There’s been a lot of renewed discussion on defining what exactly an ARG is, lately. I know this has been touched on here before, but I just want to make a little point on what it seems everyone who’s talking is missing.
Oh, and lest I be accused of putting ARGs in boxes, I’m talking in terms of the “classic” ARG model as it exists right now, not necessarily what it will be blossoming into in the years to come. I do however think that what I have to say here will still apply then. Time will tell. :)
Most discuss (and rightly so, for the most part) that ARGs are made up of three major componenets: narrative, puzzles, and interaction. Take away any one, and whatever’s going on starts to resemble an interactive novel, or a puzzle trail. I would go beyond that and say that, really, the story’s the thing. The puzzles and interactions exist as vehicles to propel the storyline.
OK, so here’s the subtle yet important point that I think quite a few people continue to miss. It’s what Sean Stewart calls Internet Archaeology. I call it Connecting the Dots. The pieces of story are out there for players to find and dig up, not presented in a flow directly to them. The dots are presented to the players, but it’s up to them to connect them correctly.
Sean quotes Jordan Weisman, who’s #1 assumption about what The Beast (the first ARG in its current form, for the movie A.I.: Artifical Intelligence) would be:
“The narrative would be broken into fragments, which the players would be required to reassemble. That is, the players, like the advanced robots at the end of the movie, would be doing something essentially archaeological, combing through the welter of life in the 22nd century, to piece a story together out of fragments.”
An example of this: A series of emails sent to players (or IM sessions) that’s merely a journal, or a bunch of exposition, telling the story directly, isn’t ARG, it’s an electronic novel, which, while enjoyable for some, is definitely not good ARG.
On the other hand, if an email contains subtle clues to things that can be found elsewhere (another website, a password hint, a family member’s name, etc.), that’s much better. ARGs shouldn’t be telling a straight narrative as much as they’re delivering the results of said narrative. A series of artifacts that, when put together, reveal what’s really going on. The players connect the dots, not the puppetmasters.
This is the most common reason for in-context puzzles. They can easily serve to point to, or unlock, these narrative dots. Sometimes they can point to where they are, or they can serve to be the dots themselves, or both, depending on what the solve is.
The big challenge in all this is determining fun and effective ways to deliver all these dots. How do we tell this story? Sure, a lot of times it’s just straight narrative, but it can also take the form of doodles on napkins, audio files, photos, intercepted emails, voicemail, surveillance video, etc.
In Metacortechs, for example, we told the entire story of the underwater resort Aquapolis in a series of incident logs ostensibly generated by its state-of-the-art security and maintainence system. Elsewhere, in a particularly brilliant bit of work by Andy Aiken, a conversation from a broken AI’s point of view was told in the form of captured XML code.
Methods like this are much more effective and compelling from a storytelling point of view (not to mention fun for the players) than simply having them find a diary of an Aquapolis worker saying “Today, level 3 flooded for some unknown reason, killing Stavros.” or the mysterious robo-guy saying “Bethh…..I…m……brken…Pls….fix…..mee.”
Finding things is a lot more fun than being handed things. While the narrative is the heart of the ARG, this Archaeology or Connecting of the Dots is what makes ARG different from an electronic novel, interactive fiction, or what have you.
Take it away, and even if you do have puzzles, narrative and interaction, you have no ARG.
I can’t realy stress enough, how strongly I agree with you about the connecting of the dots or the internet archaeology. These things allow players to speculate and ponder. They are the story puzzle.
So often we see puzzles thrown onto a game, usually via an ecclectic or paranoid individual (or group) that also happens to be incredibly intelligent and misunderstood or feels the need to right the wrongs of the world. It’s an easy device, but it leads to cyphers – whether simple or complex, whether they’re traditional or creative twists.
Some people consider that the game.
“We need more game, throw in some puzzles.”
Puzzles are not games, they are puzzles. And what is worse is that people that just throw in puzzles are throwing in cyphers, they are not thinking of the broader puzzle, of the game design. In fact, while they may be skilled in creating a story and may be skilled in creating cyphers, they tend to be weak in story telling and in game design.
Do games include puzzles? Often times, yes. And, alternate reality games absolutely do. However, the puzzles in alternate reality games do not have to be cyphers and the args that rely on such puzzles to the point of excluding the story puzzle suffer for it. While I won’t go as far as to say that, without the connecting of the dots, you don’t have an ARG. Though, I’ll admit that just be my growing desire to keep things less defined in order to inspire some creative sparks.
Well, for that I’d refer back to my caveat at the beginning, about talking about the form of ARGs right now. :)
I really agree with you on the puzzles just for the sake of throwing puzzles in thing. And I love you pointing out the already-overused-to-the-point-of-cliche of using the misunderstood genius as a vehicle to throw in come codes to be broken.
It’s not about proving to players how musch smarter or more clever you are than them, it’s about giving them a fun ride. :)
It’s not about proving to players how musch smarter or more clever you are than them…
Clearly, we aren’t that musch smarter ;)
One of the things that bothers me, aside from the intelligence level, is the idea that they’re the only way to provide work for the group mind that lasts beyond just 5 minutes. That, to me is just absurd. Not only is it often nothing more than a frustrating challenge that makes a large percentage of the playerbase feel completely inadequate or completely ill-equiped (like that’s fun), but how many times do we see players getting stuck on the most simple of puzzles (in our minds) and solving some of the most difficult in those first 5 minutes.
There are, relatively, simple ways to go achieve that same goal that can increase community interaction. The Seven Sins in Lockjaw is a pretty decent (I think) example of a busywork type puzzle that was easy to solve while taking some time to work through while providing constant rewards and a sense of accomplishment – you could see your progress while filling in the grid of options. As a bonus, it could be worked through individually, but was more fun to work through as part of a group. “Hey, have you gotten this combination yet?” “OMG! Look at this solution!” To tie it in to the original post and the ‘connecting the dots’… each solution provided further insights into character actions and behaviors while not specifically naming the character, leaving it open for speculation.
That’s not to say that a busywork puzzle is the only way. Heck, if you’re doing a good job of providing a number of dots for them to connect, then they’ll have plenty to speculate about and discuss with each other.
Don’t get me started on people just throwing out a bunch of dots with no idea how or if they’ll connect. Bah.
(oh, and yeah, I noticed your slightly more subtle caveat. we sure do like those, don’t we. what, words coming back to haunt? not with our caveat skills! nope, nuhuh!)
older blog entry said “ARGs should be being defined more broadly and broadly as time goes by, not more narrowly.” Perhaps so, but with many styles of gameplay elements (even within a single game) competing for the attention of its players, you’ll find that no single game does them all in equal proportions. The edges of ARGspace are littered with “almost an ARG” and “ARGish” games. So as the umbrella gets larger, what does that gain us?
this blog entry ends with “Take it away [Internet Archaeology and Connecting the Dots], and even if you do have puzzles, narrative and interaction, you have no ARG.” This is dangerously tightening the box on the definition, relying on either/or and just one element of gameplay.
I look at LCP and ILB as nothing like The Beast or Metacortechs, and AotH and WiBS as differing from those two styles as well. That gives us 3 buckets right there. They don’t necessarily “fit” into mutually exclusive boxes, however; it’s all a continuum. I’m leaning towards a profile, maybe a snapshot of something like your stereo equalizer, with bars going up on different elements. Then a game would be described by the area under the curve, in proportions of elements. Whether or not we can then put a label to a common reoccuring “profile”, that might be more convenient.
I’ll pimp the link to further discussion behind my name.
Heya Cather-
Again, I really do emphatically agree: No Boxes. :)
At the same time, as per my qualification at the beginning of the post, I was trying to offer up an important element of ARGS as they are today that I think most people are overlooking.
Also, just for what it’s worth, I consider LCP to have had all the elements of the Beast and Metacortechs, just dressed up a little differently at times. For instance, the different cards/character profiles were, in essence, multiple websites, at least they fulfilled that role in my eyes. We did it that way to keep a few points of the meta ruleset we’d created for the game: 1) LCP was “haunted” and Lucky could only influence it, for whatever reason; and 2) players could never have direct contact with in-game characters unless it was through the filter of Lucky (we did, however, break this rule a little at the very end). This avoided players being able to, for instance, contact Lucy and tell her about this weird website where her and her friends’ lives were laid bare.
The character profiles fulfilled the classic function multiple websites have in the past, in that 1) they could be discovered via various puzzles; 2) they contained new pieces of story information; and 3) were updated over time. Admittedly, on the surface, this was a tradeoff for some, as it is really cool to find fictional websites (say for Lucy’s limo service), it was just a conscious decision that we made to follow our own ruleset within the little universe we’d created.
Granted, the 4th wall got pretty shattered at the end, there, what with prominent links to video on the homepage, but hey, it’s that box thing again. :) Overall, we wanted LCP to have all the ARG elements people had grown to expect and enjoy, despite any constraints we were under (self-imposed or otherwise). And where we couldn’t, we tried to compensate for it in some way.
But anyway, I digress. Um, Boxes: Bad. :)
Nice post Steve. I think what you’ve outlined is really what makes ARGs what they are. It’s really subtle. There’s now so many layers to the genre and community it’s hard to distill anything down. One other sticking point for me is that ARGs are too often perceived as a revolution. They need to be seen more as an evolution. It’s that last one percent that makes ARGs different from other entertainment/marketing/stroytelling/etc.
I think we could use more little boxes though :P
On a side note, it seems this issue was broached nearly 4 years ago, The way meta issues revolve around this community will never ceases to astound me.
Fascinating thread, wanted to throw in a couple of parallel thoughts, even though I’m late to the party, thanks for getting this started, Steve.
That “connect the dots” theme is what I always pitch as “discovery” and is a big part of what makes the narrative of ARGs different, and part of what incorporates subtle gameplay into less obvertly game stuff. It is also part of what makes it “sticky” (because you keep feeding discovery) and what makes it interesting for branding (because if your story is about getting people to ask questions, they pull the answers to them.)
Steve wrote: “While the narrative is the heart of the ARG, this Archaeology or Connecting of the Dots is what makes ARG different from an electronic novel, interactive fiction, or what have you.”
Going to challenge you a little bit about that. Connecting the dots and discovery aren’t confined to just ARGs. As a random example, I got resucked into “Silence of the Lambs” on AMC over the weekend — talk about connect the dots, forensics (a type of archeology) and discovery! Interactive? Nope. Immersive? Nope. Game? Nope. Puzzle? Yup. Narrative? Yup. Heck, it isn’t even really non-linear (except that the characters in the linear narrative are revealing a non-linear narrative within it.) Roshamon all over again.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t a core concept in what makes an ARG an ARG. Part of that, though, comes from “researcher” being a fairly natural and elementary way to frame an Internet audience’s involvement in a story, to give them a reason for being within it. LARPs have far more elaborate framings for audience involvement, but we wouldn’t consider them ARGs (even though they have narrative and interaction.) Would we consider them as mainstream?
Similarly, I could say the other part of what makes an ARG an ARG is that you’re making dots even as people are creating lines. It’s performance instead of crafting: that doesn’t mean performers exist without scripts, but performances are more than just those scripts. The upside of that is that you can incorporate audience feedback into the creation of the experience (potentially producing better outcomes.) The downside is that there is no erase button, no rewind button, no delete button. Obviously not every ARG has that to the same depth (I like that equalizer visual!) as every other, but all of them have some of this dynamic at play (which makes me think it’s probably an untouched part of a core definition of ARGing.)
Holy thread resurrection!
Good points, Brian. My point about the archaology being unique to ARGs is in reference to the fact that it’s the audience that has to procactively do the unearthing, not merely watching someone else do it.
Your point about the dots being created on the go is a great point! In addition to new dots being created, existing ones may even be moved. ;)