ARG's

In recent months, I've found myself becoming more and more intrigued by this fairly new "realm" of gaming and the idea of fully immersing myself into an alternative world. For those that are unsure what an ARG is, it is a highly story-driven type of game that follows a fictitious plot-line within the real world. It's an Augmented Reality Game — ARG.

Most, if not all the ARG's I have discovered so far, have optional levels of immersion, so if you just want to play the game as a game you can, but for the brazen and bold there is always the choice to delve a little deeper and become more involved.

My first ARG was a location based mobile game called Ingress (ingress.com). In this, you take on the role of an "agent" either for the resistance or the enlightened faction. As an agent, it is your job to attack enemy portals, claim them for your faction and where possible link those portals together to create control fields.

There is a very powerful storyline behind ingress, that involves alien races as well as time travel but as I joined in 4 years after it started I felt I couldn't catch up with it...

Not that it mattered, I was happy attacking and claiming portals, meeting local opposition in person and the teamwork that is involved in some of the bigger fielding operations.

Next up came the alpha testing of what will be a new location-based ARG that goes by the name Delta T (deltat.com). In this game, you play an agent sent back through time by your megacorp to try and once and for all wipe the other three megacorps from history.

Your role is to plant and level up energy cores as well as to team up with friends to build bases. There's a treasure hunt style aspect to delta T as you will have to find in game items via triangulation. Not much to say about this one yet, but the beta test shall commence during the first week of August 2017, so I shall soon have plenty to tell.

After alpha testing Delta T, I became interested in the idea of an ARG I could play from home — something I could do on a cold rainy day when I couldn't justify going out to play Ingress.

So I searched... And I searched...

What I found was that, although there have been many "play from home" ARG's, many had already run their course and finished the story they had to tell.

Luckily, I found The Black Watchman (theblackWatchmen.com) This one blew my mind from the beginning. So once again you take on the role of an agent, except this time for a para-military group that investigates unusual if not slightly paranormal deaths.

Each mission gives you someone or something to investigate. Some of these things are coded one way or another, but not always. Most of the answers require you to step out of the game client and research historical events and/or persons/groups.

Currently, there isn't much option for immersion but that is because there isn't an ongoing live season at the moment. But when there is, you can choose to give your phone number which opens the first level immersion (phone calls, texts, etc.) you can also give your home address to begin receiving files, letters, and parcels.

For now, though you can play through the first two seasons as well as seven other campaigns that should keep you busy in the meantime.

Then finally, I come to NITE Team 4 (niteteam4.com). Made by the creators and set in the universe of The Black Watchman, this ARG has you playing the role of a hacker using a variety of tools to intrude networks and find the target. NITE Team 4 is currently in alpha testing, but is soon launching its beta test, so now is the time to get involved.