ARIS

To explore ARIS this weekend, I took a quick look at Dow Day, which is a location game exploring the student Dow chemical protests which happened on campus in the mid-1960s. The idea is pretty interesting: you are given the role of a journalist and have to investigate several areas of campus that were impacted by the real student protests to learn more information, watching real videos and interviewing in-game characters. I also took a bit of time to play around with the ARIS editor, which is the GUI used to create these kinds of games. It was very intuitive to use and had nearly all the functionality I was expecting out of it (only missed dialogue trees that merge again after initially branching). It looks like a very solid tool kit to build these location-based games. 

As for the concept itself, I don't quite know how I feel about location-aware historical ARGs. Sure, there is something to be said about literally standing in the same spot that some historical event took place while learning about it, but I'm not sure how much that adds to the experience. I could have easily read and watched videos about the actions and gotten more or less the same knowledge out of it without walking around in the freezing cold.

I think the idea of merging virtual and physical worlds through this kind of technology is itself promising though. The self-guided campus tour is a better fit for this kind of application I feel, and makes it possible to learn a lot about some new area without being stuck on the rails created by a real tour guide. ARIS and other location-aware mobile games are without a doubt an interesting tool for creating engaging experiences.