Thanks to a Snoutcast interview, I learned of the existence of This Is Not A Game, a non-fiction book about Alternative Reality Games by Dave Szulborski (not to be confused with the novel This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams). It starts out slow—the first quarter of the book careful defintions and academic categorizing when all you had to say was "Y'know, like I Love Bees"—but once that's out of the way, there's some good stuff. You know you're in for a good time when you reach chapter 7 when you see it's all going to be about The Beast. Szulborski has been a player and a Game Control for these games. He writes about things that happened and how the influenced what happened next. ARGers, like players+customers everywhere, don't know what they want. They say they want realism, but they react better if new content comes out on a regular schedule and if there are puzzles and... And these things make it challenging to write an ARG.