Alter reality gaming is an interactive networked narrative that uses a real world platform to give a transmedia storytelling experience to participants by delivering a story through their participations. The purpose of this is to bring a story created by a game/film to a real life experience for participants to anticipate.

An example would the recent rise in Esports, Dota 2. The International is a international Dota 2 competition hosted by Valve themselves. In the attempt of making the event a success, Valve came up with a strategy to get casual players involved in this competition by getting them to participate by “game predictions”. At $10.00, a player can purchase a compendium online, also known as E-book to show their support of the team and country. Every victory that they predict through the compendium, the players will be rewarded with an in game item, which could be sold at a high price depending on rarity. For every E-book purchased, $2.50 goes to the prize pool of the competition, and just last year the prize pool came to a staggering $10.7 million.

Besides using the compendium as getting active gamers involved, they hosted the event at Seattle. In the event, a “secret shop” was set up for players to purchase merchandise. These merchandise carry with them a code which can be further used to receive items from the game. By taking these steps, Valve is “rewarding” players for supporting the game. Besides that, the Dota2 tournament designed it’s structure according to the game’s map. the middle lane is where all the actions happened, and there is precisely where the competitors compete for the prize pool.