New media allows previously passive consumers to tell and shape stories together. Yet most information is still disseminated in a top-down fashion, without taking advantage of the features enabled by new media. This paper presents five Alternate Reality Game (ARG) case studies which reveal common features and mechanisms used to attract and retain diverse players, to create task-focused communities and to solve problems collectively. Voluntary, collective problem solving is an intriguing phenomenon wherein disparate individuals work together asynchronously to solve problems together. ARGs also take advantage of the unique features of new media to craft stories that could not be told using other media.

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In his examinations of the ecological parties of Belgium and West Germany, Herbert Kitschelt argues that he has found a new form of political representation that defies patterns of behaviour outlined for political parties by all previous scholarly work. These parties, which Kitschelt calls “left-libertarian,” are unique because they lack the organizational structures common to traditional parties, and include in their membership constituencies that are normally more comfortable in social movements. This article compares the political platforms of these parties and the sociological characteristics of their activists with those of the Montreal Citizen's Movement (MCM) and concludes that the MCM is indeed a left-libertarian party. However, an examination of the MCM reveals that although Kitschelt has found a new form of political representation in the left-libertarian party, this new form does not actually defy the developmental patterns outlined by the classical studies of political parties.

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