Cheshire: A Design Framework for Alternate Reality Games

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) have come very far in the last ten years. Great works by the likes of Steve Peters, Christy Dena and Jim Miller have pushed the genre forward, but it still lacks some of the tools created for other types of games. The design process for ARGs is, in the best case scenario, complicated. Given the enormous amount of media these kind of games use, things can escalate from complex to utterly impossible in the blink of an eye and sadly, there are currently no tools to help solve this problem or lower its impact in the finished game. This paper proposes Cheshire, a framework to enable categorization of games and alignment of these with defined sets of patterns previously detected in the design of the experience. This tool will help maintain the generated experience as loyal to the original concept as possible, and graphically represent which elements will support it in the best manner.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaíso, Chile

   Alejandro I. Baltra

Editors and Affiliations

1. Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), São Carlos, SP, Brasil

   Junia Coutinho Anacleto

2. Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, 2356 Main Mall, V6T 1Z4, Vancouver, BC, Canada

   Sidney Fels

3. School of Computing, Queen’s University, K7L 3N6, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

   Nicholas Graham

4. University of Ontario Institute of Technology, L1H 7K4, Oshawa, ON, Canada

   Bill Kapralos

5. Northeastern University, 02115,, Boston, MA, USA

   Magy Saif El-Nasr

6. University of Saskatchewan, S7H S7W, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

   Kevin Stanley

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