Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction

The ARGOSI project will use an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to support the student induction process. This small-scale pilot project is a collaboration between Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Bolton, and aims to provide an engaging and purposeful alternative to traditional methods of introducing students to university life.

An Alternate Reality Game consists of three elements: a series of challenges, an underlying narrative, and a collaborative community. While all three elements will be facilitated online, many challenges take place in the real world, and may be collaborative or individual.

The ongoing story provides coherence to the challenges, and the collaborative community provides a forum for students to share information, provide hints for each other and work together. In this pilot the focus will be a single area of induction: library and information skills.

The ARGOSI project aims to address four research objectives. These consider the issue of whether an Alternate Reality Game is an effective and appropriate medium for enabling students to:

1. meet the intended learning outcomes of the library and information skills induction;
2. create social networks during the induction period;
3. improve their confidence in navigating the city and university campus;
4. engage in, and enjoy, the induction experience.

Producing the game environment requires the connecting together of a number of components:

1. A story site that acts as an introduction to the game. The story site links to character blogs for the main characters in the game story. These are put in place in external sites, such as Blogger, EduSpaces and LiveJournal. This is partly for heightened reality within the game, partly for convenience, and partly to increase participants’ familiarity with a wider range of external services. Microsites may also be developed for in-game concepts, organisations, or to support specific challenges.
2. A challenges site that provides participants with access to challenges, the current scoreboard, and to enter answers for challenges, including uploading photos evidencing achievement of live (real-world) tasks, which will be used to also update a map of Manchester to show where challenges have been completed. This site will be constructed using Ruby on Rails, a rapid development environment well suited to rich web applications, with good support for automated testing.
3. A community site that offers personal profiles and community forums to support participants' discussion of the challenges and story. This will use an existing community toolkit (Elgg) with minor customisations.

• Nicola Whitton, Manchester Metropolitan University, Project Manger;
• Scott Wilson, University of Bolton, Technical consultant;
• David White, Oxford University, will provide expertise on the construction of digital narratives;
• Rosie Jones, Manchester Metropolitan University, will provide expertise on the design and implementation of student induction, particularly in the area of library and information skills;
• Peter Whitton will provide graphic design expertise to ensure a professional, consistent and integrated look to the components of the ARG;
• Adrian Stevenson will act as project facilitator and reviewer;
• Katie Piatt, Brighton University, has been using a similar game with her students for a year and the project intends to draw upon her experience and lessons learned;
• Student volunteers (and experts in the student experience) will be involved in all aspects of the design, development and evaluation.