Courtesy of www.hatch23.com

If the instructions "Follow the White Rabbit" or numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 give you a conspiratorial tingle, ARGs may be your bag, assuming you're not already spending your Saturday nights piecing together clues scattered throughout the Web while your pals shoot JagerBombs.

ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game, a genre that's pretty much followed the Internet's trajectory into the mainstream since the mid-90s, with The San Francisco-based game Dreadnot laying the groundwork for the many ARGs that have followed. For the lay-paranoid, ARGs can be thought of as interactive stories played in real time, in the real world, where participants collaboratively piece together clues to an overarching mystery while the games' "puppetmasters" throw up the pitfalls and paths for gamers to advance forward and backward. The Internet generally acts as the 'console', where players find clues and communicate with each other through web sites, email and social networks, but also phones and at physical locations. There's no fancy suped-up processor, virtual-reality hand held device, or even dice, making ARGs simultaneously cutting edge and simple to learn.

Today, ARGs often serve as elaborate extensions of TV shows or movies, creating a broader and sometimes entirely separate universe than exists in the original canon. They also follow the Web's egalitarian and collaborative underpinnings toward a the resolution of common goal which, no surprise, usually involves the defeat of some evil doer (in the pre-Dubya sense), plotting against the world from atop a powerful hierarchy.

The most successful ARGs challenge the most analytical minds yet have fairly clear structure themselves, including logical rules and story lines, rather than loosely structured versions that tend to fail through a series of endless and frustrating rabbit holes.

Not unlike when Lost the TV series lost the plot circa season 3, its online ARG extensions (including The Lost Experience, Find 815 and Dharma Initiative Recruiting Project)  have sadly tended to fail in this manner, leaving players pissed when clues fail to connect or even unintentionally reveal TV show spoilers. Want to know the meaning of the numbers? The impatient can click here. 

Still, half the fun is in the journey. The thrill and fame that comes from claiming clue discovery in a surreptitiously-placed YouTube video or site's source code satisfies almost as much as a tidy resolution.

Used as a promotional vehicle for Spielberg's 2001 release of the movie A.I., The Beast seems to stand atop the all-time best ARG list. Conceived by creative minds at Microsoft, The Beast evolved into a multi-layered murder mystery prequel to the film, spanning the breadth of the Internet with addicts collaboratively solving riddles so fast, the creators found themselves barely able to stay one step ahead with the next sub-plot. The games popularity continues to ripple through the digital realm through to 2009.

More recently, the makers of the upcoming movie 2012 (filmed in Vancouver and starring Jon Cusack and Danny Glover) based on the Mayan end-of-times prophecy, have created an auxiliary online campaign, albeit more viral marketing in nature than a true ARG. Still, Insititute for Human Continuity serves as an entertaining place to get your feet wet (no pun intended for the film's trailer) in the dizzying online ARG pool.

At the end of the day, a lot of us like the idea of ARGs in theory, but don't have (or would feel wiser and perhaps more mentally grounded) the time required to become a devoted player.

For the rest of you, here's ARG ground zero. The answer is out there... and it's looking for you.