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Emerging Participatory Culture Practices

Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games

University of Sydney, Australia, cdena{at}cross-mediaentertainment.com

This article introduces an emerging form of participatory culture, one that is not a modification or elaboration of a primary producer's content. Instead, this article details how the artifacts created to `play' a primary producer's content have become the primary work for massive global audiences. This phenomenon is observed in the genre of alternate reality games (ARGs) and is illustrated through a theory of `tiering'. Tiers provide separate content to different audiences. ARG designers tier their projects, targeting different players with different content. ARG player-production then creates another tier for non-playing audiences. To explicate this point, the features that provoke player-production — producer-tiering, ARG aesthetics and transmedia fragmentation — are interrogated, alongside the character of the subsequent player-production. Finally, I explore the aspects of the player-created tiers that attract massive audiences, and then posit what these observations may indicate about contemporary art forms and society in general.

Key Words: aesthetics • alternate reality games • audience • complexity • culture • game design • media • narrative • personalization • player types • transmedia

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