From Graduation Project to a Live City Wide ARG
CLIENT — INHOLLAND
We turned a student graduation project into a production ready ARG. It is an app guided city game for Inholland's tourism management students, complete with location based traps and a full admin override system for lunch calls and emergencies.
A few students at Inholland had designed a promising ARG concept for their graduation project. The idea was to send tourism management students out into a real city, guided by an app from one point of interest to the next. Along the way, they would answer curriculum based questions about each location. The concept worked on paper, but turning it into a production ready tool for live use was a different challenge. They needed software that could actually handle real students unsupervised in a real city with phones in hand. It had to gracefully handle players taking wrong turns or shortcuts, give organizers real time control over the game state, and most critically, have a built in safety mechanism to pull every single player out of the game instantly in an emergency.
We took their core idea and built a completely live, stable ARG platform from the ground up. Organizers plot custom points of interest on a map. As students are guided to each location, the app serves up a specific question tied to that spot, drawing on the tourism management curriculum.
The platform also polices its own route. If a team tries to take a shortcut or strays off the intended path, the app detects it and triggers a hack. The quest glitches out, locking the team's progress with a countdown. To resume, they have to answer a rapid fire bonus question correctly to disable the hack and get back on track.
Beyond the game mechanics, we built two critical override systems that give organizers total control. First is a mandatory lunch call that instantly redirects every player to one chosen rally point, regardless of where they are in the city. Second is a full emergency broadcast that overrides the game entirely, pushing safety instructions and directing students to check in with a teacher or organizer immediately.
The ARG ran live with 40 players and five organizer admins in the field. Inholland staff had real time visibility and control over the entire game, from routing students to triggering location based traps. Most importantly, they had the power to instantly override the whole event for a mandatory lunch call or an emergency. What started as a promising student project became reliable software the organizers could trust with real students in a real city, for their school trip to Lisbon.