In 2008, hoping to catch some of the attention surrounding the Presidential race, I formed a modest team of family and friends to create an alternate reality game called Man of the People. It was small and simple, but gathered an interested audience in its two-month run.
In the following years, our team created and ran three more alternate reality games called Myth of the Seeker, Purity Towers, and LARP Hard. Between each of these games, we also ran several iterations of a free-form, text adventure game called Transition Village.
These games gained a small and engaged audience, generating hundreds of posts on now-defunct forums made for players of alternate reality games.
Players submitted artwork and other content to participate in our stories, and their interactions with our fictional characters influenced story events in the games.
These were student and amateur projects, but the experience taught us valuable lessons about audience engagement, game design, web design, video and audio production, interactive storytelling, and project management.