The first demonstration of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) style training event for military training applications has shown the unique benefits and challenges of this approach. ARGs are web-based, interactive experiences for large numbers of distributed individuals, built around a gradually unfolding narrative. Our event, Dark Waters, was designed to accommodate 100 participants in a scenario lasting 28 days and orchestrated by a small number of controllers. This initial demonstration was not developed for a specific training course but was instead designed to give volunteer participants invited from the military training community an opportunity to see how aspects of ARGs could be applied to training for staff-level skills for long-term situation management. Lessons learned from this demonstration include the need for explicit community building, the role of both synchronous and asynchronous event content, and some feasible approaches towards assessing learning in an ARG-based event.

The event used a scenario about a disaster relief effort complicated by an unexplained epidemic to provide a narrative context for task assignments. Participants were assigned two tasks per week, designed to be completed by each individual, but with collaboration explicitly encouraged. These tasks provided opportunities to develop, practice, and demonstrate three main learning objectives: Information Management, Organizing and Organization Navigation, and Interagency Interaction. The scenario content and task assignments were designed for a target minimum participation time of 3-4 hours per week; however, the content was also designed to provide deeper avenues of exploration to support optional additional participation.

This demonstration event showed that an ARG style training event can be used to provide immersive, webbased training to distributed participants. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the method as demonstrated by this event in terms of participation over the course of the event, feedback from the participants, and lessons learned about design and execution.