http://markheggen.com/heggen_noncasual_ARG.pdf
which includes proper typesetting and pull quotes. If you are going to print it out and read it (or even if you aren't), I definately recommend getting the PDF version ***
For a lot of people alternate reality games are just plain fun; something to do in their free time. They read the forums before heading to school or steal a quick peek at the latest trailhead during their lunch break. Even a serious late night marathon session of decryption would qualify as Recreation by most people in the community.
But to others, ARGs are serious stuff. I’m not just talking about people getting really wrapped up in the story or being worried sick about the dangers facing a character in their favorite game. I’m talking about people who are making a living creating ARGs. I’m talking about people getting doctorate degrees on the subject and artists making very serious statements through the form. To teachers trying to make a real impact on the field of education or authors creating serious works of literature, alternate reality games offer an exciting new terrain of exploration.
Driven by my own curiosity, and a reoccurring explanation to friends and family about “those crazy internet games” that I am into, I wanted to get a better understanding of the non-casual face of alternate reality gaming. There are a wonderful variety of people out there doing interesting things in the ARG world, and this is by no means a complete catalog of everything going on. Rather, it is a sample platter of the rich world that is out there; a pinch from over here and a sprinkle from over there.
From the very start of alternate reality gaming there has been a rich tradition of collaboration between advertising and ARG producers. Maybe it is because the combination of advertising’s resources and alternate reality gaming’s energy makes for a flavorful stew. Whatever the reason, most large scale games have been fueled by advertising in one way or another. When a major Hollywood film or the new operating system from Microsoft is being rolled out, we are not talking about small potatoes. These are multi-million dollar projects that require a major effort from major players. It isn’t exactly easy to hijack the Bellagio water fountains.
Advertisers have a lot of options when it comes to getting their message out and they aren’t just trying new things for the heck of it. You can be certain that serious minds spend serious time thinking about marketing principles, demographic details, and mediation strategies before Steven Spielberg or the bigwigs at Audi sign off on a complex campaign.
On the other side of the coin are small projects that still desire to create a strong connection with audiences. Digital media and ARGs offer some powerful equalizing qualities which have been utilized by a variety of smaller projects. For an independent project without a lot of money to throw around, a creative web presence and gripping cross-media narrative might be their one chance to compete with the big dogs.
To get a better understanding of how alternate reality gaming can be used to connect with an audience, I went to Brian Clark. Brian is the founder and CEO of GMD Studios (www.gmdstudios.com), an experimental media studio which has been around for more than twelve years. GMD Studios gave us the ARGs Art of the Heist and Who Is Benjamin Stove, as well as many other experimental projects that utilized cross-media communication to explore new grounds in mediation and narrative. Working with everyone from major corporate clients like Sharp Electronics to emerging independent film makers, Brian Clark and GMD Studios have explored a lot of ground when it comes to connecting with audiences and telling stories. I asked Brian about the unique psychological and communicative possibilities he deals with.
Q: You work in the advertising industry. In terms of client psychology, what are you able to offer your clients that something like a traditional television ad campaign cannot? Beyond page hits, what it is that makes clients so hungry to tap into the ARG world?
Brian Clark: “Well, I work *for* advertising agencies occasionally, but even working with them I’m an “out of the box” thinker. So, to be kind to them as an industry even in critique, the advertising space is going through a radical transform now that we’re entering the age of attention instead of the age of eyeballs. The classic tools of advertising, which relied in great part on interruption of attention streams, are learning bloody lessons about the audience’s ability avoid those interruptions. Immersion, engagement, and consideration start to become tools for looking the way audiences engage with brands (who are the advertising industry’s clients.) Some of the practices looking enhance that cluster under the general rubicon of “branded entertainment”.
They look at new genres like alternate reality gaming and see some hope: proof that audiences who avoid their interruptions aren’t necessarily audiences that reject brands in general. An ARG audience judges first and foremost on the quality of the experience they having: later people who come along and try to “save them” from the “advertising campaign” get told by those advocates, “Yes, we know there’s a sponsor, but we’re having a great time, so we don’t need saving, see you later!”
Despite all of that, the advertising industry is an adaptive lot if you look at it in long time spans. It was 30 years after the launch of television before ad agencies started having teams in their agencies dedicated to thinking exclusively about what they do with television that might be different than radio and print. Once they get their feet moving, they can surprise you and help invent whole genres like the “soap opera” that become lasting parts of the medium.”
Q: Are there anomolous patterns or unique strategies that appear in the ARG world? In other words, in what ways are the social interactions within the ARG world strange, rare, or unusual?
“There’s so much academic work in this area that I’m not sure you could ever go so far as to call anything in ARGs anomalous. The interesting new domain, though, is networked community, which have traits different than most of the group dynamics and social psychology work that I still have a geeky taste for keeping up on. As one example, most group dynamics think about that group as in some kind of equilibrium of forces, where as networked groups are porous and able to recruit and incorporate new skill sets and subdivide tasks in new and more efficient ways.
From an artistic perspective, ARGs are fascinating because they work from creative assumptions that rely upon those traits that are unique to networked audiences, a relatively recent addition to mediascape for most people. I would suggest the word “new” instead of anomalous or rare, but
that would gloss over the fact that this is far more ancient stuff. Cognitive psychology continues to find surprising connections between the way the brain works and the narratives we use to explain existence to ourselves and each other. Play (for certain) and gameplay (perhaps) predate even narrative on the tree of ancient human technologies.
We’ve just spent a few unfortunately centuries thinking that non-interactive media was the norm and interactive media the exception. Go back and ask a Homeric bard or Beowulf-howling skaal if storytelling was social and interactive and I bet the clay tablets looked the exception.”
While advertising dollars are a common backbone for many ARGs, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Mind Candy was founded in 2003 and gave us the sprawling world of Perplex City. Utilizing a self-funding business model that relied on selling packs of cards and promising a huge cash prize, Mind Candy quickly became a major player in the field and turned a lot of heads. Lasting almost two years and involving some 50,000 players, Season 1 of Perplex City was proof that there existed a worldwide audience hungry for ARGs and game-based storytelling. Back with Season 2 (a.k.a. Perplex City Stories), Mind Candy promises more of the complex puzzles and in-depth storytelling that hooked fans last time around, but also some changes in the way the project will operate. Like any business they must learn lessons and make adjustments to succeed.
In 2006 Mind Candy made headlines when it announced it had raised $7 million in venture capital and had plans to reach out to additional demographics as well as expand their product lineup to include things such as video games and mobile content. They have already rolled out a board game and a website chalk full of various puzzles and games. Mind Candy has proven the economic viability of alternate reality gaming, and serious attention is being payed to the path they are paving.
Dan Hon is the COO at Mind Candy. Having served as a Cloudmakers moderator and working with the team behind The Beast, Dan knows a thing or two about ARGs. I asked him about the shifting business model for Perplex City and what it is like to deal with people outside the ARG community.
Q: During Season 1, Perplex City was a rare example of a successful ARG that utilized a business model that didn’t rely on advertising. For Season 2 you have moved away from card-centric funding to something more traditional. As storytellers and experience creators, what will this inclusion of outside advertising allow you to do? What risks does it bring with it?
Dan Hon: “What we saw with Season One of Perplex City was that - as an ARG, and certainly as a “commercial’ ARG that didn’t rely on advertising to be funded, it was a very difficult proposition for people to get their head round. Not only in terms of the small (comparatively - compared to other forms of media) existing audience, but also because for our new players, it wasn’t clear how much the cards tied into the “game” and how much of a game the cards were on their own.
It’s certainly difficult where there are lots of people who’re playing your ARG for different reasons. There’s the people who’re playing it for the treasure, the people who’re playing it to follow the story and the interactivity, and also the people who’re playing it just because they like the cards. And are the people who’re playing it for the puzzle cards playing the ARG at all?
There’s definitely something in “many pieces, loosely joined” as a model for an ARG where you don’t *have* to buy the cards, or, say, any other associated physical objects to get on in the game, but that they add to the experience. It’s that model of experimentation that we’re looking at - a family of ARGlike products, probably.
So what will the inclusion of outside advertising allow us to do? Well, it lets us, in business speak, “diversify our revenue streams” - the ARG isn’t solely dependent upon sales of the puzzle cards. And - who’d have thought it - but distribution is hard! Production of physical objects is hard (for various values of the term “hard”, of course), and production of the puzzle cards - and what we want to do with the puzzle cards! - is very hard indeed.
So, it means that the ARG doesn’t have all its eggs in the one basket of having to be funded by puzzle cards.
On the flipside though, there are risks. The risk is that
advertising, done badly, can alienate players - and the potential audience - about as quickly as punching each player in the face. So we’re aware and conscious of that, and that’s a risk. But, we’re fairly confident that we’re smart people, and our friends at 42 are showing everyone that advertising doesn’t have to be bad. It can be done well, it can be integrated, and it can make sense. And I really believe that ARGs are the best platform, period, for brand/product placement *that makes sense*, that isn’t intrusive and where everyone wins.”
Q: To what extent has alternate reality gaming and cross-media storytelling become understood and accepted by the “outside” world? When you talk to VC people and possible advertising or business partners do you get a lot of blank stares and wide eyes, or are people becoming familiar and even comfortable with the techniques, strategies, and vocabularies you are utilizing?
“ARGs and cross-media storytelling aren’t accepted by the “outside world” at all. Well, that’s not strictly true, but I think it’s important to remember that the biggest ARG communities are still tiny. That only a handful of advertisers and brands know about ARGs. That the man in the street doesn’t know them and that, because what ARGs are is so different - that they’re a new media platform, in essence, that it’s incredibly hard to explain to people. It’s much easier to show them. And that’s quite hard, because that takes some effort.
So: our VC people don’t give us blanks stares. They’ve got the religion, and they’ve got it bad. And we love them for it! But yes there are still some people with blank stares, and it’s always a case of tailoring what we’re saying, what we’re selling, adjusting the “religion” of ARGs to the right audience. We sincerely believe in ARGs and their potential. We’ll get there in the end :) ”
At their core, ARGs are stories. It doesn’t matter if you are calling phone booths or sending a text message; audiences probably won’t pay much attention if you aren’t telling them an interesting tale. Literary theorists and authors have been thinking about the various ways a story can be told for a long time. The hypertext theorists of the 1980’s and 1990’s investigated what it means to tell a story in flexible piece rather than on a strict path. Media theorists have been talking about the difference between watching a story unfold on a television screen and reading that same plot within the pages of a book since the television was first invented. Alternate reality games offer a new way to communicate a story to an audience, and that fact isn’t lost on some authors. Like any traditional novel, ARGs can be serious works of literature and art. Just look at Year Zero, the recent project from Nine Inch Nails: this clearly went beyond building buzz for an upcoming album. Rather, the Year Zero ARG materials were a huge part of a complex storytelling/art experience that happened to include an album. As artists, Trent Reznor and the team behind Year Zero were making a very serious statement through the ARG experience.
Sean Stewart is a successful author of science fiction and fantasy novels. He won 2000 World Fantasy Award for Galveston and won great praise for his Star Wars novel Yoda: Dark Rendezvous. In 2001 he served as lead writer for The Beast, arguably the first ARG. In 2006 he teamed with Jordan Weisman to write Cathy’s Book, an ARG wrapped in a novel. Sean currently heads up story development
efforts at 42 Entertainment.
Q: You have written both traditional fiction books and ARG narratives. How does the essential act of writing change when operaing in a cross-media format? As an author do you find yourself approaching traditional literature and ARGs in fundamentally different ways?
Sean Stewart: “Every kind of writing requires adjustments. My background is as a novelist; when I started having to write scripts for the Beast and I Love Bees, I had the novelist’s classic problems: lines that were 4x as long as they should have been, and a tendency to try to carry in dialogue (the only part of the novel’s game I really had left) what would better have been told through sights and sounds. Of course, reciprocal problems exist; if I’m remembering correctly, Roddy Doyle started out as a playwright, and his early novels (which I very much enjoyed) rely too much on dialogue, and don’t take advantage of the novel’s ability to submerge you in a world.
Don’t Fight the Web
The first thing you have to understand is that the web has a much lower attention span than a novel. The same people who will curl up with a Tolstoy novel get antsy if you ask them to read the same material on a computer. The web wants to poke, click, prod, jump, link, and drag. The web is that hyperactive kid that can’t sit still in class, and it’s no use complaining. Got a 5000 word scene of passionate intensity and philosophical grandeur? Cut it into ten pieces or sell it somewhere else.
When you are writing for an audience of one…
Keep it short. If you can’t keep it short, at least give your reader a little power—a choice of where to go, or when, or how. In the example above, take your 5000 word chunk of text, cut it into ten pieces, and let your reader have a chance to do SOMETHING—click on a link, look at a diagram, at least turn the page.
When you are writing for a collective audience….
Many ARGs assume that a group of people will be considering the stories you tell at the same time. For them, much of the pleasure comes from the interstices between your words. In a novel, we tell a story; in an ARG, we like to let the audience infer it. To take an example, consider Pride and Prejudice. Our pleasure in the novel comes from the time we spend with Lizzie, with steeping in her world, her thoughts, and her emotions. If Pride and Prejudice were an ARG, we would still enjoy those things: but we would enjoy talking about them with our friends even more.
The turning point in P & P comes with Mr. Darcy’s unexpected proposal; Lizzie’s furious refusal; Darcy’s subsequent letter in which he explains the reasons for his actions. Reading the letter, Lizzie comes to realize, just a moment too late, that she has judged him unfairly, a mistake it seems too late to fix.
In an ARG, we would show the proposal scene, but then say that later that afternoon Mr. Darcy wrote a letter to Elizabeth, but decided not to send it. The audience would have to investigate Darcy’s study and find the letter. Having found it, they would realize that this is stuff Elizabeth needs to know, and find a way to get the letter to her after all.
To summarize, an ARG audience fills in the interstices of the story with educated guesswork, arguing about who is right, who is wrong, and by how much. They then search/explore until they find the next piece of the story (e.g. Darcy’s letter) and act to change the story (by delivering the letter to Elizabeth.)
The fundamental activities of the web are searching for stuff and gossiping about it. The writing in an ARG is often elliptical and fragmentary because it is writing to that goal—letting people search for stuff, and then gossip about it afterwards.
Distributed Narrative = Distributed Control
We often talk about “distributed narrative” – the idea that the story is broken into little bits and sprinkled about for the audience to collect and collate. But the narrative is also distributed in another sense: the more readers are involved in creating the narrative, the more control the author has to cede to them.
In the early 90s, William Gibson was asked about the brilliant future of hypertext, and responded guardedly by saying, “as a writer, I put words in a certain order, and I kind of hope they stay that way.” Early commentary about net-based writing tended to say that the net would make narrative democratic by giving the reader all kinds of choices. Most writers stubbornly felt that, after all, they were good at making stories and putting words in an order, and the whole point of being read was for others to enjoy that skill. I was (and am) one of those writers.
At the same time, the nature of writing for the web in general (and the ARG in particular) seems to call for a re-adjustment of the power relationship between author and reader. The web reader wants some agency. The story can go largely where you want it to go, and in many parts you can retain precise control of words and the order they are in: but sooner or later you need to let the reader have something to *do*, or she will get bored.
If writing a novel is like a figure-skating routine, writing an ARG is more like dancing a tango. As your 7th grade Social Dance teacher said, the man (or author in our case) may propose a step: but the lady (audience) always has the choice of whether she will follow. And if she is interested in a different story line, or mechanic, or game-play opportunity, then you ignore her at your peril.
If you, like Mr. Darcy, are too proud in your dealings with your reader, she will be disgusted with you, and the romance can’t possibly end happily after that.”
Q: ARGs seem to be a “net native” communication form. It is almost impossible to imagine them existing outside of a digitally networked context. Are you aware of examples in the history of literature that could be viewed as predecessors or parallels to alternate reality games?
“I think there are at least two obvious predecessors to ARG’s, although neither of them is, in a normal sense, part of the history of literature.
As a practical matter, ARG’s are a kissing cousin to the role-playing games of the 70s and 80s, which live at the intersection of story-telling and game mechanic. An RPG is a kind of loosely-structured story-telling embedded in a rule structure that gives some shape to what happens. (Define the rules more tightly, you get baseball or chess; define them less tightly, you get improv theater.) In the particular case of 42, both Jordan Weisman and I were RPG fanatics for many years. We both designed many rule sets and world backgrounds for RPGs, the difference being that Jordan found a way to sell his stuff for money, which only goes to show.
The part of ARG’s which are less like role-playing games lies in the creation of massive collaborative audiences. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a kind of art which has this kind of massive, exploratory, communal engagement with an audience: but that activity has absolutely existed for centuries. We call it Science, and on the whole it has worked out pretty well for us as a species. If you think about it, an ARG essentially recreates the science of the age of Darwin: the collaborative unraveling of mysteries by an eclectic assortment of amateurs spread all over the world. The sense of excitement an ARG brings, of passionate collective effort, of exploration, of solidarity, and of awe at the spectacle of what thousands of curious minds working together can accomplish is something I think Mr Darwin would have recognized at once.
Working backwards, you could look back through the history of knowledge and think of the monasteries at Grenada and Seville as early websites where early ARGers like Thomas Aquinas could view source on the pages of Arabic manuscripts and see the original code of Greek thought; the Renaissance, in this view, being an ARG hosted on the server we call the Library of Alexandria, and propagated, in the absence of laptops and cell phones, by donkeys and merchant ships.
We are human beings; for us, “knowledge” and “play” are intimately linked. An ARG is science considered as a Penn & Teller routine, and story repackaged as a dance.”
Sebastian Mary Harrington is a London-based writer and entrepreneur exploring ARGs from a literary perspective. She studied English Literature at Oxford University. These days, she combines her interests in literary theory and Web subcultures through contributions to the work of the Institute for the Future of the Book ( www.futureofthebook.org), a New York think tank exploring writing, authorship and publishing in the digital era. Her website is www.sebastianmary.com
Q: Clearly there were a set of technological (software, hardware, and infrastructural) benchmarks that had to be reached for a storytelling format like ARGs to take off. Connected to that (but in some ways independent) are a series of physiological and sociological adjustments and benchmarks that had to take place in the minds of the audience. Do you think that there is something fundamentally different about today’s audience that allows them to so easily embrace this new form of storytelling as compared to the audiences of yesterday?
Sebastian Mary Harrington: “I think the two big changes that have come about between people accustomed to print reading, and people accustomed to Web reading, are
1. Digitally-literate people are accustomed to information overload and fragmented sources, and expect to derive coherence for themselves from a mass of messy date
2. People accustomed to the Web don’t place so much stock on the reliability, truth or authority of the text they’re reading. This is fundamentally different to the tradition of print literature, which is all about how you can trust a book because no-one would have bothered to publish it if it wasn’t reliable.
But I wouldn’t say these make for a fundamental change in an audience. They’re very different ways of reading, but I think it’s an inflection rather than a paradigm shift. And I certainly don’t think it replaces the previous way of reading.
I’m part of that strange generation that is completely at home on the Web, but can remember what life was like without it. I sent my first email aged 19, and graduated just before Web research became standard practice in liberal arts studies. So I spent four years at Oxford sitting in libraries, researching the old-fashioned way. And then I got a job and was suddenly being asked to find things out in a completely different way. It’s prompted me to think a good deal about the different experiences of print and Web reading; I think this sheds much light on how and why ARGs work.
If you’re reasearching in print, you have to sit in a library and chew through your sources. Online, you google, re-google, pick a fact from here, a snippet from there, an image from somewhere else. You treble-check everything. You collate bookmarks, quotes and ideas, you join forums and sign up to mailing lists.
You get distracted. Web research tends towards digression. You go looking for reliable figure for the amount of rainforest in Borneo, and suddenly realise you’ve spent 15 minutes reading the blog of someone who collects orang utan cartoons. Staying focused is a skill in its own right, as is the black art of search engine keywords that return the results you want. In its own way, it’s as sustained, concentrated, and rigorous as researching in a library. It just works associatively, laterally, sceptically, imaginatively.
I think ARGs are enjoyable, because the experience of playing one mimics the experience of researching like this. The story content of an ARG is usually scattered across different sites, and asks you to play an active part in turning it up. To read a novel or research something in a library, you just turn the pages. To research on the Web, or to ‘read’ a Web ‘story’, you have to check, cross-check, Google, decode, unravel, pick up emails, message ‘characters’, hack sites, compare or collate information. It matches the way people use the Web.
The other interesting effect of changing from print to Web reading is the rampant unreliability of the Web. I think the emergence of the TINAG philosophy in ARGs is directly connected to this experience.
If you look something up in a print encyclopedia you’ll tend to assume that it’s got its facts right (ok, it might have not, but there’s a very strong tradition of trust in the authority and ‘truth’ of printed books. But no-one doing any serious research online will take facts at face value without cross-checking rigorously. Everything on the Web is slightly unreliable, slightly tinged with bias; and people who’ve grown up with a straightforward faith in authoritative text (the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Bible, whatever) is likely to find this a bit disturbing.
But the digitally-literate aren’t bothered by the fact that on the Web there’s no such thing as an authoritative text. So what? There’s plenty of interesting, funny, provocative or absorbing ones – who cares if it’s all a bit biased? So the lines between truth and fiction are already blurred. And I think the TINAG philosophy just pushes this a bit further, makes a game of it. You have to work a bit harder to work out whether a site is in-game or not; and the game itself is not going to help you – any more than the Web itself is going to help you decide whether to take the output of any one website seriously.
So I guess I’d say that it’s about digital literacy in the broad sense. In much the same way as print fiction didn’t really take off until literacy became widespread among the middle classes in the 18th century, I think ARGs are taking off because digital literacy is widespread enough for people to enjoy playing with it. And this isn’t just about how to switch the computer on or use a browser, but an ability to understand instinctively the conventions, mechanisms, strengths and weaknesses of the Web and be willing to play with them.
Print fiction’s conventions are as much a function of the form of the book (boundedness, time and cost to manufacture, etc etc) as of any intrinsic value. The conventions of print fiction are as much a function of its physical form as of anything intrinsically ‘good’ about novels as such. By the same token, fiction that works on the Web has to do so within the form encouraged by the Web. To be convincing online, fiction has to feel boundless, fragmented, associative and unreliable, and use the tools people might be using online anyway.
I don’t think there’s something ‘fundamentally’ different about the people who play ARGs. Many educated people are literate in both print and online reading. But you have to be digitally highly-literate to enjoy a good ARG – otherwise you’re likely just to find it strange, unnerving, disturbing or simply incomprehensible. The pleasure comes from drawing a coherent narrative out of a mass of fragmented information, and from the precarious thrill of ‘playing’ without the safe boundaries of print fiction to tell you when you need to stop. Online, generally, the membrane between fact and story is much thinner; to enjoy the TINAG experience, you have to be excited rather than frightened by this. Finally, I think you have to be willing to collaborate with other people to find your pathway through the maze.
Which brings me nicely to your second question...”
Q: Cooperation and collaboration are centrally important elements to many ARG experiences. Conversely, almost all traditional books are designed to be experienced within one’s own personal space (both physically and mentally). What are the benefits and limitations of utilizing a narrative format that is experienced collaboratively rather than personally?
“The first thing I’d say to this is that the history of solo reading is shorter than you may think. In the Middle Ages and earlier, people were typically either illiterate or shared books by reading them out. If there’s only one copy of Aristotle’s Poetics between here and the Sudetenland, you can’t just photocopy the relevant chapter for people to read at home: you get everyone together, and someone will read it out.
As I mentioned above, it wasn’t till the 18th and 19th centuries that literacy and reading became widespread even among the middle and upper classes. So the history of solo reading as a cultural standard is less than three centuries old. Compared to how long people have been writing and telling stories, that’s not much of a tradition at all!
So my first comment would be that solo novel reading and ARG collaboration may not be the whole story. Consider the practice of reading fiction out loud to a group well into the 19th century; consider the practice of oral storytelling, including interaction from the audience. Plenty of cultures still do this. Consider the experience of sharing a play or a movie with a theatreful of people. All these have a ‘group’ element to them,
sense that part of the pleasure of experiencing the story comes from the fact that you’re sharing it with the others around you.
I wouldn’t say that ARGs are distinct because they’re experienced in a group rather than individually. I’d say, rather, that their distinctiveness is in the quality of participation.
Participation has two sides. One is the shared, group experience. In this, as I’ve suggested above, ARGs are not doing anything wildly new: seeing a play is a shared experience. But collaboration, group discussion and puzzle-solving do something very interesting to the quality of imaginative participation in that story.
At the risk of digressing massively (again!), I think that people today are trained to resist imaginative participation in stories. We’re told that ‘suspension of disbelief’ is for kids, or else it’s something we do occasionally, in clearly-defined spaces (a movie theatre, between the covers of a book), that it’s ‘entertainment’, a distraction from the ‘real world’. And we’re told that that once it’s over we can go back to taking things literally again. And I think ARGs challenge that convention in some very interesting ways.
Modern culture encourages us to be ‘rational’, unaffected by emotive narratives. We’re trained to resist getting drawn into stories. This has the strange effect that mainstream stories (I’m thinking of Hollywood here really) become schlockier and schlockier in order to get past people’s jaded cynicism. Meanwhile, anyone approaching, say, Rambo with all their faculties of emotional participation open will probably be traumatised by the experience. Everyone’s seen a screaming kid being hurried out of the cinema because they’ve not yet been trained to resist the empathetic response to a story, have seen something they took straight to heart, and have been horrified by it. The parent will usually comfort them outside by telling them ‘It’s only a story’; but that’s meaningless to a small child, to whom everything is a story, and stories are the whole world. It’s only later that we come to believe that there’s a difference between stories and ‘reality’.
So what’s my point? I think ARGs are a very interesting wayof routing round that resistance. Because they ask the audience to take an active part in decoding the narrative, said audience is not being forced by quick jump-cutting, explosions, loud noise or grisly events to become absorbed in the story; they’re responsible for their own willingness to suspend disbelief and ‘act as if’ the story were really happening. This isn’t the same as being duped into believing it is (Jane McGonigal has written very well on this in A Real Little Game); it’s more active, collaborative, provisional and self-aware than that.
So ARGers volunteer their own imaginative participation. One of the benefits of this is that your audience (players, whatever) will participate much more intensely in the story than they might otherwise. Every storyteller wants a rapt audience. But the (potential) downside is that your audience, by virtue of being intensely involved, won’t put up with poor quality stuff. I’ll enjoy a rubbish action movie if it’s got entertaining stunts; but an ARG will stand or fall by the cumulative quality of its execution, interactions, puzzles, characters, narrative and pacing. In comparison, that’s a pretty tough order.
That starts me wondering about genre fiction: there are plenty of people who read sci-fi or romance novels that aren’t very good, because they’re more interested in the genre markers than the strength of the story. I find it hard to imagine ARGs speciating into ‘literary’ narratives and ‘genre’ ones. Though it’s not unthinkable, I think there’s a healthily democratic quality to the Web that doesn’t easily lend itself to the categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.
But that’s another discussion. There’s also a whole element to the collaborative quality of ARGs that I believe enacts a fundamental societal paradigm shift the beginnings of which we’re only just starting to feel. Or, to put it another way, if the experience of reading novels enacted the individualism that sat at the heart of industrial capitalism, I think ARGs enact a new spirit of collaboration and self-organisation that marks a profound tectonic shift in the importance we accord respechttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.bold.giftively complex systems, and the hierarchies that attempt to manage such systems. But I’m not sure if that’s a benefit or a limitation; in truth, I think it’s just something that’s happening and as such to be taken seriously. But either way, I’m now way beyond alternate reality gaming and into the realm of politics.”
ARGs have a way to encouraging people to expand their skill sets. Just ask any player who has stayed up late learning to read ROT-13 or pouring over the minute details of some obscure ancient text. When the progression of a gripping narrative or the well-being of a lovable character is on the line, people seem to have an easy time learning new things. The idea of an educational ARG has been around since the start of the genre, and big things are starting to happen. The International Game Developers Association’s ARG Special Interest Group (IGDA ARG/SIG) has a nice listing of some of the people currently looking into the educational possibilities of ARGs at www.igda.org/wiki/index.php/Alternate_Reality_Games_SIG/Educators_and_ARGs.
To learn a little more about ongoing explorations of educational ARGs, I talked to Jim Wolff. Jim describes his history with this terrain:
“I spent several years working for The Learning Game, designing interactive games for training courses, which I delivered in schools around the UK to both pupils and teachers. We found that the kids loved this combination of teamwork, multimedia and technology as it was such a refreshing change from the drone of standard classroom teaching. I have also been studying for an MSc in E-Learning, where I’ve been focusing on Game-Based Learning and the potential of web 2.0 features. I became interested in ARGs primarily because they’re such an engaging format - large-scale collaboration and cross-media integration combined with real-world events is just pure brilliance. And the more I look at them from a theoretical perspective, the more I realise just how valuable they might be for teaching and learning.”
I asked Jim about finding the sweet spot between entertaining and educating, and also about how open for innovation the education culture is.
Q: How can these learning processes be enriched or enhanced without ruining the narrative and experiential qualities of the game? In other words, how can a designer infuse even more learning opportunities into their game without having the whole thing seem obnoxiously scholastic?
Jim Wolff: “I like that term, ‘obnoxiously scholastic’ - it seems to sum up our general concerns that any obvious learning in a game might ruin it completely. But whether we realise it or not, we are constantly learning new skills and thinking processes in any game we play. And game players love to learn - without any learning taking place, we’d never improve at something. So first of all, designers needn’t fear learning, but we do need to make it engaging.
The key here I think is to integrate any learning intentions with the overall design of the game, so that the narrative and experiences complement the desired outcome. This is an obvious point, but if you want participants to learn something about World War 2 for example, create a narrative that involves characters in scenarios that are relevant to the subject. Likewise, player experiences should be relevant too - for instance, using the example above, players might have to find clues in a war museum to help one of the characters.
One of the best ways to avoid something looking like intended learning is to make use of the characters’ motives. A character might require players to learn how to use say, a certain piece of software, as part of a greater narrative goal. In aiming for this goal, players are learning to use this software without it being the main focus. Best of all, they are learning through doing in a relevant context and enjoying it to boot - here lies the great potential for ARGs in education.”
Q: While some very exciting and progressive work is being done with educational gaming, I am sure that there are some old guard educators out there who are suspicious of games and their place within education. Do you get the feeling that the educational community as a whole is ready to embrace things like ARGs? Are the educators of certain countries particularly interested or disinterested in looking at games and ARGs as a real innovation in teaching?
“I think that teachers are coming round to the idea that a fun class needn’t be a pointless class. There are currently many initiatives to encourage greater collaboration, problem-solving and thinking skills in regular lessons, and many of the more creative teachers I’ve met do a great job of doing just that. However, one of the biggest challenges teachers currently face is the need to get across large amounts of knowledge, which is then tested in exams and supposedly proves whether a student is a good learner or not. Games tend to be great at getting people to think, but not so good at imparting volumes of knowledge (although games like Civilisation are an exception).
However what is particularly interesting is that now in the digital age, knowledge is so easily accessible that we no longer need to store huge amounts of it in our own brain, as we have the internet and access to networks of experts around the world. So schools’ focus on knowledge accumulation is gradually becoming redundant. What is becoming more necessary now as we enter the so-called knowledge economy, is the ability to use the tools and technologies that enable large-scale collaboration and networking. These are skills that ARGs in particular teach brilliantly, but are currently almost completely ignored in schools.
So in answer to your question then, schools will at some point need to adapt teaching practice and evaluation methods if they are to prepare pupils for the modern workplace. And the great news is that well-designed games combine the very proficiencies required for this modern work environment (such as teamwork, technology, and simulated experience), with features such as entertainment and excitement, which are now becoming more needed to stimulate and interest media-saturated pupils. Once schools recognise this need for change, games, and ARGs especially, will have their day in education.”
While most people in the world may not be familiar with ARGs, that hasn’t stopped a group of academics from tuning in. Academia has a wonderful ability to pour great attention into tiny details of society, regardless of how familiar mass culture is with those things. Even though ARGs are being created and played by relatively small groups of people (as compared, let’s say, to the number of people who watch Nascar or read romance novels) there exists an energetic community of graduate students, researchers, and university professors who are exploring the ARG world. As more and more people learn about this strange thing called ARG, the amount of academic attention payed towards it will surely swell. Christy Dena wrote the ARG/SIG Whitepaper section on ARGs and Academia (http://www.igda.org/wiki/index.php/Alternate_Reality_Games_SIG/Whitepaper/ARGs_and_Academia) which is a wonderful description of ongoing academic explorations.
Christy is a cross-media entertainment researcher and creator. Working on her PhD at the School of Letters, Art and Media, University of Sydney, Christy works with the entertainment industry and the academic world to expand understanding of cross-media design and communication. She writes www.cross-mediaentertainment.com.
I asked her about academia’s interest in ARGs, and the mutually beneficial relationship between the two worlds.
Q: you piloted the ARGs and Academia section of the ARG/SIG Whitepaper which sheds light on a wide variety of academic investigations into the topic. That sections describes people all around the world in all sorts of different academic fields approaching this thing from all different angles. What do you think is the common motive running through all these diverse approaches? Beyond simply being new, what is it about ARGs that makes them a target of such diverse avenues of investigation?
Christy Dena: “A common motive running through the diverse approaches? I think a genuine desire to capture what ARGs are (at the particular time they looked). The irony is that because of the polymorphic and participatory nature of ARGs, it is perhaps only through the combination of all the theories that ARGs are glimpsed.
ARGs are diverse. They exhibit a variety of traits either within each ARG or across the range of ARG types. Just as an ARG has different parts that appeal to different players (for instance puzzle or narrative preferences), so too do ARGs have different elements that appeal to different researchers. For instance, ARGs enable researchers to revisit, test and develop theories of interactive narrative, participatory culture, play, performance, communication, intertextuality, ludic space, education, industrial-audience relations and so on.”
Q: ARGs are still an extremely young form of mediated communication. As an art form or mediation strategy they are still testing their boundaries, trying out new things, and learning a lot of lessons. During this important process of early evolution, what role can serious academic input have? Regarding the goal of healthy growth for the form, can academics offer the nascent ARG world something that won’t come from casual critics, business influences, weekend players or elsewhere?
“Academic research into ARGs can contribute to three main areas: 1) to the ARG community, 2) to the general population outside the ARG community; and 3) to academia. For the ARG community, academics are in the position where they can contribute insights that are not openly shared due to competition. For instance, academics can illuminate areas such as design and audience measurement – two areas that are not volunteered by production houses.
Research also takes care of a particular mode of analysis: that of establishing patterns, understanding the nature of the form and where it lies in relation to others. Designers can busy themselves with creating new forms, with breaking moulds, while academics run after them piecing together the moulds so that others may see them and create their own hybrids. Beyond running behind, however, academics can also help assist designers with strategic foresight by providing insight into trends. Their research can also help temper the rhetoric around the form, providing insights beyond media hype. They can also act as champions of the form interrogating accusations and conversely, when contributing to the general population, bloated claims.
To the general population, ARG research can situate ARGs within context: past and present media, industrial and creative ecologies. Researchers have the opportunity to provide an impartial insight into the form because they are not bound by the need for investor income, client privileges and increasing audience share by media coverage.
ARGs are also a form that contributes to academia. As I have already stated, they help test and develop previous theories; and due to their complex and often overwhelming nature, they also facilitate a team-based approach to analysis.
In short, ARGs are quite stimulating to many. Research is just another lens through which some express their experience.”
For more on academia and ARGs I talked with Jane McGonigal; certainly one of the major figures in the world of alternate reality games. Jane was a lead designer for I Love Bees while at 42 Entertainment, and has been a strong voice for the power and possibilities of ARGs. After earning her PhD from UC Berkeley with the dissertation This Mighhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.italic.gift Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Jane is now a researcher for the Institute for the Future, an influential nonprofit research group. In 2006, McGonigal was named as one of the top 35 innovators changing the world by the MIT Technology Review. She recently lauched World Without Oil (www.worldwithoutoil.org) which is working to utilize the natural strengths and tendencies of ARGs to address a real world issue. Her website is www.avantgame.com.
Q: As more and more attention is being payed to ARGs by academics, educators, theorists and so on, what (if anything) can today’s casual player to do help this new infusion of energy and attention make a positive impact on the art form?
Jane McGonigal: “ *Sharing their ARG experiences publicly, where designers and researchers can learn from them, is the single most important thing players can do to advance the art and science of ARGs.
All of the designers and researchers I know -- and perhaps even more importantly all of the foundations, clients, venture capitalists and research organizations who are considering funding new ARGs -- want to know exactly why ARGs are compelling and specifically how they impact players’ lives.
So we need more public conversation about the influence of ARGs. On forums, blogs, and maybe even the game wikis themselves, players could be talking meta about the impact of games they play, specifically in terms of how the
games shape and change the players’ outlooks, technology usage, opinions, friendships, learning, creative practices, and how they go about their everyday lives. The end result of this kind of visible discussion would be better-designed games and better-informed backers for new ARGs.”
Q: The World Without Oil project seems to minimize the infusion of fictional elements into a real world setting. There are fictional characters, but for all practical purposes they could very easily be real people (the “plot” doesn’t hinge on them traveling through time or being vampires or anything of that sort). Could you imagine (or have you seen) a successful project that completely eschewed any fictional elements and applied the mechanisms of ARGs (and involved the ARG community) to completely real situations? Reality Games if you will? I think of the famous idea of the Cloudmakers tackling the events surrounding 9-11, but wonder why that project seems not to have materialized. Is the infusion of fiction into the real world the primary force that drives the famous energy, innovation, and collective problem solving ability of the ARG community or just one
approach?
“ * I do believe that all ARGs have to tell a great story. No matter what the purpose of the ARG, from entertainment to marketing to social change, compelling fiction is absolutely key. It gives players a new mythology to rally around. It ties the interactions and puzzles and missions together. It provides a framework for interpreting and tackling the problems that need to solved. Fiction is a huge part of the art.
The stories that ARGs tell, however, do not need to be futuristic, or fantastic, or crime stories, or even mysteries. I am very much hoping to see the stories of ARGs in the future include comedies, romances, political thrillers, comic book sagas, deep sea adventures, and any other crazy genre you could think of.
We shouldn’t mistake non-fantastic plots for lack of engaging story. The World Without Oil story is relatively “realistic”, as none of the characters appear to be futuristic A.I.s, criminals on the run, or dead people. But WWO, like every well-designed ARG, is imagining and bringing to life an
immersive fictional scenario, an alternate reality (even one that is very close to actual reality) in which the players can do their creative, innovative, amazing thing.”
So there you have it. Alternate reality games are a fun way to spend five minutes before bed, and they are also very serious tools for reaching an audience with a message or story. You can use an ARG to add some excitement to your weekend, or to earn a PhD. ARGs can help change education as we know it, they can help address major problems facing the world, and maybe (just maybe) they can pay your rent.
The network of non-casual investigations into alternate reality games is good for the genre and good for the world. Everyone from the most casual lurker to the most dedicated professional is playing an important role in the growth of this new form of communication. And we ain’t seen nothing yet: the form is young and expansive and certainly not yet become all that it can be. As the form grows up it will expand into a variety of new directions and new applications of this tool will inevitably be explored. I look forward to watching the current batch of non-casual investigations of ARGs continue, and to seeing new possibilities emerge. For now, keep uphttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.bold.gif the good work.
About the author:
Mark Heggen is currently working on his MFA in Design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. With a background in graphic design and media theory he explores cross-media communication, alternate reality and pervasive gaming, augmented reality, hypertext theory, game studies and Furbees.
His website is markheggen.com
and his blog is retext.blogspot.com
