Reality Ends Here – Season 3: Postmortem

Posted on December 7, 2013December 7, 2013 by Kevin Wong

105 days, 191 players, 251 projects, 648 cards, over 300,000 points.

After nearly a year of work, the third season of the Reality Ends Here game has finally come to a close. I joined the project as a narrative/puzzle designer back in January by taking the ARG practicum class, and the game has come a long way since its cloudy inception. Past iterations of the game have been incredibly successful, having won the 2012 Indiecade Impact Award and being cited by Extra Credits in their episode about games in education. The game helped me take my first steps forward into the most creative and prolific period of my life when I played it, this year’s iteration is a bit different, the air of mystery surrounding the game isn’t quite as pronounced due to a multitude of reasons, inhibiting the desired feeling of anarchic excitement critical to the game’s success.

A typical Reality Ends Here justification

Nonetheless, I’m incredibly proud of our work with this game. Reality Ends Here – Season 3 has served its purpose, connecting its players into a diverse network of friends, mentors, and rivals, changing how they go about their everyday lives at USC, bringing any given idea into oft-amazing fruition. Reality Ends Here was my favorite game of 2012, and I am incredibly grateful to have been granted the blessing of working on its next season. I hope that I have been able to create an awesome first-semester experience for this year’s Freshmen, and hope to seem them step forward into fruitful, prolific careers of courageous integrity.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. PROLIFIC CORE PLAYERS

In terms of players to content created, the third season of Reality Ends Here was one the most successful ever run. Over the course of eighteen weeks, over 250 projects were created ranging from the punk, to the postmodern, to the absurd. This is impressive given that the 2012 Season had approximately 196 deals and the 2011 Season had 112. The core group of players consistently put effort into their work, creating roughly a new project each week. Familiar faces were seen regularly in the Game Office, allowing us to form a relationship with our players and understand them and their work on a deeper level. A greater variety of non-film Maker cards was included in the 2013 deck, allowing players to do work in different mediums such as derives, manifestos, and zines, marked by the largest number of nondigital games to have been seen in any version of Reality. Cross compatibility with the Annenberg version of the game allowed players to explore themes and mediums left untouched in film school, expanding their horizons substantially. One of the most notable additions was a “Solo Project” Special Card, which would bestow points for working alone on a project. While this falls slightly outside of the intended aesthetic of friendly cooperation, this was a heavily used card which players enjoyed playing with.

2. RABBIT-HOLE & “ARG-SAUCE”

Outside of trading cards and “leveling up” by passing predesignated point thresholds, solving complex puzzles

Tim Taylor was an accidental element of a puzzle that evolved into a meme. — Tim Taylor was an accidental element of a puzzle that evolved into a meme in later deals

was the primary means for players to get new cards. While nothing as complex or sophisticated as Season 2’s Minecraft world emerged from this season, the seven puzzles that we did deploy sparked players imaginations and had them exploring the campus, scouring it for its secrets. Every little indication or hint that we would drop our players would quickly pick up, analyzing them and seeking meaning in the clues. One puzzle had players rearrange a set of directions on basis of Oscar History to form a map that would lead them to a secret card stash. Another had players seek out a secret phone number that they would call to receive a string of numbers corresponding to a hidden book in the library, where they would find their cards. These challenges were quite complex and were rewarded with enough cards to reenergize a players bank and put them ahead in the game. This could be disconcerting though, as the biweekly frequency of these challenges might have caused players to construe these scavenger hunts as a core mechanic of the game.

Aside from the scavenger hunts, the “Rabbit Hole” sequence, the initial week of Reality where the existence of the game is kept secret and players are challenged to discover it, was incredibly successful, if perhaps due in part to greater awareness of the game’s existence. Nonetheless, we had over eighty players signed up in the first day of the game, and the game’s first deal was submitted within the first hour of the Game Office’s opening.

3. QUALITY OF WORK

While power gaming and forced-pointsing did indeed happen with this season of the game, all players put substantial effort into almost all of their deals. Players experimented with unusual mediums that required substantial effort to pull off, such as animated shorts, Kickstarter Projects, drawn-on-films, and faux New Wave. Video-based deals were substantially longer, the longest reaching upwards of seventeen minutes. Projects made in the were submitted to festivals, and were screened in CNTV 101. One team developed a particularly distinct punk aesthetic, dealing with queer themes in all of their diverse work. Another player wrote a full season of full-length courtroom dramas. The most notable project to have emerged from the game is the UNI School of Bollywood Arts, a transmedia franchise taking place in an alternate universe where India has colonized Hollywood, resulting in a film school dedicated to Bollywood film. The franchise consisted of a successful crowdfunding campaign, a series bible, and a short film, created by a large team with a pronounced structure, complete with auditions, casting calls, and dedicated roles, resulting in likely the largest and most complex project to have ever emerged from the game.

4. BALANCING & NEW MECHANICS

All of Reality‘s Green Maker Cards were redesigned to accommodate special challenges that could be completed for point bonuses, incentivizing increased effort and higher quality work. This resulted in better, more complex deals that were not necessarily “thrown together”. Players had a lot of fun attempting to fulfill these optional objectives and played more competitively.

One of the most controversial new mechanics was the “Scan Card”, a mysterious card which could only be acquired by solving a puzzle. The Scan Card had a QR-code, which, if played, rolled a dice and applied a random effect to the deal it was applied to. One play may double the points of a deal or win players additional cards, other plays could destroy the Scan card, reward other players points, or delay the deal’s publication to the next week, essentially making the choice of playing the card one of high risk. Players initially played the Scan Card with gusto until Logan Austin rolled the “Self-Destruct” effect, forcing him to tear apart the card. All players used the Scan Card very conservatively thereafter.

5. MINIMAL EMBEDDED NARRATIVE

The original design of Season 3 had an underlying narrative to it, aligning it with other traditional ARGs, which would be delivered through notes left by an opponent to the Reality Committee that players would discover at the end of each puzzle sequence. This entire element of the game was cut, as interacting with embedded narrative is an aesthetic of consumption, which contradicts the game’s intended goal of promoting creation, distancing players from the game’s goal of fostering creativity and collaboration within its player base. Instead, a similar narrative arc appeared emergently as previous years players would interfere with the game, granting players overpowered cards intended to be removed from the system by putting them through unusual and difficult challenges.

Nonetheless, the embedded narrative elements survived and were included into the game enhanced player’s experiences substantially. The first element was “Vintage Cards”, cards that were used in the game’s previous decades that we found and included in the game as rewards for solving puzzles. These Vintage Cards could be played like any other game card, and alluded to the game’s history of being played by students as an underground subculture.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. DROPOFF

While the player base for Season 3 is the largest it has ever been, the drop in active players was more pronounced than we expected. The game started with a group of nearly 170 players, but dropped off substantially as the semester ramped up, going down to twenty players and ending with a core group of roughly sixteen players. While this core group was indeed prolific, it is surprising to see how drastically the number of players dropped off after the first few weeks. Substantial drop-offs have been characteristic of previous seasons of the game given the plethora of other commitments students have, ranging from fraternity commitments, to midterms, clubs, and non-game related projects, the players that do survive and remain committed and passionate about DIY-media making go on to create the game’s best content. Nonetheless, when designing future iterations of the game, Reality Game Runners should take into consideration the reasons that this phenomenon takes place and take measures to keep players engaged with playing and project-creation without compromising the game’s core aesthetics of aggressive, creative competition and self-motivated, creative agency.

2. “POINTSING”

“Pointsing” was a term that players coined to describe the forced integration of loosely-justified cards into deals in an attempt to maximize the score-value of an individual project or any other behavior that may be construed as “pushing the rules” of the game in order to maximize the score of a deal. While this behavior did create interesting dramatics and make for more competitive, aggressive play from other players, I am concerned about the effect that this behavior might have on other players. Richard Bartle’s categorization of players of MUDs posits that the behavior of different kinds of players in a game space can substantially affect the game experience for other players. “Power-gamers” that aggressively balance and min-max their builds and play styles can potentially overpower other players and make them feel impotent and powerless, disincentivizing their continued play given the knowledge that they could not necessarily match up points-wise against the other teams. While the negative feedback system integrated into the cards with the “depletion” mechanic reduced each card’s value with each consecutive use, this behavior was still present. One thing that could be done to address this issue is to better communicate the fact that the Reality Committee pick weekly winners in terms of both points and quality.

3. UNIMPLEMENTED MECHANICS & CONTENT

A plethora of mechanics, rules, and content was created for the game during the Spring Practicum. Only a fraction of that content made it into the final iteration of the season. Many of the cut elements reasonably improved or preserved the experience of the game, such as the removal of an embedded narrative, which would have detracted from the exploratory, self-motivated aesthetic critical to the game’s success. Nonetheless, out of oversight or lack of time and resources, we had to scale back on many things, such as the complexity of each of the puzzles. One of the game’s first puzzles involved cracking open a hidden safe to discover a secret cache of cards. This puzzle was scaled back due to time and budget constraints to feature only a suitcase and a combo-lock. The collectable “audio-diaries” alluding to the stories and experiences of past students and alumni of SCA were cut entirely, instead, we included artifacts from the game’s past: a collection of “vintage cards” from prior decades runs of the game, a grainy image of the Bullpen as it existed in the forties, a blurry photograph from last year’s Wrap Party.

Perhaps the mechanic that we most unfortunately left out was the inclusion of “weekly challenges” that players can undertake for special bonuses. Shoot a deal using only a cell-phone camera, shoot on 35mm film, collaborate with someone you’ve never worked with before. These special challenges would have shook up the game substantially and kept players on their toes, constantly experimenting and trying out new methods of media-making.

4. CHAOTIC SCHEDULING

Season 3 of Reality Ends Here was run entirely by three people with the intermittent involvement of the Reality Committee. Esteban Fajardo and I were Game Runners and Simon Wiscombe was Game Master. Esteban and I both have full eighteen-unit class schedules and are working on Advanced Game Projects, limiting our availability in the office during the week’s peak periods and ability to create complex, involving challenges that multiple groups of players can engage with. One particularly rough scheduling fiasco occurred during a “Double Points Week”, wherein the points value of all submitted deals is doubled, incentivizing players to create and submit as many projects as they can during that week. I was running playtests for an Intermediate Games Project as part of my Usability Testing Class on the Friday of that week, preventing me from being available at the Game Office on that day, forcing me to ask last year’s Game Runners to substitute for me and run justifications.

5. TECHNOLOGY

We revamped the entire Reality Ends Here website in order to streamline the process of submitting and justifying deals, and for the first few weeks of the game, the new site served its purpose admirably and effectively. But past the mid-game and escalating throughout the entirety of the late-game, the website started exhibiting serious issues. Entire submissions were lost and had to be redone again, the site would lag and stutter at the most inappropriate times, players who changed their account names found themselves with multiple accounts, each with its own score on the leaderboard, and players would find themselves inexplicably in the lead with tens of thousands of points, or suddenly lose all their points. While the site is effective and usable from the front-end, it would be important to look into improving the sites stability in the next season of Reality Ends Here.

CREDITS

Designed by:
The Reality Committee

Season 3 Game Master:
Simon Wiscombe

Season 3 Game Runners:
Kevin Wong and Esteban Fajardo

Season 3 Backup Game Runners:
Michael Effenberger, Will Cherry, Althea Capra

Download the Game Master’s Manual at
http://realitycommittee.org

I Like Games

Posted on February 1, 2013February 1, 2013 by Kevin Wong

One thing that has sat on my bucket list for a while is to give a TED Talk. If I were to do one, it would be on video games and how awesome they are and why everyone should at least care about them.

I think that after the casual revolution that came around 2006, video games have infiltrated the public consciousness and stayed there. Add the proliferation of iOS and Facebook games, then everybody’s a gamer. I don’t want to get into the whole “Are Games Art?” argument here, since that argument was already settled decades ago, and any further attempts at justification in this day amounts to nothing more than self-aggrandization Instead, I just want to say that I love games.

Games give us empathy, they allow us to share the experience of another individual by simulating their identities and lives. By actually experiencing the struggles of another person through interactivity, we can comprehend how other people experience the world more intimately than in any other medium. For one, Darfur is Dying allowed players to understand the crises facing those affected by the Darfur genocide, tasking them with protecting their family from insurgents and managing the limited resources of a refugee camp, risking their own lives to get something as simple as water. Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia shared the experience of being a transgendered person in contemporary society with its players, a kind of life that I, a young, straight, privileged, male, cannot naturally relate to. Yet, through interactivity, this alien experience can become relatable and understandable, and as a result, we can empathize with people whose lives are radically different from our own.

When teaching about the Holocaust, most schools go to Elie Wiesel’s Night or Anne Frank’s diary to allow students to observe the dehumanizing effects of oppression. If we were to take students out of the role of a passive observer of someone else’s story, and instead place them in the shoes of a Holocaust survivor in a simulated reality, imagine how much closer to home the messages of these stories would hit. Games have aspired to become more emotionally involving in recent years by asking players to make increasingly difficult ethical decisions in their virtual worlds. Perhaps asking players to sympathize with the victims of unimaginable oppression would be a step in a bold new direction for such a movement. If anything, such a game, if done artfully and tastefully, could instill understanding and sympathy within its players.

Games become even more interesting when we consider them as an interactive storytelling medium. By letting our own identities bleed into those of our in-game avatars, as in Mass Effect and Skyrim, we become more intimately attached to the stories that we can create through our participation in a game’s world. Already, games such as Half Life and Bioshock have exploited the perks of an interactive, explorable, medium by using virtual environments to tell immersive stories with rich, imaginative, universes. Things get even more interesting when you approach more experimental games, Spec Ops: The Line self-reflexively questions our enjoyment of violent video games through its subversion of gaming tropes. Journey abstractly touches hearts using a subtle, unspoken language transcendent of cultural boundaries. As a narrative and artistic medium, gaming becomes increasingly hard to ignore.

Looking beyond the potential of games to let us empathize with others, games most importantly serve as a social framework through which relationship can be made. Over a decade ago, Pokemon served as a social framework that united us all, and despite our diverse backgrounds and peripheral interests, most kids in my third grade class had a common interest in Pokemon. We would discuss the teams that we had assembled during recess, surreptitiously sneak our Game Boys to school to make trades, and be envious of the one kid who had that Shiny Zigzagoon. Ask any gamer you may meet, and s/he will recall fond memories of elementary school and the friends that they made playing it. Games unite disparate people, their play serves as a common language through which we bond with each other. Chess leagues, FPS clans, DnD groups, ARG communities, nerdy fandoms, MMO guilds, athletic teams, political parties, games have done an immense social good by allowing us to form authentic relationships with each other and become part of a larger community. If to belong to something greater than oneself is a fundamental human need, then games serve this purpose admirably.

Which is why the reignited controversy over violent video games perturbs me. While I welcome an impartial study on the effects of violent games, the inflammatory accusations that I see from pundits are disturbing. I owe myself to games: they were my childhood and their play served as a fundamental building block to my character. In the brief time that I have spent on the side of the developer, my affinity for the medium has only grown. Being part of the USC Interactive Media Division, I stand at the very edge of a rapidly expanding universe, and the future for the medium that I see being constructed by my friends, mentors, and colleagues thrills and inspires me.

I see that future in Reality Ends Here, a pervasive alternate-reality game that has facilitated collaboration and creativity in the students at the School of Cinematic Arts. I see that future in Project Holodeck, a experimental, motion-controlled, virtual-reality interface for playing games. I saw a lot of that future at IndieCade, a festival to celebrate the creativity of independent games. We stand at the dawn of an incredible new age for games, and a vast uncharted future stands in front of us, to step towards a broader, richer, world of games is both thrilling and terrifying, to step back out of unfounded fear of the unknown would be a disservice to the world.

2012: Gaming Year in Review

Posted on December 3, 2012December 3, 2012 by Kevin Wong

I usually do a “Year in Review” post each year around Christmas Eve where I reflect on games that I have played and name a personal game of the year. In celebration of the successful funding of LA Game Space, I am publishing this blog post early.

My taste in gaming has changed substantially over the past year, I am no longer satisfied by epic narrative experiences and find myself seeking out brief, esoteric, and quirky interactive experiences that I’ll never forget. On my previous site, I wrote “Year in Review” posts where I would reflect and wax poetic on games that I’ve played and pick out a game as my personal game of the year. This year’s post will be a little different as it will include more nondigital and alternate reality games, giving us a broader range of experiences to discuss. My criteria for selecting games has also changed, and the games that I am about to discuss don’t necessarily fall under the umbrella of “fun”, but under that of “impactful”.

Games That I’ve Played

For the sake of readability, I won’t write about the games I played at the Global Game Jam, but will just say that Chelsea Howe’s To What End is totally worth the five minutes it takes to play.

I started the year off by playing both the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Both games were smartly done. While I felt that Skyward Sword suffered from a poorly paced introduction and midsection, I took note that the Impressionistic art style suited the spirit of the series perfectly and that the game’s motion controls finally made good on Nintendo’s original promise to create a game based around true 1:1 motion swordplay, and in many ways, it was the best motion-controlled traditional game that I’ve ever played. Skyrim was brilliant in it inspiring breadth, while narratively it sucked and there were a great many things that broke my immersion into it’s fantastic world, I was consistently driven to adventure for eighty hours with my Nord character Pixels. Alas, I eventually got bored raiding dungeons and hunting for improved loot, and went on a murderous rampage in Riften leaving much of the town’s population in pieces.

Then Journey entered my life.

This is the part where I sit at my keyboard and stare at my screen, not quite knowing what to put down to post. In many ways, Journey has become an important McGuffin in my life. I first played it days before I was accepted into USC’s Interactive Media Division and my life changed forever, I discussed it at length with my codevelopers at Subtle Stone before we separated for good, I played it to meditate before I left for college, and when I arrived at IMD, I discovered that it touched and inspired the souls of the colleagues that I was about to share my career with. Somehow, we had gathered around Journey collectively as an experience that had shaped, defined, and moved our infantile career in gaming.

But yes, Journey was something special. It touched my soul and shook my very being by speaking in a universal language transcendent of cultural boundaries. Play it.

After Journey I played Bastion. If I could find a word to describe this game, it would be luscious. Its rich coloration and enthralling music captivated me, its fluid combat and simple character customization was fun as hell. Most intriguing was Bastion’s narrator, Rucks, whose grizzled voice is as memorable to me as Morgan Freeman’s or Liam Neeson’s. His narration contributed much to Bastion’s emotional overtone, and I found myself invested in the story and found the ending to be clever in its self-reflexivity.

Up next was Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. I played this game on my laptop, and missed out on a lot of the tablet & touch exclusive features. While I didn’t quite like the game’s puzzles and found them at times illogical and strange, its aesthetics and ambitions appealed to me. Give this game a try if you’re into the esoteric.

I liked Dear Esther, and you have every right to call me pretentious, but you know that that’s not true. It didn’t strike me that the island was a manifestation of the protagonist’s subconscious until the very end, but that made the second playthrough much sweeter. It reminded me much of Inception, it’s a brainy game that will make you think and dig deep into your intellect.

Itching for a shooter, I downloaded Crysis to my Playstation 3 and enjoyed how the first few levels encouraged creative ways to deal with combat situations. It was unique, fun, and reminiscent of the original Far Cry, one of my favorite shooters out there. Alas, when aliens were introduced, the game became far more generic, linear, and unfun.

I Arrive at USC & Meet IMD

IMD 2016, The Settlers of CTIN, The Unnamed Game Development Group, The Indie Circlejerk. I have met no group of people quite like my colleagues in my undergraduate class at the USC Interactive Media Division. Their drive, ability, initiative, creativity, kind-heartedness, and courage are above and beyond anything I’ve ever seen, they’re both good as developers, but even better as people. It is both an honor and a joy to work amongst them for these short few years, if not for the rest of my career. They’ve already done a lot by introducing me to a few games, surprisingly, nondigital ones.

Two of the first folks I met from IMD got me into Dungeons and Dragons, having loved computer role-playing games like KOTOR, Fallout, and Chrono Trigger, it was necessary to discover where these games got their roots. When I signed up to join them one Friday night for DnD, I had no idea what I was getting into. The game’s ability to collectively pool the imaginations of a diverse group of people, bond them closely together, and leave them with inside jokes galore is astounding. I was a schizophrenic, dark-skinned rogue named Pixels with long purple hair and a goatee, and the situations that I have plunged my party into will stay with me for some while. Situations like rolling a critical miss on a disarm device check and nearly killing half my party. This game has brought together my adventuring party, and we’ve played many things together outside of DnD, like Uncharted 3 and the Jak & Daxter trilogy.

Speaking of which, what was the deal with that ship scene in Uncharted 3? C’mon, seriously.

Shortly thereafter, I was introduced me to Cards Against Humanity, a party game for horrible, horrible people. That game has the unique ability to reveal facets of a person’s personality that you would have never expected. Its good fun and consistently hilarious.

Shortly after, a friend introduced me to this digital web game called Frog Fractions, which taught me… things… Its best that I don’t talk about it. Play it, you’re never going to forget it.

I also got to replay the Mass Effect trilogy as part of a charity speedrun. Bad stuff happened, Garrus shouldn’t be tech expert and Miranda is in no shape to save the galaxy alone.

Reality Ends Here

The most pervasive game in my life at USC was this alternate-reality game that Jeff, Tracy, and Simon dreamed up called “Reality Ends Here”, of which the entirety of the first semester of Freshmen year is based around. It was introduced to us minutes after we met each other in the courtyard of SCA with a mysterious message coded into fortune cookies that we received at our lunch leading us to a mysterious URL on the web. After a bit of snooping around, we were led to a secret unlabeled room in the School of Cinematic Arts called the “Game Office”. We were given our cards and were set off on our own to create things. Less than 24 hours after the Dean of SCA welcomed us to the school, I found myself operating an expensive DSLR video-rig for our very first project.

I formed an impromptu team and for a brief month, was obsessed with competing with other groups to win each week by producing high-scoring media. We won two weeks in a row, our reward experiences: a tour of Jim Henson studios by Transformer’s producer Don Murphy, and an advance viewing of Gates McFadden’s (Dr. Crusher from Star Trek: TNG) new play. But most rewarding was the experience of playing the game itself, the anarchic and chaotic spirit of running around the residence halls with expensive camera equipment and a script that we wrote in a few hours has been an unforgettable experience.

Reality Ends Here won the renowned Impact Award at IndieCade for showing the most potential for games to do social good and change some facet of society. G4TV did an excellent piece on the ARG:

ARG? Card Game? Film Project? It’s all of that and more. Reality Ends Here started out as a project for USC freshmen looking to do something a little different. As the story goes, the Reality Committee will be keeping an eye on you and judging how you play the game. Players work in teams as they put together groups of cards that they receive in a packet. Cards combine to develop an idea that the students need to make happen either through film, animation, or game. Cards tell you what kind of story and what will appear in said story. Cards add points to your project, but make it more challenging with each additional item you need to include. You make it and send it in.

More than just the motto for the USC School, Reality Ends Here gave freshmen an education that extended far outside their classroom. Contestants got to meet special mentors and got their “missions” viewed by some of the top players in the business. For some it might look like a game, Reality Ends Here showed a handful of students the beginning of a wonderful life.

I fell out of the game for a good two months when life got in the way, but I do have a wonderful concluding piece for my participation in this project, and for many of the people who dedicated much of their first semester to the game, it has been a life-changing experience that truly set off their careers in film in an epic way. Consider for one the Xander Legacy team, whose project The Sci-Fi Supercut managed to find its way onto the front page of Wired. The team has since decided to reconstitute itself into its own production company.

Game of the Year

Naming a game of the year is difficult this year, simply because I have decided to encompass nondigital games into the mix, diversifying the already wide range of experiences that I could have through games. Dungeons & Dragons showed me the original promise of the procedurally generated story and the simple fun that could come out of collectivized imagination. Journey exists in my life as both a mysterious symbol that has the tendency of showing up at significant times and a game showcasing the potential of video games to make us better, more loving people. Reality Ends Here made my first-semester of college truly one-of-a-kind.

Indiecade Impact Robot & Game Designer Jeff Watson

What is different about this year’s batch of GOTY nominees is that each of them has rubbed off on me and has changed how I live in some small way. I’m not judging these games purely on their fun, but on their overall impact on me. Dungeons & Dragons showed me the original promise of role-playing games, the potential of collaborative storytelling, and introduced me to a valuable group of people that I expect to spend time with in the foreseeable future. Journey transcended the emotional ambitions of most games and touched my spirit in a way that I would have never expected from a piece of art. Reality Ends Here reenergized a creative side of me that atrophied over the summer and introduced me to some incredible collaborators at USC that I wish to work with for much of my life. To choose one of these games would shirk not only the other games that I have nominated, but the incredible people that were involved in my experiences with that game and impacted my life in some way, shape, or form. Playing these games with other people and gathering around the significance of these games in our worlds made these games great, and the people that I have met and shared this chapter of my life with through these games have been impactful on me.

To that extent, I must say that, with great apologies to both my adventuring party and the people of my IMD class, Reality Ends Here stands boldly as my personal game of the year. Wearing its dream on its sleeve, it exists as a shining example of how pervasive games can alter our perception of reality and change how players connect, compete, and interact with each other, fundamentally changing how we go about our everyday lives at SCA. Ideas come randomly and through the right team-chemistry, become realized in amazing ways. It is a unique experience and a highly sophisticated ARG that has changed the lives of its most dedicated players in huge ways. With escalating interest in pervasive and ARGs amongst the public, Reality Ends Here can set off a shockwave of positive social change throughout the world.