Experience Design
Jon Waite and gang recently interviewed Elan Lee, Sean Stewart and Jim Stewartson to talk about what they’re up to, and the challenge of defining this new transmedia thing we do.
ARG Netcast: Beyond the Fourth Wall (Part 1)
ARG Netcast: More Tales From Beyond the Fourth Wall (Part 2)
ETA: Link to first podcast removed.
Looking through old posts and articles, I ran across this gem that still holds up after 4 years or so…
Part puzzle-infused scavenger hunt, part interactive fiction, ARGs are among the first entertainment forms genuinely native to the Net, culture watchers say. Unlike the online cartoons or games that differ little from their offline counterparts, ARGs…are woven from the fragmented, deeply community-driven fabric of the Web itself.
Yeah, so obligatory blog apology about being too busy to blog, yada yada blah blah shmow shmow.
Well, I’m reeling from a catastrophic computer failure last night that left me with the fun day of reinstalling windows and every application I have today. I was trying to partition my main drive last night, and the computer did what all computers love to do if you wait long enough: Prove To You That It Is In Fact They Who Are Overlords Of You And Not The Other Way Around. Yep, some glitch during the repartitioning left me with an unusable hard drive. Had to reformat and reinstall WinXP.
Fortunately for me, I’d finally gotten around to getting myself an external firewire drive to backup all my data on, so I didn’t lose the most important stuff: finances, family photos, etc. It sucks for sure, but it could’ve definitely been worse.
Took advantage of the situation to give myself a partition to install the beta of Windows Vista in, to see what that’s all about. Bottom line, it’s pretty, but SLOW and BUGGY, but hey, that’s why it’s beta, right?
Seeing as it’s the first weekend of summer, my daughter and I went to Hollywood video to get a weekend’s worth of DVDs, since it’s so hot during the day you can’t really actually DO anything around here. One of the movies we picked up was The Producers, which I’d already seen in the theater.
Bottom line on that is that it’s one of the few movies ever to make me laugh so hard and often that my sides hurt. It really is that funny, at least to me. Mel Brooks is really a master of comedy, as far as I’m concerned. He knows when to go over the top, and when to be subtle, which is so rare nowadays.
Best laugh in the film for me came over the credits, which I’m sure most people weren’t around for in the theaters. Will Farrell does a Celine Dionesque version of Der Gutan Tag Hop-Clop that had me in tears, wheezing. From the David Foster-ish arrangement to the Titanic Irish Whistle during the big key change, it was a masterful satire of the whole “gotta put a hit song over the credits, regardless of if it fits the rest of the movie style-wise” thing. If you have the DVD, don’t miss it, and don’t miss the final song after the credits, either.
Finally, Sean Stewart updated his site to include a really great article on Alternate Reality Gaming, which includes a list of what he thinks the Hallmarks of an ARG are. Very interesting read, for those of you interested in such things, and you know who you are.
For me, he was able to finally quantify something that I’d been unable to figure out, precisely. From his article:
“For both the Beast and I Love Bees, we refused to do interviews under our own names until very near the end. It’s OK to see the name of a book’s author on the cover—but imagine how jarring it would be if periodically the actual narrative of your Napoleonic era sea story was interrupted by someone reminding you it had been written by a little old lady named Doris who lived in a condo in Tampa and liked Siamese cats.
When there is no frame around a story, you have to be really careful about reminding the audience that it is, after all, “just” a story… “
Finally! All along I thought I was just being weird, or purist, or eliteist or something. It always bugged me when Puppetmasters (ARG developers) were so blatantly out from behind the curtain before and/or during their game, and I know many players have felt this way as well. Now I know why, as this makes perfect sense. It’d be like watching a film, and every 10 minutes they cut to a shot of the director telling you something about how he made this scene, or what it means, or something about his life.
Because ARGs typically take place on a “Platform Independent” stage, coming at us from all the normal channels of communication that we use every day in our lives, it totally ruins it when the puppetmasters are interviewed, or blog, or whatever, as it’s taking place in the same space as their creation.
Does that make sense? It does to me, now. Totally.
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.