Uploaded December 2018 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
"Transforming First-Year Orientation Through Alternate Reality Gaming"
University of Chicago
October 20, 2018
Patrick Jagoda, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies.
Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor of Sociology.
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are an art form that originated in early 21st-century information culture. Most games in this category, including Microsoft’s The Beast and 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees, function as collaborative narrative experiences that use real-world urban spaces as a platform, blurring the lines between games and reality. To accomplish this fusion, these games incorporate a wide breadth of everyday media types including text, video, audio, print, phone calls, websites, email, social media, locative technologies, and live performance. This presentation offers a case of an ARG called the parasite. A design team at UChicago developed this ARG to augment the orientation for the class of approximately 1,750 incoming undergraduate students.
Patrick Jagoda is a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and co-founder of both the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. He is the author of Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and co-author of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT Press, 2016). He is currently working on his next book, Experimental Games. Jagoda is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies.
Kristen Schilt is the author of "Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality," and her work has appeared in journals such as Gender & Society and the Annual Review of Sociology. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UChicago. Currently, Schilt serves as the director for the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to humanities@uchicago.edu.
"Transforming First-Year Orientation Through Alternate Reality Gaming"
University of Chicago
October 20, 2018
Patrick Jagoda, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies.
Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor of Sociology.
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are an art form that originated in early 21st-century information culture. Most games in this category, including Microsoft’s The Beast and 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees, function as collaborative narrative experiences that use real-world urban spaces as a platform, blurring the lines between games and reality. To accomplish this fusion, these games incorporate a wide breadth of everyday media types including text, video, audio, print, phone calls, websites, email, social media, locative technologies, and live performance. This presentation offers a case of an ARG called the parasite. A design team at UChicago developed this ARG to augment the orientation for the class of approximately 1,750 incoming undergraduate students.
Patrick Jagoda is a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and co-founder of both the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. He is the author of Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and co-author of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT Press, 2016). He is currently working on his next book, Experimental Games. Jagoda is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies.
Kristen Schilt is the author of "Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality," and her work has appeared in journals such as Gender & Society and the Annual Review of Sociology. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UChicago. Currently, Schilt serves as the director for the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to humanities@uchicago.edu.
