title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: However, there is a discrepancy between, on the one hand, some archaeological and historical ideas about the scale of the Anglo-Saxon immigration, and on the other, estimates of the genetic contribution of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants to the modern English gene pool (see "Molecular evidence" above). Härke, Mark Thomas, and Michael Stumpf created a statistical study of those who held the "migrant" Y chromosomes and those that did not, and examined the effect of differential reproductive success between those groups, coupled with limited intermarriage between the groups, on the spread of the genetic variant to discover whether the levels of migration needed to meet a 50% contribution to the modern gene pool had been attained. Their findings demonstrated that a genetic pool can rise from less than 5% to more than 50% in as little as 200 years with the addition of a slight increase in reproduction advantage of 1.8 (meaning a ratio 51.8 to 50) and restricting the amount of female (migrant genes) and male (indigenous genes) inter-breeding to at most 10%.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Generally, however, the problems associated with seeking estimates for the population before AD 1089 were set out by Thomas, Stumpf, and Härke, who write that "incidental reports of numbers of immigrants are notoriously unreliable, and absolute numbers of immigrants before the Norman period can only be calculated as a proportion of the estimated overall population." Recent isotope and genetic evidence has suggested that migration continued over several centuries, possibly allowing for significantly more new arrivals than has been previously thought.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: A re-evaluation of the traditional picture of decay and dissolution in post-Roman Britain has occurred, with sub-Roman Britain being thought to have been more a part of the Late Antique world of western Europe than was customary a half century ago. As part of this re-evaluation some suggest that sub-Roman Britain, in its entirety, retained a significant political, economic and military momentum across the fifth century and even the bulk of the sixth. This in large part stems from attempts to develop visions of British success against the incoming Anglo-Saxons, as suggested by the Chronicles which were written in the ninth and mid-tenth century. However, recent scholarship has contested the extent to which either can be credited with any level of historicity regarding the decades around AD 500.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The representation of long-lasting British triumphs against the Saxons appears in large parts of the Chronicles, but stems ultimately from Gildas's brief and elusive reference to a British victory at Mons Badonicus – Mount Badon (see historical evidence above). Nick Higham suggests that the war between Britons and Saxons seems to have ended in some sort of compromise, which conceded a very considerable sphere of influence within Britain to the incomers. Kenneth Dark, on the other hand, has argued for a continuation of British political, cultural and military power well into the latter part of the sixth century, even in the eastern part of the country. Dark's argument rests on the very uneven distribution of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and the proposition that large gaps in that distribution necessarily represent strong British polities which excluded Anglo-Saxon settlers by force. Cremation cemeteries in eastern Britain north of the Thames begin during the second quarter of the fifth century, backed up by new archaeological phases before 450 (see Archaeological evidence above). The chronology of this "adventus" of cremations is supported by the Gallic Chronicle of 452, which states that wide parts of Britain fell under Saxon rule in 441.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Multiple theories have been proposed as to the reason behind the invisibility of the Romano-Britons in the archaeological and historical records of the Anglo-Saxon period.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: One theory, first set out by Edward Augustus Freeman, suggests that the Anglo Saxons and the Britons were competing cultures, and that through invasion, extermination, slavery, and forced resettlement the Anglo-Saxons defeated the Britons and consequently their culture and language prevailed. This view has influenced much of the scholarly and popular perceptions of the process of anglicisation in Britain. It remains the starting point and 'default position', to which other hypotheses are compared in modern reviews of the evidence. Widespread extermination and displacement of the native peoples of Britain is still considered a viable possibility by a number of scholars. Such a view is broadly supported by the linguistic and toponymic evidence, as well as the few primary sources from the time.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Another theory has challenged this view and proposes that the Anglo-Saxon migration was an elite takeover, similar to the Norman Conquest, rather than a large-scale migration, and that the bulk of the population was composed of Britons who adopted the culture of the conquerors. Bryan Ward-Perkins argues that while "culturally, the later Anglo-Saxons and English did emerge as remarkably un-British, ... their genetic, biological make-up is none the less likely to have been substantially, indeed predominantly, British". Within this theory, two processes leading to Anglo-Saxonisation have been proposed. One is similar to culture changes observed in Russia, North Africa and parts of the Islamic world, where a politically and socially powerful minority culture becomes, over a rather short period, adopted by a settled majority. This process is usually termed 'elite dominance'. The second process is explained through incentives, such as the wergild outlined in the law code of Ine of Wessex. The wergild of an Englishman was set at a value twice that of a Briton of similar wealth. However, some Britons could be very prosperous and own five hides of land, which gave thegn-like status, with a wergild of 600 shillings. Ine set down requirements to prove guilt or innocence, both for his English subjects and for his British subjects, who were termed 'foreigners/wealas' ('Welshmen'). The difference in status between the Anglo-Saxons and Britons could have produced an incentive for a Briton to become Anglo-Saxon or at least English speaking.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: While most scholars currently accept a degree of population continuity from the Roman period, this view has not gone without criticism. Stefan Burmeister notes that "to all appearances, the settlement was carried out by small, agriculturally-oriented kinship groups. This process corresponds most closely with a classic settler model. The absence of early evidence of a socially demarcated elite underscores the supposition that such an elite did not play a substantial role. Rich burials such as are well-known from Denmark have no counterparts in England until the 6th century." Richard Coates points out that linguistically, "the case of the Britons in England appears consistent with the withdrawal of speakers of the previously dominant language, rather than the assimilation of the dominant classes by the incomers."


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Several theories have been proposed by which numbers of native Britons could have been lowered without resorting to violent means. There is linguistic and historical evidence for a significant movement of Brittonic-speakers to Armorica, which became known as Brittany. Meanwhile, it has been speculated that plagues arriving through Roman trade links could have disproportionately affected the Britons.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: In recent years, scholars have sought to combine elements of the mass migration and elite dominance models, emphasizing that no single explanation can be used to account for cultural change across the entirety of England. Heinrich Härke writes that "the Anglo-Saxon migration [was] a process rather than an event, with implications for variations of the process over time, resulting in chronological and geographical diversity of immigrant groups, their origins, composition, sizes and settlement areas in Britain. These variations are, to a certain extent, reported in the written sources." According to Toby Martin, "Regional variation may well provide the key to resolution, with something more akin to mass migration in the south-east, gradually spreading into elite dominance in the north and west." This view has support in the toponymic evidence. In the southeastern counties of England, Brittonic place names are nearly nonexistent, but moving north and west, they gradually increase in frequency.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: East Anglia has been identified by a number of scholars, including Härke, Martin, Catherine Hills, and Kenneth Dark, as a region in which a large-scale continental migration occurred, possibly following a period of depopulation in the fourth century. Lincolnshire has also been cited by Hills and Martin as a key centre of early settlement from the continent. Alexander Mirrington argues that in Essex, the cultural change seen in the archaeological record is so complete that "a migration of a large number of people is the most logical and least extreme solution." In Kent, according to Sue Harrington and Stuart Brookes, "the weight of archaeological evidence and that from literary sources favours migrations" as the main reason for cultural change.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Immigration into the area that was to become Wessex occurred from both the south coast and the Upper Thames valley. The earlier, southern settlements may have been more prosaic than descriptions in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" imply. Jillian Hawkins suggests that powerful Romano-British trading ports around the Solent were able to direct significant numbers of Germanic settlers inland into areas such as the Meon valley, where they formed their own communities. In areas that were settled from the Thames, different processes may have been at play, with the Germanic immigrants holding a greater degree of power. Bruce Eagles argues that the later population of areas such as Wiltshire would have included large numbers of Britons who had adopted the culture of the socially dominant Saxons, while also noting that "it seems reasonable to consider that there must have been sufficient numbers of widely dispersed immigrants to bring about this situation in a relatively short space of time."


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: In the northern kingdom of Bernicia, however, Härke states that "a small group of immigrants may have replaced the native British elite and took over the kingdom as a going concern." Linguist Frederik Kortlandt agrees, commenting that in this region "there was a noticeable Celtic contribution to art, culture and possibly socio-military organization. It appears that


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: the immigrants took over the institutions of the local population here." In a study of place names in northeastern England and southern Scotland, Bethany Fox concluded that the immigration that did occur in this region was centred on the river valleys, such as those of the Tyne and the Tweed, with the Britons moving to the less fertile hill country and becoming acculturated over a longer period.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The reasons for the success of Anglo-Saxon settlements remain uncertain. Helena Hamerow has made an observation that in Anglo-Saxon society "local and extended kin groups remained ... the essential unit of production throughout the Anglo-Saxon period". "Local and extended kin groups" is one of a number of possible reasons for success, along with societal advantages, freedom and the relationship to an elite, that allowed the Anglo-Saxons' culture and language to flourish in the fifth and sixth centuries.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Nick Higham is convinced that the success of the Anglo-Saxon elite in gaining an early compromise shortly after the Battle of Badon is a key to the success of the culture. This produced a political ascendancy across the south and east of Britain, which in turn required some structure to be successful.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The Bretwalda concept is taken as evidence for a presence of a number of early Anglo-Saxon elite families and a clear unitary oversight. Whether the majority of these leaders were early settlers, descendant from settlers, or especially after the exploration stage they were Roman-British leaders who adopted Anglo-Saxon culture is unclear. The balance of opinion is that most were migrants, although it should not be assumed they were all Germanic. There is agreement that these were small in number and proportion, yet large enough in power and influence to ensure "Anglo-Saxon" acculturation in the lowlands of Britain. Most historians believe these elites were those named by Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and others, although there is discussion regarding their floruit dates. Importantly, whatever their origin or when they flourished, they established their claim to lordship through their links to extended kin ties. As Helen Geake jokingly points out "they all just happened to be related back to Woden".


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The Tribal Hidage is evidence of the existence of numerous smaller provinces, meaning that southern and eastern Britain may have lost any macro-political cohesion in the fifth and sixth centuries and fragmented into many small autonomous units, though late Roman administrative organisation of the countryside may have helped dictate their boundaries. By the end of the sixth century the leaders of these communities were styling themselves kings, with the majority of the larger kingdoms based on the south or east coasts. They include the provinces of the Jutes of Hampshire and Wight, the South Saxons, Kent, the East Saxons, East Angles, Lindsey and (north of the Humber) Deira and Bernicia. Several of these kingdoms may have their foundation the former Roman civitas and this has been argued as particularly likely for the provinces of Kent, Lindsey, Deira and Bernicia, all of whose names derive from Romano-British tribal or district names.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The southern and east coasts were, of course, the areas settled first and in greatest numbers by the settlers and so presumably were the earliest to pass from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon control. Once established they had the advantage of easy communication with continental territories in Europe via the North Sea or the Channel. The east and south coast provinces may never have fragmented to the extent of some areas inland and by the end of the sixth century they were already beginning to expand by annexing smaller neighbours. Barbara Yorke suggests that such aggressiveness must have encouraged areas which did not already possess military protection in the form of kings and their armies to acquire their own war-leaders or protection alliances. By the time of the Tribal Hidage there were also two large 'inland' kingdoms, those of the Mercians and West Saxons, whose spectacular growth we can trace in par in our sources for the seventh century, but it is not clear how far this expansion had proceeded by the end of the sixth century.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: What Bede seems to imply in his "Bretwalda" list of the elite is the ability to extract tribute and overawe and/or protect communities, which may well have been relatively short-lived in any one instance, but ostensibly "Anglo-Saxon" dynasties variously replaced one another in this role in a discontinuous but influential and potent roll call of warrior elites, with very few interruptions from other "British" warlords. The success of this elite was felt beyond their geography, to include neighbouring British territories in the centre and west of what later became England, and even the far west of the island. Again, Bede was very clear that English imperium could on occasion encompass British and English kingships alike, and that Britons and Angles marched to war together in the early seventh century, under both British and English kings. It is Bede who provides the most vivid picture of a late sixth- and early seventh-century Anglian warlord in action, in the person of Æthelfrith of Northumbria, King of Bernicia (a kingdom with a non-English name), who rapidly built up a personal 'empire' by military victories over the Britons of the North, the Scots of Dalriada, the Angles of Deira and the Britons of north-eastern Wales, only ultimately to experience disaster at the hands of Rædwald of East Anglia.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Where arable cultivation continued in early Anglo-Saxon England, there seems to have been considerable continuity with the Roman period in both field layout and arable practices, although we do not know whether there were also changes to patterns of tenure or the regulation of cultivation. The greatest perceptible alterations in land usage between about AD 400 and 600 are therefore in the proportions of the land of each community that lay under grass or the plough, rather than in changes to the layout or management of arable fields.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The Anglo-Saxons settled in small groups covering a handful of widely dispersed local communities. These farms were for the most part mobile. This mobility, which was typical across much of Northern Europe took two forms: the gradual shifting of the settlement within its boundaries or the complete relocation of the settlement. These shifting settlements (called "Wandersiedlungen" or "wandering settlements") were a common feature since the Bronze Age. Why farms became abandoned and then relocated is much debated. However it is suggested that this might be related to the death of a patron of the family or the desire to move to better farmlands.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: These farms are often falsely supposed to be "peasant farms". However, a "ceorl", who was the lowest ranking freeman in early Anglo-Saxon society, was not a peasant but an arms-owning male with access to law, support of a kindred and the wergild, situated at the apex of an extended household working at least one hide of land. It is the ceorl that we should associate with the standard x post-hole building of the early Anglo-Saxon period, grouped with others of the same kin group. Each such household head had a number of less-free dependants and slaves.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The success of the rural world in the 5th and 6th centuries, according to the landscape archaeology, was due to three factors: the continuity with the past, with no evidence of up-rooting in the landscape; farmers' freedom and rights over lands, with provision of a rent or duty to an overlord, who provided only slight lordly input; and the common outfield arable land (of an outfield-infield system) that provided the ability to build kinship and group cultural ties.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The origins of the timber building tradition seen in early Anglo-Saxon England have generated much debate which has mirrored a wider debate about the cultural affinities of Anglo-Saxon material culture.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Philip Rahtz asserted that buildings seen in West Stow and Mucking had late Roman origins. Archaeologist Philip Dixon noted the striking similarity between Anglo-Saxon timber halls and Romano-British rural houses. The Anglo-Saxons did not import the 'long-house', the traditional dwelling of the continental Germanic peoples, to Britain. Instead they upheld a local vernacular British building tradition dating back to the late first century. This has been interpreted as evidence of the endurance of kinship and household structures from the Roman into the Anglo-Saxon period.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: However, this has been considered too neat an explanation for all the evidence. Anne and Gary Marshall summarise the situation:


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: "One of the main problems in Anglo-Saxon archaeology has been to account for the apparent uniqueness of the English timber structures of the period. These structures seem to bear little resemblance either to earlier Romano-British or to continental models. In essence, the problem is that the hybrid Anglo-Saxon style seems to appear full-blown with no examples of development from the two potentially ancestral traditions ... The consensus of the published work was that the Anglo-Saxon building style was predominantly home-grown."


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: In the Sutton Hoo burial, perhaps that of the East Anglian king Raedwald, a long and complex iron chain, used for suspending a cauldron from the beams of a hall, was found. It was the product of a continuous British smithing tradition dating to pre-Roman times. This was, however, a high-status object.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: For Bryan Ward-Perkins the answer to the relative lack of native influence on everyday objects is found in the success of the Anglo-Saxon culture and highlights the micro-diversity and larger cohesion that produced a dynamic force in comparison to the Brittonic culture. From beads and quoits to clothes and houses, there is something unique happening in the early Anglo-Saxon period. The material culture evidence shows that people adopted and adapted styles based on set roles and styles. John Hines, commenting on the diversity of nearly a thousand glass beads and many different clothes clasps from Lakenheath, states that these reveal a "society where people relied on others to fulfill a role" and "what they had around them was making a statement", not one about the individual, but about "identity between small groups not within small groups".


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: "[The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain] was more complex than a mass invasion bringing fully formed lifestyles and beliefs. The early Anglo-Saxon, just like today's migrants, were probably riding different cultural identities. They brought from their homelands the traditions of their ancestors. But they would have been trying to work out not only who they were, but who they wanted to be ... and forge an identity for those who followed."


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Looking beyond simplistic 'homeland' scenarios, and explaining the observations that 'Anglo-Saxon' houses and other aspects of material culture do not find exact matches in the 'Germanic homelands' in Europe, Halsall explains the changes within the context of a larger 'North Sea interaction zone', including lowland England, Northern Gaul and northern Germany. These areas experienced marked social and cultural changes in the wake of Roman collapse—experienced not only within the former Roman provinces (Gaul, Britain) but also in "Barbaricum" itself. All three areas experienced changes in social structure, settlement patterns and ways of expressing identities, as well as tensions which created push and pull factors for migrations in, perhaps, multiple directions.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The study of pagan religious practice in the early Anglo-Saxon period is difficult. Most of the texts that may contain relevant information are not contemporary, but written later by Christian writers who tended to have a hostile attitude to pre-Christian beliefs, and who may have distorted their portrayal of them. Much of the information used to reconstruct Anglo-Saxon paganism comes from later Scandinavian and Icelandic texts and there is a debate about how relevant these are. The study of pagan Anglo-Saxon beliefs has often been approached with reference to Roman or even Greek typologies and categories. Archaeologists therefore use such terms as gods, myths, temples, sanctuaries, priests, magic and cults. Charlotte Behr argues that this provides a worldview of Anglo-Saxon practice culture which is unhelpful.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Peter Brown employed a new method of looking at the belief systems of the fifth to seventh centuries, by arguing for a model of religion which was typified by a pick and choose approach. The period was exceptional because there was no orthodoxy or institutions to control or hinder the people. This freedom of culture is seen also in the Roman-British community and is very evident in the complaints of Gildas.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: One Anglo-Saxon cultural practice that is better understood are the burial customs, due in part to archaeological excavations at various sites including Sutton Hoo, Spong Hill, Prittlewell, Snape and Walkington Wold, and the existence of around 1,200 furnished inhumation and cremation cemeteries, which were once assumed to be pagan but whose religious affiliation is now substantially debated in scholarship. There was no set form of burial, with cremation being preferred in the north and inhumation in the south, although both forms were found throughout England, sometimes in the same cemeteries. When cremation did take place, the ashes were usually placed within an urn and then buried, sometimes along with grave goods. According to archaeologist Dave Wilson, "the usual orientation for an inhumation in a pagan Anglo-Saxon cemetery was west–east, with the head to the west, although there were often deviations from this." Indicative of possible religious belief, grave goods were common amongst inhumation burials as well as cremations; free Anglo-Saxon men were buried with at least one weapon in the pagan tradition, often a seax, but sometimes also with a spear, sword, or shield, or a combination of these. There are also a number of recorded cases of parts of animals being buried within such graves. Most common amongst these were body parts belonging to either goats or sheep, although parts of oxen were also relatively common, and there are also isolated cases of goose, crab apples, duck eggs, and hazelnuts being buried in graves. It is widely thought therefore that such items constituted a food source for the deceased. In some cases, animal skulls, particularly oxen but also pig, were buried in human graves, a practice that was also found earlier in Roman Britain.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Despite this earlier confidence in the ability to use burial customs to understand cultures of belief, mortuary archaeologists have now challenged the notion that burial with grave-goods either in post-Roman Britain, or further afield in early medieval Europe, need have anything at all to do with paganism or other forms of belief in the afterlife. Howard Williams, summarising general trends in the scholarship, has pointed out


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The emergence of furnished cremation and inhumation graves is thus no longer regarded as reflecting a single and coherent ‘Anglo-Saxon paganism’; nor need the decline in accompanied burial relate directly or exclusively to Christian conversion. Indeed, the very term ‘pagan Anglo-Saxon burial’ compounds the conceptually naïve assumption that there existed a one-to-one correlation between ethnic affiliation, religious beliefs and ritual practice that archaeologists have been so keen to move beyond.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: There is also evidence for the continuation of Christianity in south and east Britain. The Christian shrine at St Albans and its martyr cult survived throughout the period (see Gildas above). There are references in Anglo-Saxon poetry, including "Beowulf", that show some interaction between pagan and Christian practices and values. While there is little scholarly focus on this subject, there is enough evidence from Gildas and elsewhere that it is safe to assume some continuing – perhaps more free – form of Christianity survived. Richard Whinder states "(The Church's pre-Augustine) characteristics place it in continuity with the rest of the Christian Church in Europe at that time and, indeed, in continuity with the Catholic faith ... today."


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Anglo-Saxon paganism was folk-based, centred on the individual and the community; it was not dependant on faith, but on ritual. The rituals were intended to bring benefits to, or to avert disaster from, the celebrants. As kingship developed, conversion to Christianity proved an attractive way for leaders to directly influence religion, with a priestly class under their immediate sponsorship. It is evident that the process of Christianisation was a 'top down' phenomenon, driven by kings.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: Little is known about the everyday spoken language of people living in the migration period. Old English is a contact language and reconstructing the pidgin used in this period from the written language found in the West Saxon literature of some 400 years later is difficult. Two general theories are proposed regarding why people changed their language to Old English (or an early form of such); either a person or household changed so as to serve an elite, or a person or household changed through choice as it provided some advantage economically or legally.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: According to Nick Higham, the adoption of the language—as well as the material culture and traditions—of an Anglo-Saxon elite, "by large numbers of the local people seeking to improve their status within the social structure, and undertaking for this purpose rigorous acculturation", is the key to understanding the transition from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon. The progressive nature of this language acquisition, and the 'retrospective reworking' of kinship ties to the dominant group led, ultimately, to the "myths which tied the entire society to immigration as an explanation of their origins in Britain".


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: The final few lines of the poem "The Battle of Brunanburh", a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon poem that celebrates a victory of Æthelstan, the first king of all the English, give a poetic voice to the English conception of their origins.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: This 'heroic tradition' of conquering incomers is consistent with the conviction of Bede, and later Anglo-Saxon historians, that the ancestral origin of the English was not the result of any assimilation with the native British, but was derived solely from the Germanic migrants of the post-Roman period. It also explains the enduring appeal of poems and heroic stories such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer and Judith, well into the Christian period. The success of the language is the most obvious result of the settlement period. This language was not just the language of acculturation, but through its stories, poetry and oral traditions became the agency of change.


title: Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

text: "As Bede later implied, language was a key indicator of ethnicity in early England. In circumstances where freedom at law, acceptance with the kindred, access to patronage, and the use or possession of weapons were all exclusive to those who could claim Germanic descent, then speaking Old English without Latin or Brittonic inflection had considerable value."


title: Count

text: Count (feminine: countess) is a historical title of nobility in certain European countries, varying in relative status, generally of middling rank in the hierarchy of nobility. The etymologically related English term "county" denoted the territories associated with the countship.


title: Count

text: The word "count" came into English from the French "comte", itself from Latin "comes"—in its accusative "comitem"—meaning “companion”, and later “companion of the emperor, delegate of the emperor”. The adjective form of the word is "". The British and Irish equivalent is an earl (whose wife is a "countess", for lack of an English term).


title: Count

text: In the late Roman Empire, the Latin title "comes" denoted the high rank of various courtiers and provincial officials, either military or administrative: before Anthemius became emperor in the West in 467, he was a military "comes" charged with strengthening defenses on the Danube frontier.


title: Count

text: In the Western Roman Empire, Count came to indicate generically a military commander but was not a specific rank. In the Eastern Roman Empire, from about the seventh century, "count" was a specific rank indicating the commander of two "centuriae" (i.e., 200 men).


title: Count

text: Military counts in the Late Empire and the Germanic successor kingdoms were often appointed by a "dux" and later by a king. From the start the count was not in charge of a roving warband, but settled in a locality, known as a county; his main rival for power was the bishop, whose diocese was sometimes coterminous with the county.


title: Count

text: In the Frankish kingdoms in the early Middle Ages, a count might also be a count palatine, whose authority derived directly from the royal household, the "palace" in its original sense of the seat of power and administration. This other kind of count had vague antecedents in Late Antiquity too: the father of Cassiodorus held positions of trust with Theodoric, as "comes rerum privatarum", in charge of the imperial lands, then as "comes sacrarum largitionum" ("count of the sacred doles"), concerned with the finances of the realm.


title: Count

text: The position of "comes" was originally not hereditary. The position of count was regarded as an administrative official dependent on the king, until the process of allodialisation during the 9th century in which it became private possessions of noble families. By virtue of their large estates, many counts could pass the title to their heirs—but not always. For instance, in Piast Poland, the position of "komes" was not hereditary, resembling the early Merovingian institution. The title had disappeared by the era of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the office had been replaced by others. Only after the Partitions of Poland did the title of "count" resurface in the title "hrabia", derived from the German "Graf".


title: Count

text: Originally, with the emergence of the title came the most powerful symbol of entitlement, that is the ownership of and jurisdiction over land, hence the term "county". The term is derived from the Old French "conté" or "cunté" denoting a jurisdiction under the control of a count (earl) or a viscount. The modern French is "comté", and its equivalents in other languages are "contea", "contado", "comtat", "condado", "Grafschaft", "graafschap", etc. (cf. "conte", "comte", "conde", "Graf").


title: Count

text: The title of Count was also often conferred by the monarch as an honorific title for special services rendered, without a feudal estate (countship, county) being attached, so it was merely a title, with or without a domain name attached to it. In the United Kingdom, the equivalent "Earl" can also be used as a courtesy title for the eldest son of a duke or marquess. In the Italian states, by contrast, all the sons of certain counts were little counts ("contini"). In Sweden there is a distinction between counts (Swedish: "greve") created before and after 1809. All children in comital families elevated before 1809 were called count/countess. In families elevated after 1809, only the head of the family was called count, the rest have a status similar to barons and were called by the equivalent of "Mr/Ms/Mrs", before the recognition of titles of nobility was abolished.


title: Count

text: The following lists are originally based on a Glossary on Heraldica.org by Alexander Krischnig. The male form is followed by the female, and when available, by the territorial circumscription.


title: Count

text: Since Louis VII (1137–80), the highest precedence amongst the vassals (Prince-bishops and secular nobility) of the French crown was enjoyed by those whose benefice or temporal fief was a "pairie", i.e. carried the exclusive rank of "pair"; within the first (i.e. clerical) and second (noble) estates, the first three of the original twelve "anciennes pairies" were ducal, the next three comital "comté-pairies":


title: Count

text: Later other countships (and duchies, even baronies) have been raised to this French peerage, but mostly as apanages (for members of the royal house) or for foreigners; after the 16th century all new peerages were always duchies and the medieval countship-peerages had died out, or were held by royal princes


title: Count

text: A "Graf" ruled over a territory known as a "Grafschaft" ('county'). See also various comital and related titles; especially those actually reigning over a principality: Gefürsteter Graf, Landgraf, Reichsgraf; compare Markgraf, Burggraf, Pfalzgraf ("see Imperial quaternions").


title: Count

text: The title of "Conte" is very prolific on the peninsula. In the eleventh century, "Conti" like the Count of Savoy or the Norman Count of Apulia, were virtually sovereign lords of broad territories. Even apparently "lower"-sounding titles, like Viscount, could describe powerful dynasts, such as the House of Visconti which ruled a major city such as Milan. The essential title of a feudatory, introduced by the Normans, was "signore", modeled on the French "seigneur", used with the name of the fief. By the fourteenth century, "conte" and the Imperial title "barone" were virtually synonymous.


title: Count

text: Some titles of a count, according to the particulars of the patent, might be inherited by the eldest son of a Count. Younger brothers might be distinguished as "X dei conti di Y" ("X of the counts of Y"). However, if there is no male to inherit the title and the count has a daughter, in some regions she could inherit the title.


title: Count

text: Many Italian counts left their mark on Italian history as individuals, yet only a few "contadi" (countships; the word "contadini" for inhabitants of a "county" remains the Italian word for "peasant") were politically significant principalities, notably:


title: Count

text: The principalities tended to start out as margraviate or (promoted to) duchy, and became nominal archduchies within the Habsburg dynasty; noteworthy are:


title: Count

text: Count/Countess was one of the noble titles granted by the Pope as a temporal sovereign, and the title's holder was sometimes informally known as a papal count/papal countess or less so as a Roman count/Roman countess, but mostly as count/countess. The comital title, which could be for life or hereditary, was awarded in various forms by popes and Holy Roman Emperors since the Middle Ages, infrequently before the 14th century, and the pope continued to grant the comital and other noble titles even after 1870, it was largely discontinued in the mid 20th-century, on the accession of John XXIII. The Papacy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies might appoint counts palatine with no particular territorial fief. Until 1812 in some regions, the purchaser of land designated "feudal" was ennobled by the noble seat that he held and became a "conte". This practice ceased with the formal abolition of feudalism in the various principalities of early-19th century Italy, last of all in the Papal States.


title: Count

text: Poland was notable throughout its history for not granting titles of nobility. This was on the premise that one could only be born into nobility, outside rare exceptions. Instead, it conferred non-hereditary courtly or civic roles. The noble titles that were in use on its territory were mostly of foreign provenance and usually subject to the process of indygenat, naturalisation.


title: Count

text: Somewhat similar to the native privileged class of nobles found in Poland, Hungary also had a class of Conditional nobles.


title: Count

text: As opposed to the plethora of hollow "gentry" counts, only a few countships ever were important in medieval Iberia; most territory was firmly within the Reconquista kingdoms before counts could become important. However, during the 19th century, the title, having lost its high rank (equivalent to that of Duke), proliferated.


title: Count

text: Portugal itself started as a countship in 868, but became a kingdom in 1139 (see:"County of Portugal"). Throughout the History of Portugal, especially during the Constitutional Monarchy many other countships were created (see: "List of Countships in Portugal").


title: Count

text: In the First Bulgarian Empire, a "komit" was a hereditary provincial ruler under the tsar documented since the reign of Presian (836-852) The Cometopouli dynasty was named after its founder, the "komit" of Sredets.


title: Count

text: The title of Serdar was used in the Principality of Montenegro and the Principality of Serbia as a noble title below that of Voivode equivalent to that of Count.


title: Count

text: In Denmark and historically in Denmark-Norway the title of count ("greve") is the highest rank of nobility used in the modern period. Some Danish/Dano-Norwegian countships were associated with fiefs, and these counts were known as "feudal counts" ("lensgreve"). They rank above ordinary (titular) counts, and their position in the Danish aristocracy as the highest-ranking noblemen is broadly comparable to that of dukes in other European countries. With the first free Constitution of Denmark of 1849 came a complete abolition of the privileges of the nobility. Since then the title of count has been granted only to members of the Danish royal family, either as a replacement for a princely title when marrying a commoner, or in recent times, instead of that title in connection with divorce. Thus the first wife of Prince Joachim of Denmark, the younger son of Margrethe II of Denmark, became Alexandra, Countess of Frederiksborg on their divorce - initially retaining her title of princess, but losing it on her remarriage.


title: Count

text: In the Middle Ages the title of jarl (earl) was the highest title of nobility. The title was eventually replaced by the title of duke, but that title was abolished in Denmark and Norway as early as the Middle Ages. Titles were only reintroduced with the introduction of absolute monarchy in 1660, with count as the highest title.


title: Count

text: In Sweden the rank of count is the highest rank conferred upon nobles in the modern era and are, like their Danish and Norwegian counterparts, broadly comparable to that of dukes in other European countries. Unlike the rest of Scandinavia, the title of duke is still used in Sweden, but only by members of the royal family and are not considered part of the nobility.


title: Count

text: Like other major Western noble titles, Count is sometimes used to render certain titles in non-western languages with their own traditions, even though they are as a rule historically unrelated and thus hard to compare, but which are considered "equivalent" in rank.


title: South Pole

text: The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole, Terrestrial South Pole or 90th Parallel South, is one of the two points where Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface. It is the southernmost point on Earth and lies antipodally on the opposite side of Earth from the North Pole, at a distance of 12,430 miles (20,004 km) in all directions.


title: South Pole

text: Situated on the continent of Antarctica, it is the site of the United States Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, which was established in 1956 and has been permanently staffed since that year. The Geographic South Pole is distinct from the South Magnetic Pole, the position of which is defined based on Earth's magnetic field. The South Pole is at the centre of the Southern Hemisphere.


title: South Pole

text: For most purposes, the Geographic South Pole is defined as the southern point of the two points where Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface (the other being the Geographic North Pole). However, Earth's axis of rotation is actually subject to very small "wobbles" (polar motion), so this definition is not adequate for very precise work.


title: South Pole

text: The geographic coordinates of the South Pole are usually given simply as 90°S, since its longitude is geometrically undefined and irrelevant. When a longitude is desired, it may be given as At the South Pole, all directions face north. For this reason, directions at the Pole are given relative to "grid north", which points northward along the prime meridian. Along tight latitude circles, clockwise is east, and anti-clockwise is west, opposite to the North Pole.


title: South Pole

text: The Geographic South Pole is presently located on the continent of Antarctica, although this has not been the case for all of Earth's history because of continental drift. It sits atop a featureless, barren, windswept and icy plateau at an altitude of above sea level, and is located about from the nearest open sea at the Bay of Whales. The ice is estimated to be about thick at the Pole, so the land surface under the ice sheet is actually near sea level.


title: South Pole

text: The polar ice sheet is moving at a rate of roughly per year in a direction between 37° and 40° west of grid north, down towards the Weddell Sea. Therefore, the position of the station and other artificial features relative to the geographic pole gradually shift over time.


title: South Pole

text: The Geographic South Pole is marked by a stake in the ice alongside a small sign; these are repositioned each year in a ceremony on New Year's Day to compensate for the movement of the ice. The sign records the respective dates that Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott reached the Pole, followed by a short quotation from each man, and gives the elevation as "9,301 "FT."". A new marker stake is designed and fabricated each year by staff at the site.


title: South Pole

text: The Ceremonial South Pole is an area set aside for photo opportunities at the South Pole Station. It is located some meters from the Geographic South Pole, and consists of a metallic sphere on a short barber pole, surrounded by the flags of the original Antarctic Treaty signatory states.


title: South Pole

text: The tent was erected by the Norwegian expedition led by Roald Amundsen on its arrival on 14 December 1911. It is currently buried beneath the snow and ice in the vicinity of the Pole. It has been designated a Historic Site or Monument (HSM 80), following a proposal by Norway to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. The precise location of the tent is unknown, but based on calculations of the rate of movement of the ice and the accumulation of snow, it is believed, as of 2010, to lie between 1.8 and 2.5 km (1.1 and 1.5 miles) from the Pole at a depth of 17 m (56 ft) below the present surface.


title: South Pole

text: A flagpole erected at the South Geographical Pole in December 1965 by the First Argentine Overland Polar Expedition has been designated a Historic Site or Monument (HSM 1) following a proposal by Argentina to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting.


title: South Pole

text: In 1820, several expeditions claimed to have been the first to have sighted Antarctica, with the first being the Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev. The first landing was probably just over a year later when American captain John Davis, a sealer, set foot on the ice.


title: South Pole

text: The basic geography of the Antarctic coastline was not understood until the mid-to-late 19th century. American naval officer Charles Wilkes claimed (correctly) that Antarctica was a new continent, basing the claim on his exploration in 1839–40, while James Clark Ross, in his expedition of 1839–1843, hoped that he might be able to sail all the way to the South Pole. (He was unsuccessful.)


title: South Pole

text: British explorer Robert Falcon Scott on the "Discovery" Expedition of 1901–1904 was the first to attempt to find a route from the Antarctic coastline to the South Pole. Scott, accompanied by Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson, set out with the aim of travelling as far south as possible, and on 31 December 1902, reached 82°16′ S. Shackleton later returned to Antarctica as leader of the British Antarctic Expedition ("Nimrod" Expedition) in a bid to reach the Pole. On 9 January 1909, with three companions, he reached 88°23' S – from the Pole – before being forced to turn back.


title: South Pole

text: The first men to reach the Geographic South Pole were the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his party on 14 December 1911. Amundsen named his camp Polheim and the entire plateau surrounding the Pole King Haakon VII Vidde in honour of King Haakon VII of Norway. Robert Falcon Scott returned to Antarctica with his second expedition, the "Terra Nova" Expedition, initially unaware of Amundsen's secretive expedition. Scott and four other men reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, thirty-four days after Amundsen. On the return trip, Scott and his four companions all died of starvation and extreme cold.


title: South Pole

text: In 1914 Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition set out with the goal of crossing Antarctica via the South Pole, but his ship, the "Endurance", was frozen in pack ice and sank 11 months later. The overland journey was never made.


title: South Pole

text: US Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, with the assistance of his first pilot Bernt Balchen, became the first person to fly over the South Pole on 29 November 1929.


title: South Pole

text: It was not until 31 October 1956 that humans once again set foot at the South Pole, when a party led by Admiral George J. Dufek of the US Navy landed there in an R4D-5L Skytrain (C-47 Skytrain) aircraft. The US Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was established by air over 1956–1957 for the International Geophysical Year and has been continuously staffed since then by research and support personnel.


title: South Pole

text: After Amundsen and Scott, the next people to reach the South Pole "overland" (albeit with some air support) were Edmund Hillary (4 January 1958) and Vivian Fuchs (19 January 1958) and their respective parties, during the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. There have been many subsequent expeditions to arrive at the South Pole by surface transportation, including those by Havola, Crary and Fiennes. The first group of women to reach the pole were Pam Young, Jean Pearson, Lois Jones, Eileen McSaveney, Kay Lindsay and Terry Tickhill in 1969. In 1978–79 Michele Eileen Raney became the first woman to winter at the South Pole.


title: South Pole

text: Subsequent to the establishment, in 1987, of the logistic support base at Patriot Hills Base Camp, the South Pole became more accessible to non-government expeditions.


title: South Pole

text: On 30 December 1989, Arved Fuchs and Reinhold Messner were the first to traverse Antarctica via the South Pole without animal or motorized help, using only skis and the help of wind. Two women, Victoria E. Murden and Shirley Metz, reached the pole by land on 17 January 1989.


title: South Pole

text: The fastest unsupported journey to the Geographic South Pole from the ocean is 24 days and one hour from Hercules Inlet and was set in 2011 by Norwegian adventurer Christian Eide, who beat the previous solo record set in 2009 by American Todd Carmichael of 39 days and seven hours, and the previous group record also set in 2009 of 33 days and 23 hours.


title: South Pole

text: The fastest solo, unsupported and unassisted trek to the south pole by a female was performed by Hannah McKeand from the UK in 2006. She made the journey in 39 days 9 hours 33 minutes. She started on 19 November 2006 and finished on 28 December 2006.


title: South Pole

text: In the 2011–12 summer, separate expeditions by Norwegian Aleksander Gamme and Australians James Castrission and Justin Jones jointly claimed the first unsupported trek without dogs or kites from the Antarctic coast to the South Pole and back. The two expeditions started from Hercules Inlet a day apart, with Gamme starting first, but completing according to plan the last few kilometres together. As Gamme traveled alone he thus simultaneously became the first to complete the task solo.


title: South Pole

text: On 28 December 2018, Captain Lou Rudd became the first Briton to cross the Antarctic unassisted via the south pole, and the second person to make the journey in 56 days. On 10 January 2020, Mollie Hughes became the youngest person to ski to the pole, aged 29.


title: South Pole

text: During winter (May through August), the South Pole receives no sunlight at all, and is completely dark apart from moonlight. In summer (November through February), the sun is continuously above the horizon and appears to move in a counter-clockwise circle. However, it is always low in the sky, reaching a maximum of 23.5° around the December solstice because of the 23.5° tilt of the earth's axis. Much of the sunlight that does reach the surface is reflected by the white snow. This lack of warmth from the sun, combined with the high altitude (about ), means that the South Pole has one of the coldest climates on Earth (though it is not quite the coldest; that record goes to the region in the vicinity of the Vostok Station, also in Antarctica, which lies at a higher elevation).


title: South Pole

text: The South Pole is at an altitude of but feels like . Centrifugal force from the spin of the planet pulls the atmosphere toward the equator. The South Pole is colder than the North Pole primarily because of the elevation difference and for being in the middle of a continent. The North Pole is a few feet from sea level in the middle of an ocean.


title: South Pole

text: In midsummer, as the sun reaches its maximum elevation of about 23.5 degrees, high temperatures at the South Pole in January average at . As the six-month "day" wears on and the sun gets lower, temperatures drop as well: they reach around sunset (late March) and sunrise (late September). In midwinter, the average temperature remains steady at around . The highest temperature ever recorded at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was on Christmas Day, 2011, and the lowest was on 23 June 1982 (for comparison, the lowest temperature directly recorded anywhere on earth was at Vostok Station on 21 July 1983, though was measured indirectly by satellite in East Antarctica between Dome A and Dome F in August 2010). Mean annual temperature at the South Pole is –49.5 °C (–57.1 °F).


title: South Pole

text: The South Pole has an ice cap climate (Köppen climate classification "EF"). It resembles a desert, receiving very little precipitation. Air humidity is near zero. However, high winds can cause the blowing of snowfall, and the accumulation of snow amounts to about 7 cm (2.8 in) per year. The former dome seen in pictures of the Amundsen–Scott station is partially buried due to snow storms, and the entrance to the dome had to be regularly bulldozed to uncover it. More recent buildings are raised on stilts so that the snow does not build up against their sides.


title: South Pole

text: In most places on Earth, local time is determined by longitude, such that the time of day is more-or-less synchronised to the perceived position of the Sun in the sky (for example, at midday the Sun is roughly perceived to be at its highest). This line of reasoning fails at the South Pole, where the Sun is seen to rise and set only once per year with solar elevation varying only with day of the year, not time of day. Because there are more than 24 time zones in the world and they all meet up at the South Pole, it can be any hour, any minute, any second at the South Pole. There is no "a priori" reason for placing the South Pole in any particular time zone, but as a matter of practical convenience the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station keeps New Zealand Time (UTC+12/UTC+13). This is because the US flies its resupply missions ("Operation Deep Freeze") out of McMurdo Station, which is supplied from Christchurch, New Zealand.


title: South Pole

text: Due to its exceptionally harsh climate, there are no native resident plants or animals at the South Pole. Off-course south polar skuas and snow petrels are occasionally seen there.


title: South Pole

text: In 2000 it was reported that microbes had been detected living in the South Pole ice. Scientists published in the journal "Gondwana Research" that evidence had been found of dinosaurs with feathers to protect the animals from the extreme cold. The fossils had been found over 100 years ago in Koonwarra, Australia, but in sediment which had accumulated under a lake which had been near to the South Pole millions of years ago.


title: Alternate reality game

text: An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players' responses. It is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by an AI as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones and mail, but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.


title: Alternate reality game

text: ARGs tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g., collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City) or through promotional relationships with existing products (for example, "I Love Bees" was a promotion for "Halo 2", and the "Lost Experience" and "Find 815" promoted the television show "Lost"). Pay-to-play models exist as well. Later games in the genre have shown an increasing amount of experimentation with new models and sub-genres.


title: Alternate reality game

text: There is a great deal of debate surrounding the characteristics by which the term "alternate reality game" should be defined. Sean Stacey, the founder of the website Unfiction, has suggested that the best way to define the genre was "not" to define it, and instead locate each game on three axes (ruleset, authorship and coherence) in a sphere of "chaotic fiction" that would include works such as the Uncyclopedia and street games like SF0 as well.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Several experts, though, point to the use of transmedia, "the aggregate effect of multiple texts/media artifacts," as the defining attribute of ARGs. This prompts the unique collaboration emanating from ARGs as well; Sean Stewart, founder of 42 Entertainment, which has produced various successful ARGs, speaks to how this occurs, noting that "the key thing about an ARG is the way it jumps off of all those platforms. It's a game that's social and comes at you across all the different ways that you connect to the world around you."


title: Alternate reality game

text: Due to factors like the curtain, attempts to begin games with "stealth launches" to fulfill the TINAG aesthetic, and the restrictive non-disclosure agreements governing how much information may be revealed by the puppet-masters of promotional games, the design process for many ARGs is often shrouded in secrecy, making it difficult to discern the extent to which they have been influenced by other works. In addition, the cross-media nature of the form allows ARGs to incorporate elements of so many other art forms and works that attempting to identify them all would be a nearly impossible task.


title: Alternate reality game

text: G. K. Chesterton's 1903 short story "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" (part of a collection entitled "The Club of Queer Trades") seems to predict the ARG concept. In the story, a company called the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited, creates adventures for its clients.


title: Alternate reality game

text: John Fowles' 1965 novel "The Magus" describes an elaborate series of "masques" collectively called "the godgame", an ARG-like scenario that involves many players in several nations, on both sides of the curtain, all working under the direction of one puppet-master. not all of whom are aware of who the others are. The novel ends ambiguously, leaving the reader to literally choose the ending they prefer. In his foreword to the 1977 revised edition of "The Magus", Fowles acknowledged some literary works that had influenced him, including Alain-Fournier's 1913 novel "Le Grand Meaulnes" ("The Lost Estate") for showing a secret hidden world to be explored, and Richard Jefferies's "Bevis" from 1882, for projecting a very different world.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In Thomas Pynchon's 1965 novel "The Crying of Lot 49", the conspiracy may be an ARG set up by Pierce Inverarity to bedevil Oedipa Maas.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The combination board and card game "Vlet" that many of the main characters in Samuel R. Delany's science fiction 1976 novel Triton play throughout his novel appears to be a type of ARG. The game's name was borrowed from a similar game in a short story by Joanna Russ titled "A Game of Vlet" from 1974.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Ludic texts such as the popular "Choose Your Own Adventure" or "Secret Path" children's novels may also have provided some inspiration. The first of these, Edward Packard's "Sugarcane Island", was published by R. A. Montgomery of Vermont Crossroads Press in 1976. This book's popularity launched the gamebook phenomenon and led to an extended series of titles that the pair, along with other authors, created for Bantam Books from 1979 through 1988.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Other possible antecedents include performance art and similar theatrical forms that attempt to directly engage the audience. One of the most popular examples of this genre is the live enactment of a murder mystery, in which theatrical participants interact with the audience. This idea dates to 1976, when a successful "murder mystery weekend" was held at the historic Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York, directed by Dilys Winn, the owner of the New York book shop, Murder Inc.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Reader-influenced online fiction such as AOL's "QuantumLink Serial", by the American writer Tracy Reed, which ran from 1988 to 1989, provides a model that incorporates audience influence into the storytelling in a manner similar to that of ARGs. The story was free with a membership to AOL.


title: Alternate reality game

text: "The One Game", a British television drama serial screened in 1988, was entirely based on the premise of the protagonist being forced to play an ARG (referred to as a "reality game" in the script).


title: Alternate reality game

text: In 1995, "The Spot" by Scott Zakarin debuted as an ad-supported site, adding photos and video to the original "QuantumLink Serial" model. It was highly successful and ran through 1997. in "The Spot," the characters, called "Spotmates", kept near-daily online diaries (similar to what later came to be called blogs), responded to emails, and posted images of their current activities. In addition the site boasted short videos, as well as photos relating to the diary entries. The fanbase on the site, or "Spotfans", interacted on a daily basis with the Spotmates and each other, discussing the newsworthy events.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Due to the influence that "The Beast" ARG from 2001 exerted over the form of later ARGs and the willingness of its creators to talk about its development, its sources of inspiration are both particularly relevant to the evolution of the modern ARG and somewhat more verifiable than other possible antecedents. Elan Lee, one of its creative principals, cites the 1997 movie "The Game" as an inspiration, as well as the Beatles' "Paul is dead" phenomenon. Sean Stewart, another of the three principal designers, notes that designing and running an ARG bears some similarities to running an RPG, and the influence of that particular game form is further suggested by the fact that Jordan Weisman, the game's third main designer, was also the founder of leading RPG company FASA. Stewart also noted that the sort of "creative, collaborative, enthusiastic scavenging behavior" upon which the Beast depended has its antecedents outside the arts: the Beast just "accidentally re-invented Science as pop culture entertainment."


title: Alternate reality game

text: The hallucinatory Turkish frontier across which A.W. Hill's Stephan Raszer tracks his quarry in the literary thriller "Nowhere-Land" from 2009 also bears similarities to an ARG.


title: Alternate reality game

text: ARGs are sometimes described as the first narrative art form native to the internet because their storytelling relies on the two main activities conducted there: searching for information, and sharing information.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Overall, academics have been intrigued by ARGs' potential for effective organizing. Across the board, a diverse range of organizations, such as businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and schools "can learn from the best practices and lessons of ARGs to similarly take advantage of new media and collective problem–solving". As such, implementation of ARGs in these different settings involves finding best practices for honing the collaborative, transmedia elements of ARGs for these respective institutions.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Much of this scholarly interest stems from the evolving media ecology with the rise of new media. In sustaining cooperative online communities, ARGs build on "an alignment of interest, where problems are presented in a fashion that assists game designers in their goal while intriguing and aiding players in their goals". This returns to ARGs' framework of transmedia storytelling, which necessitates that ARG designers relinquish a significant degree of their power to the ARG's audience, problematizing traditional views of authorship.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The majority of the scholarly review on ARGs analyzes their pedagogical advantages. Notably, in the classroom, ARGs can be effective tools for providing exigence on given topics and yield a collaborative and experiential learning environment. By the same token, weaknesses of classroom learning through ARGs include the need for a flexible narrative conducive to collaborative learning in large groups and a sophisticated web design.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In a contribution to a volume focusing on play and cities in Springer's "Gaming Media and Social Effects" series, Eddie Duggan (2017) provides an overview of pervasive games, and discusses characteristics in ARGs, LARPs, RPGs, assassination games and other games where the notion of the "magic circle" as elaborated by Salen and Zimmerman is confounded.


title: Alternate reality game

text: "Ong's Hat / Incunabula" was most likely started sometime around 1993, and also included most of the aforementioned design principles. "Ong's Hat" also incorporated elements of legend tripping into its design, as chronicled in a scholarly work titled "Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat". Some scholars disagree on the classification of the "Ong's Hat" story.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In 1996, Wizards of the Coast launched a proto-alternate reality game called "Webrunner: The Hidden Agenda" to promote their game "Netrunner". It cast players as hackers through seven puzzle-themed "gates" to get the secret data ("agenda"). The popular game was the first online game tied into a product release, making the front page of "The New York Times" technology section. A sequel, "Webrunner II: The Forbidden Code", followed on to promote the release of the "Proteus" expansion of the game.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Dreadnot was a (non-commercial) ARG produced with a grant from the San Francisco Chronicle and published on sfgate.com in 1996. It included most of the aforementioned design principles. The game included working voice mail phone numbers for characters, clues in the source code, character email addresses, off-site websites, real locations in San Francisco, real people (including then-Mayor Willie Brown), and of course a fictional mystery.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In 1997, a year prior to the release of Douglas Adams' computer game "Starship Titanic", The Digital Village launched a website purporting to be that of an intergalactic travel agency called Starlight Travel, which in the game is the Starship Titanic's parent company. The site combined copious amounts of Monty Python-esque writing (by Michael Bywater) with ARG-type interactivity.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The marketing for the 1999 movie "The Blair Witch Project" resembled ARGs in many ways (and some of its makers went on to create the 2005 Audi promotional ARG The Art of the Heist), expanding the world of the movie online, adding backstory, and treating the fiction as reality through real-world media such as fliers and a fake documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel. However, perhaps in part due to the subject material and the absence of overt metacommunications that this was fiction, it also resembles an internet hoax or attempts to create an urban legend.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Pervasive play games like the Go Game and the Nokia Game also incorporated many elements similar to ARGs (although they tended to lack the narrative element central to ARGs) and prefigured the public play components of large-scale corporate ARGs like "I Love Bees", The Art of the Heist and "Last Call Poker".


title: Alternate reality game

text: Electronic Arts' "Majestic" began development in 1999, although it didn't launch until after the Beast had concluded, in 2001. Featuring phone calls, emails, and other media that involved players in a multiplatform narrative, the game was eventually canceled due to lack of players. This was due to many factors, ranging from the monthly subscription fee (as part of Electronic Arts' EA Online venture) to "Majestic" unfortunate timing and subject matter in relation to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Many players also criticized the absence of the TINAG principle (e.g. in-game phone calls were preceded by an announcement that they were part of the game, although these announcements were optional based on user preference).


title: Alternate reality game

text: In 2001, in order to market the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" directed by Steven Spielberg that finished Stanley Kubrick's unfinished project to adapt Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long", and also a planned series of Microsoft computer games based on the film, Microsoft's Creative Director Jordan Weisman and another Microsoft game designer, Elan Lee, conceived of an elaborate murder mystery played out across hundreds of websites, email messages, faxes, fake ads, and voicemail messages. They hired Sean Stewart, an award-winning science fiction/fantasy author, to write the story and Pete Fenlon, an experienced adventure game "worldbuilder," to serve as developer and content lead. The game, dubbed "the Citizen Kane of online entertainment" by Internet Life, was a runaway success that involved over three million active participants from all over the world during its run and would become the seminal example of the nascent ARG genre. An early asset list for the project contained 666 files, prompting the game's puppet-masters to dub it "the Beast", a name which was later adopted by players. A large and extremely active fan community called the Cloudmakers formed to analyze and participate in solving the game, and the combined intellect, tenacity and engagement of the group soon forced the puppet-masters to create new subplots, devise new puzzles, and alter elements of the design to keep ahead of the player base. Somewhat unusual for a computer-based game, the production drew players from a wide spectrum of age groups and backgrounds.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Although the Beast ran for only three months, it prompted the formation of a highly organized and intensely engaged community that remained active years after the game concluded. Perhaps more significantly, it inspired a number of its participants to create games adapting and expanding the model, extending it from an anomalous one-time occurrence to a new genre of entertainment and allowing the community to grow even after the Beast itself concluded. Members of the Cloudmakers group went on to form ARGN, the primary news source for the genre, and Unfiction, its central community hub, as well as designing the first successful and widely played indie ARGs, such as LockJaw and Metacortechs, and corporate efforts such as Perplex City.


title: Alternate reality game

text: On March 1 and March 3 of 2010, Portal was updated to include information about the then-upcoming game Portal 2. It was created by the "Portal 2" development team, and while it was mostly made to discover the next entry in the "Portal" franchise, it also included a way to extend the "Portal" universe. The first update for the game was at 2:33 PST, with the description "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations", and it also had an achievement named "Transmission received". The game update now includes 26 radios in the test chambers playing the same default tune that the original radios played. To trigger the achievement "Transmission received" you must put the radio in a specific spot 26 times on each level to unlock the achievement. The radio will turn red to a green sprite and will play Morse code or the data transmission sound will be heard. The 26 sounds all have a hidden image when decoded with Robot 36. The numbers from the images form the BBS phone number "(425) 822-5251" and when you dial into the BBS it will prompt the user asking for a login. Entering the username "backup" and the password "backup" (from the 12th audio file) will show text saying "Aperture Laboratories GLaDOS v3.11", followed by "Copyright (c) 1973–1997 Aperture – All Rights Reserved" then will proceed to show the user ASCII art images and paragraphs quoting Cave Johnson. If the person is idle for 4 minutes, the following text will say "Hey! Please login now. You have one minute left." and if left idle for one more minute the next text will say "Your login time (5 minutes) ran out. Goodbye", disconnecting the user.


title: Alternate reality game

text: "Portal" was updated at another time on March 3, 2010, at the time, 2:24 PST with the description "Added valuable asset retrieval", making another update to the game. The game ending was expanded to include Chell being dragged back into the facility by the Party Escort Bot saying "Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position", setting up the events of "Portal 2".


title: Alternate reality game

text: The years immediately after the Beast saw independent developers who had played it extend the form from a one-time occurrence to a new genre of gaming, and the formation of an ever-growing community devoted to playing, designing and discussing ARGs.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Influenced heavily by the Beast and enthusiastic about the power of collaboration, several Cloudmakers came together with the idea that they could create a similar game. The first effort to make an independent Beast-like game, "Ravenwatchers", failed, but another team soon assembled and met with greater success. With very little experience behind them, the group managed, after nine months of development, to create a viable game that was soon seized upon eagerly by the Cloudmakers group and featured in "Wired" magazine. As players of the Beast, members of the Lockjaw development team were extremely aware of the community playing the game and took steps to encourage the tight bonding of the player base through highly collaborative puzzles, weekly Euchre games, and the inclusion of player personas in the game. While the numbers never rivaled those of The Beast, the game proved both that it was possible for developers to create these games without corporate funding or promotion, and that there was interest in the ARG form beyond a one-time audience for a production on the Beast's scale. Lockjaw marked the start of the ARG as a genre of gaming, rather than simply a one-time occurrence.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Shortly before Lockjaw's conclusion, players discovered a game that seemed to revolve around the movie "Minority Report". Despite speculation to the contrary, the game (known as "Exocog") was not an official promotion for the film, but an experiment in interactive storytelling by Jim Miller. Inspired by the independent Lockjaw effort, Dave Szulborski introduced "ChangeAgents", a spinoff of EA's failed "Majestic" ARG, to the ARGN audience, then followed it with two additional installments. During this time, Szulborski also created a successful grassroots game not based on the Majestic universe, called Chasing the Wish. Just before the release of the third and the final "Matrix" movie, the team that developed Lockjaw launched Metacortechs, an ARG based on that universe. The fan fiction effort was very successful, reached a larger and more active player base than many professionally produced games, and was at first assumed by many to be an officially sanctioned promotion for the movie. Metacortechs was followed by an ever-increasing number of grassroots ARGs.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In the wake of these successful, low-budget independent ARGs, an active "grassroots" development community began to evolve within the genre. While the quality of the grassroots games varies wildly, amateur storytellers, web designers, and puzzle creators continue to provide independently developed ARGs for the active player community.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The term "alternate reality gaming" was first used by Sean Stacey, one of the moderators of the Lockjaw player community, in the Trail for that game. Stacey and Steve Peters, another of the moderators, created the two websites that have become the central hub of the ARG community: ARGN and UnFiction. Due to their efforts, when Lockjaw ended, the players had a new community resource allowing them to assemble to play the games that were soon to follow. UnFiction had over 32,000 members before its closing due to server costs. ARGN employs a staff of 15 volunteer writers to report on new games and other topics of interest to the community, as well as producing a weekly netcast.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Although not considered as a pure alternate reality game, "Missing Since January" (""In Memoriam"" in Europe) is a video game based on the same principles that appear in an ARG: an online enquiry, the game entering into the players real-life environment, willingly confusing reality and fiction (real fact-based sites, emails...). Developed from 1999 onwards by the French studio Lexis Numérique, "Missing Since January" was launched by Ubisoft in Europe in October 2003 and by Dreamcatcher in the US in January 2004. In "Missing Since January", using the internet, the player must attempt to decode a mysterious CD ROM broadcast by the police in order to find two missing people abducted by a serial killer. More than a hundred sites were created for this purpose. By and large, as the player advances in the inquiry, they are contacted by different characters that send emails. The follow-up, which appeared in 2006 under the title "" (""In Memoriam 2, The Last Ritual"" in Europe) also allowed players to receive text messages and to speak on the phone with certain characters in the game.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Because of their similarities, video games and ARGs continued to be associated through many projects, In 2009, Funcom, a game development studio from Oslo, Norway, hid a gate on its corporate website, which led to an ARG which would be part of the pre-launch campaign for "The Secret World", a game released in 2013. The gate was discovered only in 2013, therefore requiring the puppet-master to adapt the scenario to its actual setting.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Funcom has done a total of 16 ARGs that tie in with "The Secret World", with the first one starting in May 2007. The ARGs focussed on several different storylines, such as: The Expedition of Roald Amundsen, The Sanctuary of Secrets and the Secret War.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The company behind Funcom's last 2 ARGs, Human Equation, a Montreal-based entertainment studio who also created an independent ARG called "Qadhos", has even further purchased the rights to a special class of characters, The Black Watchmen, to create their own independent ARG. A spin-off of Human Equation, Alice & Smith, released the game in June 2015.


title: Alternate reality game

text: After the success of the first major entries in the nascent ARG genre, a number of large corporations looked to ARGs to both promote their products, and to enhance their companies' images by demonstrating their interest in innovative and fan-friendly marketing methods. To create buzz for the launch of the Xbox game "Halo 2", Microsoft hired the team that had created the Beast, now operating independently as 42 Entertainment. The result, "I Love Bees", departed radically from the website-hunting and puzzle-solving that had been the focus of the Beast. "I Love Bees" wove together an interactive narrative set in 2004, and a "War of the Worlds"-style radio drama set in the future, the latter of which was broken into 30–60-second segments and broadcast over ringing payphones worldwide. The game pushed players outdoors to answer phones, create and submit content, and recruit others, and received as much or a more mainstream notice than its predecessor, finding its way onto television during a presidential debate, and becoming one of "The New York Times" catchphrases of 2004.


title: Alternate reality game

text: As such, "I Love Bees" captivated enough fans to garner significant press attention, and partly because of this publicity, "Halo 2" "sold $125 million in copies the first day of release." A slew of imitators fan tributes and parodies followed. In 2005, a pair of articles profiling 42 Entertainment appeared in "Game Developer" magazine and the East Bay Express, both of which tied into an ARG created by the journalist and his editors.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The following spring, Audi launched "The Art of the Heist", developed by Audi ad agency McKinney+Silver, Haxan Films (creators of "The Blair Witch Project"), to promote its new A3.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Roughly a year after "I Love Bees", 42 Entertainment produced "Last Call Poker," a promotion for Activision's video game "Gun". Designed to help modern audiences connect with the Western genre, "Last Call Poker" centered on a working poker site, held games of "Tombstone Hold 'Em" in cemeteries around the United States—as well as in at least one digital venue, "World of Warcraft"s own virtual reality cemetery – and sent players to their own local cemeteries to clean up neglected grave sites and perform other tasks.


title: Alternate reality game

text: At the end of 2005, the International Game Developers Association ARG Special Interest Group was formed "to bring together those already designing, building, and running ARGs, in order to share knowledge, experience, and ideas for the future." More recently, an ARG was created by THQ for the game "" around peak oil theories where the world is in a crisis over diminishing oil resources.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In 2008, the American Art Museum hosted an alternate reality game, called "Ghosts of a Chance", which was created by City Mystery. The game allowed patrons "a new way of engaging with the collection" in the Luce Foundation Center. The game ran for six weeks and attracted more than 6,000 participants.


title: Alternate reality game

text: As the genre has grown, there has been increasing interest in exploring models that provide funding for large-scale ARGs that are neither promotions for other products nor limited by the generally small budget of grassroots/indie games. The two major trends that have emerged in this area support through the sale of products related to the game, and fees for participation in the game. A third possible model is one using in-game advertising for other products, as in The Lost Experience, but at this time no large-scale game has attempted to fund itself solely through in-game advertising.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The first major attempt (other than EA's failed "Majestic") to create a self-supporting ARG was "Perplex City", which launched in 2005 after a year's worth of teasers. The ARG offered a $200,000 prize to the first player to locate the buried Receda Cube and was funded by the sale of puzzle cards. The first season of the game ended in January 2007, when Andy Darley found the Receda Cube at Wakerly Great Wood in Northamptonshire, UK. Mind Candy, the production company, has also produced a board game related to the ARG and plans to continue it with a second season beginning 1 March 2007. This model was delayed till 1 June, and has again, been delayed to an unspecified date. Mind Candy's acceptance of corporate sponsorship and venture capital suggests that the puzzle cards alone are not enough to fully fund the ARG at this time.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In March 2006, Elan Lee and Dawne Weisman founded edoc laundry, a company designed to produce ARGs using clothes as the primary platform. Consumers decipher the codes hidden within the garments and input the results into the game's main website to reveal pieces of a story about the murder of a band manager.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Reviving the pay-to-play model, Studio Cypher launched the first chapter of its "multiplayer novel" in May 2006. Each "chapter" is a mini-ARG for which participants who pay the $10 registration fee receive earlier access to information and greater opportunities to interact with characters than non-paying participants. VirtuQuest, a well-known corporate team, also attempted a pay-to-play model with "Township Heights" later in the year, but despite initial enthusiasm on the part of the ARG community, the game was not well-received due to the design team's use of player Hybrid-Names based on their real-life names. Also, the short run time frame was not appreciated by some seasoned players.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In June 2006, Catching the Wish launched from an in-game website about comic books based on its predecessor, 2003's "Chasing the Wish". 42 Entertainment released "Cathy's Book", by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, in October 2006, shifting the central medium of this ARG from the internet to the printed page. The young-adult novel contains an "evidence packet" and expands its universe through websites and working phone numbers, but is also a stand-alone novel that essentially functions as an individually playable ARG. Neither the cost of creating the book nor sales figures are available (although it made both American and British bestseller lists) to determine whether the project was successfully self-funded.


title: Alternate reality game

text: It is difficult to judge the efficacy of self-funded ARG models at this time, but it seems likely that exploration of ways to fund large-scale ARGs without using them as marketing for other products will continue as the genre grows.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In a 2007 article, columnist Chris Dahlen (of Pitchfork Media) voiced a much-discussed ARG concept: if ARGs can spark players to solve very hard fictional problems, could the games be used to solve real-world problems? Dahlen was writing about "World Without Oil", the first ARG centered on a serious near-future scenario: a global oil shortage. Another ARG, "Tomorrow Calling", appears to be a testbed for a future project focused on environmental themes and activism.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Serious ARGs introduce plausibility as a narrative feature to pull players into the game. People participate to experience, prepare for or shape an alternative life or future. The games thus have the potential to attract casual or non-players, because 'what if' is a game anyone can play. Serious ARGs may, therefore, be sponsored by organizations with activist or educational goals; "World Without Oil" was a joint project of the Public Broadcasting Service's Independent Lens and its Electric Shadows Web-original programming.


title: Alternate reality game

text: Their serious subject matter may lead Serious ARGs to diverge from mainstream ARGs in design. Instead of challenging collective intelligence to solve a game mastered puzzle, "World Without Oil's" puppet-masters acted as players to guide the "collective imagination" to create a multi-authored chronicle of the alternative future, purportedly as it was happening. By asking players to chronicle their lives in the oil-shocked alternative reality, the "WWO" game relinquished narrative control to players to a degree not seen before in an ARG.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In October 2008 The British Red Cross created a serious ARG called Traces of Hope to promote their campaign about civilians caught up in conflict.


title: Alternate reality game

text: There are possible future Serious ARGs described in fiction. In his novel Halting State, Charles Stross foresightedly describes a number of possible ARGs, where players engage in seemingly fictional covert spy operations.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In 2008 the European Union funded an ARG to support motivation for multilingualism within European secondary school students called ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0. As noted above in World Without Oil, to complete this ARG it was necessary to move away from the strict definitions of an ARG as listed. The ARG was by invitation only and players (students) knew they were going to play a game. This project is now completed and papers on the project and the resources produced for education (a Methodology and Teacher Training guides) are available and have been presented at the 3rd European Conference on Games Based Learning.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In 2008–2009 the MacArthur Foundation supported an ARG The Black Cloud to teach US high-school students about indoor air quality. The project is active and allows teachers to rent sophisticated air quality sensors to run the game locally.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The USC School of Cinematic Arts has run a semester-long ARG called Reality Ends Here for incoming freshmen since 2011. The game involves players collaborating and competing to produce media artifacts. In 2012, Reality Ends Here won the Impact Award at IndieCade, presented to games which "have social message, shift the cultural perception of games as a medium, represent a new play paradigm, expand the audience, or influence culture."


title: Alternate reality game

text: UCLA Film Department had its first alternate reality game class, taught by game designer/writer Flint Dille in 2011 Winter Semester. The Class Built an ARG in one semester, culminating in a real world event which resolved the story.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The Plan of Gauss was a game developed as a didactic strategy to enhance the learning and understanding of mathematics in university students. In this game, the players had to help characters (students) to find a missing friend.


title: Alternate reality game

text: 2006 produced fewer large-scale corporate ARGs than past years, but the ARG form continued to spread and be adapted for promotional uses, as an increasing number of TV shows and movies extended their universes onto the internet through such means as character blogs and ARG-like puzzle trails, and as an increasing number of independent and grassroots games launched, with varying levels of success. One of the more popular indie ARGs to launch in the fall of 2006 was Jan Libby's dark yet whimsical "Sammeeeees". "MeiGest", produced by Hazel Grian and Jon Williams, garnered a great deal of community attention and affection with a light, humorous storyline and numerous references to past ARGs. "lonelygirl15", a popular series of videos on YouTube, relinquished an unprecedented amount of control to its audience by recognizing a fan-created game as the "official" ARG. In December 2006, another indie ARG launched called "Bristel Goodman" which featured creative yet creepy videos made by an internet killer. Eddie Dees, the fictional character who is being sent these videos, posted them at YouTube and other video sharing sites, asking for help. The ARG community responded and the game began. As of March 2013, the game continues as obsessed players search for the truth about RHINO.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In August 2006, Hoodlum produced "PSTRIXI" for Yahoo!7 Australia. "PSTRIXI" was designed around a young DJ Trixi and her boyfriend Hamish. Players were engaged across all of Yahoo! 7's platforms and asked to help solve the mystery of Trixi's missing sister Max. The multi-platform ARG ran for 12 weeks and used websites, email, Yahoo!360 forums, Yahoo Radio, and viral television to engage the audience in the game. "PSTRIXI" was a major success with the Yahoo!7 community; players spent an average of 16 minutes per session on the websites and returned more than once a week.


title: Alternate reality game

text: 2007 got off to a strong start immediately, with Microsoft's "Vanishing Point" to promote the launch of Windows Vista. The game was designed by 42 Entertainment and, due in part to many large-scale real-world events, such as a lavish show at the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas as well as a prizes of a trip into space and having a winner's name engraved on all AMD Athlon 64 FX chips for a certain period of time, received large media attention. It was followed almost immediately by another 42 Entertainment production for the release of the Nine Inch Nails album "Year Zero", in which fans discovered leaked songs on thumb drives in washrooms at concerts, as well as clues to websites that describe a dystopian future occurring in 2022. Year Zero, in turn, bled out into the real world through players flyering neighborhoods and creating graffiti supporting the game's fictitious Art Is Resistance movement. "Monster Hunter Club", a promotion for the U.S. release of the movie "The Host", launched by sending action figures and other items to prominent members of the ARG community. Perplex City concluded its first season by awarding a $200,000 prize to a player who found the game's missing cube. They planned to continue the ARG into a second "season" under the name Perplex City Stories without a large grand prize, but it was ultimately cancelled.


title: Alternate reality game

text: The teaser site for "World Without Oil", the first major "Serious ARG", was unveiled in March 2007; the game itself launched on 30 April and ran through 1 June, gathering over 1500 videos, images, blog entries and voice mails to document the "Oil Crisis of 2007."


title: Alternate reality game

text: In May 2007, 42 Entertainment launched "Why So Serious", an ARG to promote the feature film "The Dark Knight". Hailed as being the single most impressive viral marketing campaign of all-time, it played out over 15 months, concluding in July 2008. Millions of players in 177 countries participated both online and taking part in live events, and it reached hundreds of millions through Internet buzz and exposure. Notably, "Why So Serious" prompted a great deal of collaborative organizing and action; players went to the streets campaigning for Harvey Dent and gathered in New York City as a part of gameplay.


title: Alternate reality game

text: In March 2008, McDonald's and the IOC launched "Find The Lost Ring", a global ARG promoting the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. The game was run simultaneously in six languages with new story lines developing in each, encouraging players to communicate with residents of other countries to facilitate sharing of clues and details of the game as a whole. American track and field athlete Edwin Moses acted as a celebrity Game Master, and McDonald's Corporation promised to donate US$100,000 to Ronald McDonald House Charities China on behalf of the players.


title: Alternate reality game

text: February 2009 saw the launch of the ARG Something In The Sea, designed to promote the videogame "BioShock 2" by immersing players in character Mark Meltzer's quest to find his missing daughter. In addition to the messages, documents, photos, and puzzles on the website, those following along on 8 August 2009, were given the coordinates of 10 beaches worldwide and told to go there at dawn. Those who did found objects planted by the game runners designed to look like they had washed ashore from "BioShock" fictional underwater city of Rapture. Players who wrote letters to Mark, whose address was advertised on the website, also sometimes received items such as wine bottles, records, or masks.


title: Alternate reality game

text: On 1 March 2010, "Valve" released an update via "Steam" to their game "Portal", adding a nondescript new achievement and some .wav files hidden within the game GCFs. The .wav files actually contained morse code and SSTV encoded images, some including certain numbers and letters. When pieced together in the correct order, these numbers and letters formed a 32-bit MD5 hash of a BBS phone number. When traced, it was found to originate from Kirkland, Washington, where Valve was based before moving to Bellevue, Washington in 2003. Accessing the number as a bulletin board system yielded large ASCII art images, all leading towards the announcement of the game's sequel, "Portal 2". Later, prior to release of "Portal 2" in 2011, a much more expansive ARG called the "Potato Sack" was run, arranged by a number of independent developers working with Valve, to simulate the re-booting of GLaDOS. The ARG resulted in the game being released several hours earlier than scheduled, among other details.