Derek Hansen (iSchool), the Co-Principal Investigator of the NSF grant underwriting the design of AGOG. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship; Digital Humanities Quarterly; Digital Media: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on History, Preservation, and Ontology; The Journal of Visual Culture; and_ Studies in Romanticism_. She first became interested in ARGs when Marc Ruppel, a PhD student in the Department of English, introduced her to Cathy’s Book, billed as the first alternate reality game developed specifically for the publishing industry. In 2008, in conjunction with the University of Maryland’s Mobility Initiative, she and her graduate students designed a mobile scavenger hunt that they playtested with a group of undergraduate students who had received free iPhones and iPod Touches as part of the Provost’s pilot project. Inspired by ARGs, the on-campus hunt made use of the technological affordances of the iPhone and iTouch – e.g., camera, phone, texting, and GPS functionality – to enhance interactivity and integrate the offline and online worlds in creative ways. The narrative framework was designed to teach students about University of Maryland history, particularly the Great Fire of 1912.
Beth Bonsignore is a Ph.D. student in the iSchool at the University of Maryland and a graduate research assistant on the ARG study team. Her research interests include the design and use of collaborative sense-making technologies that support lifelong literacy and learning, whether in formal education or informal contexts (museum, library, home). Specific work includes the empirical analysis of the use of mobile storytelling applications at home and in school (StoryKit), online communities for educators (Classroom2.0), social learning sites for children (National Park Services’ WebRangers), and the design of Alternate Reality Games as platforms for learning and collaborative-tool evaluation. As part of these efforts, she also works closely with Kidsteam, a participatory design research team at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Beth stumbled upon ARGs through her favorite type of leisure reading: children’s/young adult literature (and related fan-fiction). She started with transmedia works like the 39 Clues series and Skeleton Creek. ARG team member Kari Kraus introduced Beth to the Cathy’s Book series, the Amanda Project, and _Personal Effects:Dark Art, _and transmedia scholar/student Marc Ruppel shared MetaCortechs, an ARG based on the Matrix universe. She became interested in the educational potential for ARGs after helping Kari and other graduate students on a mini-re-creation of their UMD-history-based mobile scavenger hunt, and while investigating the 39 Clues with her two sons.
Amanda Visconti was MITH's Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow for 2014-2015 and holds a Ph.D in Literature from the University of Maryland; she also holds a master's with a specialization in digital humanities HCI from the University of Michigan School of Information. Visconti recently completed a digital dissertation with an innovative format and methodology: scholarly blogging, design, coding, user-testing, and a journal article, rather than the traditional proto-monograph. She regularly blogs about her dissertation at LiteratureGeek.com and tweets @Literature_Geek. An active member of the digital humanities community, Visconti's DH activity includes co-organizing a THATCamp (the inaugural THATCamp Games), receiving an ACH Microgrant for information visualization of knowledge flow in Digital Humanities Quarterly, and invited attendance at Speaking in Code and One Week | One Tool. She is also a professional web developer who has served in three past digital archives, web development, and usability roles at MITH.
Ann Fraistat is the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry’s creative writer; Ann created and deployed an intensive mythology and narrative for the ARG through a variety of media. She is a recent graduate from the University of Maryland, where she majored in theatre and English. Currently, Ann is a director and playwright in the DC area. Her most recently performed plays, cowritten by her brother, Shawn, include Romeo & Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending and Pandora: A Tragicomic Greek Romp. Her literary interests include comedy, historical fiction, Victorian literature, and works that put the old and the new in conversation with each other. This project has been her first experience with ARGs, but it’s probably safe to say that she’s addicted now.
