Deus Ex Machinatio

Another Step Toward Global Domination

I've got a guest post on the blog over at Luxurious Animals. If you've been reading me for long, very little of it will be new to you, but I'm proud of the piece because it contains the most succinct description of what the heck an ARG is that I've ever come up with. 

Check it out and let me know what you think. I'm sure there must be at least one or two of you out there who don't quite agree with me. 

Tribute to Dave Szulborski

A moment of silence to mourn the passing of Dave S., game designer, author, and all-around warm, wonderful human being. 

We'll all miss you. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, there's more information here.)

Some Things I've Learned About ARG Design

In no particular order. Design goals, best practices, aesthetic principles. Some things I find myself striving toward, talking about, doing. It's categorically untrue that I always do all of these things, of course. But maybe you can see what I'm reaching toward.

Feel free to add, elaborate, or dispute in comments.

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Content is a reward. Make sure the content you provide is worth the effort you're rewarding. Even an autoresponder should be worth the time it takes to read it. 

Never, never let effort go unrewarded, even if the effort isn't what you expected or wanted. 

That said, don't excessively reward players heading in the wrong direction -- the volume with which you respond is an indication as to whether they're barking up the wrong tree. 

Each discrete piece of your game should be independently entertaining in its own right, even if the player never sees another piece of it. 

If you want to make a game for a mass audience, there should be something for every level of involvement, if possible, and for as many kinds of players as you can manage: explorers, achievers, socializers, killers; more than just spectators, speculators and solvers. Read up on Dr. Bartle. 

Try to make an experience that would make sense even to a single player who is too shy or otherwise unmotivated to find or join a community. 

Be aware of trolls. Consider interactive elements of your design from the perspective of somebody who has the most fun when defecating into somebody else's swimming pool. 

Reference new content streams from within a known-in-game source as soon after discovery as possible. Once firmly established, this habit both supports the players' effort by acknowledging it and helps to prevent gamejacking. 

Again, for a large-scale game, whenever possible, keep all communication in the open. Do as little as possible through private IM and email. This scales much better and will save you time and headaches. 

Consider structure. Completely open-ended games can lose players who miss a road sign and get lost. Structure can mean a guide through the experience (often a cute brunette girl). It can mean a central website acting as a story clearinghouse. Just make sure players know where to look, and when, rather than guessing.

Make sure it's obvious to your players what their current goal is. Uncertainty isn't that much fun. 

Use your structure to provide clear calls to action from time to time. It's helpful to get everybody on the same page now and again. 

Provide rolling recaps. This serves two purposes: It allows existing players to attend to an urgency (vacation, term paper, conference) without risk of losing the thread of the story. It also allows new players a simple way to jump in, even late in the game. 

Value your players' time and attention as much as they do. Don't release a lot of content solely for the sake of having a lot of content; don't create a lot of puzzles solely for the sake of having a lot of puzzles. It's surprisingly easy to overwhelm players with more information than they can process at once. 

Manage expectations carefully. Don't commit yourself to a volume of content you can't realistically do, like live IM around the clock, or fifteen updates every single day. 

The players will generally care less about plausibility than you do. Still, you need to put in the footwork on the motivations and actions of your cast. Make sure you understand how all of the parts of your game fit together, or the gears will grind instead of spinning. 

Never let realism get in the way of fun.

Hear My Voice!

Looks like I'm going to be a guest on the ARG Netcast tonight! I'll likely talk a bit about Routes, so if you're interested -- or if you're insanely curious as to what my voice sounds like -- tune in tonight at 9:30pm Eastern time. (That's 6:30pm Pacific.) 

There's a chatroom during the netcast for questions and general kibbitzing during the live session; but if you can't make it tonight, the inestimable Jonathan Waite will have the recording up in a few days. Hope to see you there!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

Today, March 24, is Ava Lovelace Day, "an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology." I'm thrilled to see the day getting lots of publicity. If you've been following along here at DeusXM, you know that issues of gender equality are near and dear to my heart.

I signed the pledge weeks ago, intending to write about Roberta Williams, pioneering game designer and co-founder of Sierra On-Line. When you wax nostalgic for the halcyon days of King's Quest, you should take a second to think of Roberta and be grateful for her contributions to the canon of modern computer gaming.

But one of the things I absolutely love about the ARG community is the way it has historically attracted girls and women, both as players and as developers. So let me shout out to some of the women working in our cutting-edge, innovative field, who are excelling in technology and showing little girls that yes, they can come to the party, too. In no particular order, I give you:

• Jan Libby
• Maureen McHugh 
• Naomi Alderman 
• Krystyn Wells 
• Marie Lamb 
• Wendy Despain 
• Dee Cook 
• Brooke Thompson 
• Geneviève Cardin  
• Michelle Senderhauf 
• and (of course) Jane McGonigal 

Every one of these women has done something amazing, and I expect further amazement as the days go by.

If you're a woman who makes ARGs and I've left you off the list, I'm so sorry! I mean no disrespect; this is just the few I thought of on the spur of the moment -- and the fact that the list is as long as it is is a massive credit to us all, don't you think? But consider this an open thread to talk up the women in tech you admire -- particularly the women in games in general and ARGs in specific -- even if that woman is yourself.

Updated to add: So of course I leave off Kim Plowright, who has been my link to sanity lo these many months during the Routes development cycle and run. Sorry, Kim! You know I loves you!

Update 2: And of course Catherine Herdlick, too. Sheesh!

Routes: DNA Heroes

The Routes Week 5 Challenge is up: DNA Heroes. I'm fantastic at DDR but miserable at DNA Heroes, how do you stack up?

While you're there, be sure to register to win tickets to a comedy gig starring the divine Canadian funny girl Katherine Ryan. If you're already registered on the site, sign in and go to your profile to tick the box that says you're interested in going. It's sure to be a good time!

And speaking of Routes, our man on the scene Fluffy has been keeping us updated on what's been happening with Rachel in her search to find out what happened to her uncle. Take a look at the latest, why dontcha:

Routes: The Plot Thickens

Have you seen the Week 3 game up at RoutesGame.com? It's called ExperiMental, and it's a social media/photohunt challenge. You try to capture a photo of the most awesomest science experiment at home and upload it, and then go through and vote on the ones other players have uploaded that you like the best.

But that's not all that's going on over there. (and if you're a curtain purist, so to speak, you may want to avert your eyes right about... now.)

My heavens, it looks like there's some sort of cross-media interactive experiential cool thing going on! Not that I'd know anything about... OK, OK, who am I kidding?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is where I walk the talk. There's a game going on! Don't worry, I'm not going to start spouting off about design goals and overarching priorities at this point. But I DO think the time is right to say "Hey, looky here, I has a game, and if you generally like my work, this is what you need to look at." You see? It didn't hurt a bit.

So right, if you want to go digging up treasure, you need a map. Allow me. Right now, courtesy of Fluffy Bickles, we have a video summary of Week 1:

Annnnd hot off the presses, Week 2:

It's a great point to jump in, and we'd love to have you. If you're interested in playing along, there are of course a few more links you might like to see. I'd love to hear what you think, but I'm afraid I'm not going to enter into much of a dialog about Routes until the show is over, so to speak, so I apologize in advance if I'm uncharactersitically silent.

Have fun!

WTF is an ARG? 2009 Edition

It's about that time again, boys and girls. The seasonal "What is an ARG?" discussion has flared up on the ARG SIG mailing list. This is the variant strain: What was the first ARG? Which of course leads to a lot of semantic acrobatics as people try to work out what it is we're describing when we say A-R-G, and then work out whether it's the same thing anybody else is talking about. 

  There's a lot of sense in these discussions, if not a lot of consensus; and there have been some really excellent and perceptive comments in the thread. I'd do some more specific sharing and attribution, but I'm reluctant to cite quotes from a semi-private space; so please, if I'm parroting an idea you said first, forgive me. (And if you'd like to be privy to these conversations in which very many erudite and clever people say very many erudite and clever things, then please, join the list.)

But if all of these clever people can agree so broadly on so many things, why does the topic keep coming up at all? Why can't we reach a consensus on what an ARG is, and what an ARG isn't? Why do we return home, like swallows to Capistrano, to that question: What IS an ARG? 

This is my attempt to wrestle with this knotty topic, and offer up a few opinions.

Once Upon A Time...

...I was but an innocent lass, and I thought I knew what an ARG was. See that beautiful triangle where story, gameplay, and community overlap? That's an ARG, right there.

But there are other things that offer story, gameplay, and community. MMOs and MUDs do (or can, anyway). LARPs do. If you squint your eyes just a little bit, American Idol fits the bill, and so does a fan site for Bioshock. Hmm. That can't possibly be right, can it?

The Plot Thickens

The semantics only get murkier from here.

Let's ignore the problem of other, non-ARG stuff sharing the center for a while.

There are some other works that primarily and by design fall into the intersection of only two of those three circles. Some people would call some of them ARGs, and some people... wouldn't. Is Cathy's Book an ARG? I'd say yes, but I know others would disagree with me. What about Lonelygirl15? Yeah, it's been called an ARG, and I'd agree. (For my purposes I'm excluding LG15 from the gameplay circle based on the initial experience offered; I believe the series incorporated more gameplay elements as time went on.)

Then there are community play experiences like Jane McGonigal's fun new thing, The Secret Dance Off. It's awesome, and interesting, but I'm pretty sure nobody, least of all Jane herself, will be calling that an ARG. So why do some things feel ARG-like to some people when they meet two out of these three criteria, while many others don't?

The conclusion I reach is that these criteria are fundamentally flawed. We're looking for a name for all of the cool stuff that falls into that white circle in the center, which seem to ring our bells in a lot of the same ways. That white circle... that's what I'm interested in making. It's definitely bigger and more diffuse than that classic-ARG triangle, story + gameplay + community. I've been guilty of trying to expand 'ARG' to mean all of that stuff, but that's ultimately a bad idea, because people think they know what an ARG is... and it isn't that, not quite. 

Lately I'm reduced to calling it "Cool stuff on the internet." And that's why we keep going in circles about what an ARG is. We sort of know -- it's the stuff in the very center, but not all of the stuff in the center -- but we don't yet have a good name for whatever ARGs are a subset of. Digital culture? Guided pervasive experiences? It may be, in the fullness of time, that we need several names to accurately describe what the heck we mean.

My New Theory

So here's my new operating theory on what an ARG is... sort of. An ARG is something that rings all of these bells:

Let me offer up a few definitions.

Story Archaeology: The audience assembles a working model of the story based on multiple sources and fragmented pieces of narrative.

Real Time: Story/experience timeline and real-world timeline are the same

Real World: Using physical objects or venues that actually exist.

Interactive Cast and/or World: You can reach out to the story world and get a reaction (often via real-world communication methods such as email, phone, IM).

Audience Volition: The audience are an active participant in the experience and have some power over the outcome.

If you find something that hits every single one of these criteria, odds are there's not going to be a lot of argument that it's an ARG. You can take away one or two of them, and still find consensus that yeah, that there thing is an ARG. When you get to four or fewer of these elements, you start to see less and less consensus. A lot of this is very personal, and relies on what an individual sees as the Platonic ideal of an ARG. There are some people who will insist that if there are no puzzles, it can't be an ARG. There will be people who insist that if it is single-player, it can't be an ARG. I'll stick with this: any five or all six of these is definitely an ARG; four or fewer is a close cousin. 

Some of us are actively working on stripping out some of these elements to see where it leads us, as we search for the Promised Land where we have recurring revenue. There's a lot of interest particularly in removing the real-time and multiplayer elements.

The First ARG

Let's turn our attention back to the things that only jangle a few of these bells.

Just as intense as the "What is an ARG?" debate is the "What was the ur-ARG?" debate. You see a lot of the same few things offered up as 'first ARGs.' Some of them are most like puzzle hunts, like Masquerade or Publius Enigma, which both lacked elements of story archaeology and an interactive story world. Some of them are just-plain-games, like LARPs. You see Blair Witch Project cited -- I've cited it myself -- which didn't really offer audience volition or puzzles. 

There are lots of things that are quite a lot like ARGs in one fashion or another, some going back hundreds of years. More than I could possibly hope to catalog, even if I were to base an academic career around it. Were they ARGs? Well... they were cool, anyway. They fit into that white circle of stuff-we-want-to-be-talking-about. Blair Withc and Publius Enigma were definitely cool-things-on-the-internet. Who cares if they were an ARG?

They might not have been classic Beast-style ARGs, not quite the same kind of experience that launched Unfiction. Very definitely ancestors; very definitely inspiring what came after. But the thing that the Beast gave us was this: It taught us that we needed a name so we could start having a conversation. So we started using a name. Hey, we had to start somewhere, didn't we?

But we also say Christopher Columbus discovered America -- which is named after Amerigo Vespucci -- and when Leif Ericson came to North America, it was already populated. So who discovered America? What does discovering America really mean, in this context? Should we be lobbying to change Columbus Day? Should we be lobbying to change the continents to North and South Ericsonia? Wouldn't that be justice?

It's a noble ideal to give credit where credit is due. But we have that name, for good or ill, and we have a canonical first example, no matter how many close relatives there may be.

On Wankery

At the end of the day, the only reason achieving a consensus definition is relevant is to help us signal to potentially interested parties, "Hey, there's something here you might want to pay attention to." Nobody is going to come around and write you up if you call your experimental-lit project an ARG. Nobody is going to slap you in handcuffs for calling a scavenger hunt with a little role-play an ARG. Nobody is going to cry foul and blacklist you because you're sending txt messages from the characters of your TV show and calling that an ARG. (OK, maybe somebody will... but it won't be me.)

Do you need permission? Fine! Email me, I'll make you a certificate. But -- psst -- you don't need anybody's endorsement.

I've spent hours of my life working out how I feel about all of this. I'm not even that sure that I'll still agree with myself when I wake up in the morning, and who knows? I might get the thrill of waking up to a bee's nest of angry commenters. But there is one thing I feel, passionately, deeply, truly.

All of this is just wanking.

I don't care whether any given experience is an ARG or not. I care about whether it's fun.

I don't care whether anything I make is an ARG or not. I care about whether it's awesome (and fun for somebody else.)

So please... can we talk more about making cool stuff on the internet now? And stop arguing about what an ARG is and isn't? Every second we spend talking about it is one less second we can get on with making cool stuff.

Thank you, and good night.

Got Plans for Thursday Night?

Are you in the greater New York metropolitan area, or could you be on short notice? Do you have a powerful urge to rub elbows with myself and several other ARG developers and/or enthusiasts? Have you always wanted to sit me down and explain to me all of the things I am just so wrong about? Do you just plain not have much of anything to do on a Thursday night? 

Have I got the party for you! The NYC ARG crew are planning a little bit of a shindig later this week (OK, mostly it's just me and Rose making plans and hoping everyone else goes along). The deets are:

• Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008 at 6:00pm and onward into the night
• At St. Andrews (a bar, not a cathedral)
• That's 120 W. 44th St. between 6th Ave. and Broadway

I'd really love to see a lot of faces there -- old friends and new ones both. So come on out and party with us ARG-style. It's sure to be a great time!

Movies vs. Video Games

In part 3 of my series on ARGs and the Economy, I had a throwaway comment about finding the differences between movies and video games, and what that means for ARGs. I actually wrote quite a bit of this at the time, but cut it out so I could focus on the main point (it’s the money, honey). And so here’s my take on why video games are growing like gangbusters and movies aren’t. 

For starters, there's a basic difference in the value proposition you get from buying, say, Left 4 Dead, and going to see The Dark Knight. It's easy to speculate that it comes down to dollars per hour of entertainment. We could generously say TDK at $8 a ticket and a 3-hour run time is $2.60 per hour for one person, and conservatively Left 4 Dead at $60 for a 30-hour player experience is about $2.00 per hour for as many people frequent your living room. (TDK isn't quite as long as all that, though, and the play time for Left 4 Dead is theoretically much higher.)

But that's not how people decide how to have fun in the real world. The more important differences have to do with the qualitative nature of the experience being delivered. 

Video games are active. This is the difference most people get stuck on; they think people want an active experience and not a passive one. I'm actually not so certain this is true; from time to time, I loves me a good passive experience. Read any good books lately? I think it comes down to personal preference, and even the same person doesn't always prefer the same kind of experience. Still, consumers are getting more and more accustomed to having some control over their leisure experiences, and it would be ridiculous to ignore that. Even TV has bent to this, the result being American Idol-style shows where viewers vote for a winner at the shallow end, all the way to the Heroes and Lost extended immersive experiences at the other end of that scale. 

Video games are social. Whether it's rocking out with the whole family in Rock Band, running a high-level raid with your best guild buds in World of Warcraft, or making fun of your sister who can't get the bomb to the right spot in Super Mario Galaxy, games are at their best when you're playing with somebody else. Whispered comments aside, we're strictly socialized not to socialize at the movies. When people are hanging out with their friends, they don’t just want to interact with the experience; they want to interact with each other, too. 

Video games are convenient. This point doesn't get nearly as much airplay as it deserves. When you go to a movie, you're stuck with the movies they're showing, the times they're showing them, and whatever seat you can find. If you get a text message mid-film telling you a flaming meteor just destroyed downtown and you hurry to see the spectacle with your own eyes, you're not going to be able to complete your cinematic experience without laying out another eight smackeroos and starting over from the beginning. A video game is there when you want to play it. You don't need to go out in inclement weather, you don't need to worry about being late and not getting a seat, you won't be sitting through twenty minutes of previews and commercials, and you can pause the game if you need to go look at the meteor-devastated downtown. Or, you know, have to go to the bathroom. 

So there are some basic and very instructional differences between what the movie offers and what a game does. I've said before that ARGs are active, social, and convenient by nature; but that's not entirely true. Actually, ARGs fall down quite a bit on the "convenience" metric, for several reasons. Which I will address in... a future post!