Playing the Game - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 255

numbers of players all at once. Quest presentations may run long. Even positive
occurrences, such as a prominent visitor in your field who has stopped by
unexpectedly, can throw off your carefully constructed schedule.
The first two Skeleton Chase alternate reality games were designed to improve
health and fitness in the students who played (see Figure 15.2). The third
iteration, Skeleton Chase: Warp Speed, reduced the playing time from seven
weeks to two and a half days. The players were now corporate executives. The
goals of the game were team building and introducing them to new technologies.
These executives on the whole were not all that keen about physical exercise, so
much of the gameplay had to be reinvented on the spot.

Figure 15.2
Rain falls on the climactic night of the first Skeleton Chase ARG.

But the multiplayer classroom is the real world in real-time. Stuff happens.
During our first running of The Skeleton Chase, we had received permission
from the IU Student Union to use a boardroom high up in the tower. We
created a lair for one of the game s characters, a demented graduate student who

was squatting there illegally. One intricate puzzle took players all over campus
until they reached the room and discovered the props we

'

' d arranged there to