I’ve been recently getting more and more interested with the potential of alternate reality games (ARGs) as a lo-fi solution to the problem of the expense of educational game development. Basically an ARG combines a story with a series of puzzles that need collaborative input to be solved. They generally make use of a whole range of web content as well as moving into the real world. This article in Wired magazine gives a really good overview of what ARGs are all about and for more detail, this white paper is excellent.
One of the most famous commercial ARGs is perplexcity, now sadly on hold. On a similar note, Notpron and Ouverture Facile provide the same sort of challenges without the narrative.
