An enjoyment metric for the evaluation of alternate reality games

Abstract

Alternate Reality Games layer a fictional world over the real world in order to provide players with a location-based interactive narrative experience. Building off previous work on game flow and enjoyment metrics in games, we present a metric based on the key elements that empirical studies suggest make for enjoyable ARG gameplay. We empirically validate our metric and call out key elements of ARGs that are most likely to have bearing on the success of a game.