Throughout gaming history some truly odd ARGs (alternate reality games) have been produced and all have had at least one thing in common. They are damn near impossible to participate in. Every ARG that that doesn't involve an iPhone or 3DS has been an incomprehensible miasma of cryptic references that only a small handful of people have the capacity to understand, much less the knowledge needed to actually participate in them, and those that are able to be understood by the layman are pointless little shovel-ware titles that just paste shooting targets over live video feed.
Now I'm certainly not saying that all ARGs have to be dumbed down to be simple enough for everyone; their appeal is in their cryptic nature, which couldn't survive over-simplification, but it would be amazing if some of them were accessible to people who spoke less than three programming languages, aren't master ultra-puzzle solvers, or mega-geniuses and don't have piles of complex decoding hardware lying around. Valve, I'm looking at you here.
Why do they all have to be so exclusionary? The home gaming console and small developers have taught us that accessible does NOT have to mean easy or simple, but why has this knowledge not extended into this branch of gaming?
Now I'm certainly not saying that all ARGs have to be dumbed down to be simple enough for everyone; their appeal is in their cryptic nature, which couldn't survive over-simplification, but it would be amazing if some of them were accessible to people who spoke less than three programming languages, aren't master ultra-puzzle solvers, or mega-geniuses and don't have piles of complex decoding hardware lying around. Valve, I'm looking at you here.
Why do they all have to be so exclusionary? The home gaming console and small developers have taught us that accessible does NOT have to mean easy or simple, but why has this knowledge not extended into this branch of gaming?
