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. 

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.

Heroes Week: Merlin Mann

Once upon a time, Merlin Mann was a slinger of productivity porn. His website 43 Folders was a mecca for idle eyes looking for the latest and greatest in aspirational geekware. He sang the praises of the Hipster PDA, the DIY pocket planner, the Moleskine, Quicksilver, GTD, kGTD, the now-defunct Stikkit, and much, much more. It was a fantastic, shiny way to imagine yourself as a doer with a rock-solid tasklist and a squeaky-clean inbox. (Even if you weren't.)

And don't get me wrong: It was awesome and I read it. But that's not enough to make him one of my creative heroes.

Then, sometime last year, Merlin had something of an epiphany and stopped writing about all of that stuff for a while. When he emerged from his months-long radio silence, he wrote a lovely essay on how he'd been blind but now he could see. The problem is this: Reading about all of that shiny stuff -- software, business books and office supplies, basically -- is not productive. It's the opposite of productive -- in fact, a killer way to keep yourself from doing productive things. So now he's become a prophet, speaking the holy words we all need to hear:

Doing stuff is way better than reading about doing stuff.

I don't know about you, but that's a message I need kicked into my head. And not once, but over and over and over again. So I read the Mann, and I am reminded: Andrea, you are only doing actual work when you're actually creating something. And while some thinking, planning and research may be necessary for you to create, don't for a second confuse those things with actual working, because they're just not the same thing. At the end of the day, no matter how many cool apps and calendar hacks and email foldering strategies you've got, you still have to do the work to get it done.

That bears repeating: The only way to get work done is by working.

So now Merlin's posting again, a bit sporadically, perhaps. And each time he does, there's a new subtext to it: This is how Twyla Tharp or Ze Frank get on with just trying to make their best stuff. This is the point. Aspiration without action is completely worthless.

I don't want to be Merlin when I grow up, so he's not in quite the same category as my other People I Admire. I'm not sure the internet could handle more than one of him anyway. But his work is actively trying to help people like me become what it is they want to be when they grow up, and hot damn if that isn't intensely admirable.

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.

ARGs and the Economy: Part 1 of 3

The United States is officially in a recession, job losses are mounting higher every day, and venture capitalists are putting their wallets away. These are scary, uncertain times. And as somebody with a career in freelancing, I'm biting my nails wondering where the next contract will come from -- or whether there are going to be any other contracts at all. After all, the high-profile Lost Dharma Initiative was axed recently, apparently the victim of budget cuts. So are ARGs recession-proof? Well, actually... they might be (or may at least be more robust than you'd been thinking.)

Commercial ARGs are varied and it's difficult to make a solid prediction based on the historic record of any one other industry. We have ties and similarities to movies, advertising, and video games, but we're not quite the same as any of these. Still, looking at how these businesses have done -- and are projected to do -- is helpful in trying to read our own tea leaves.

From a purely rational point of view, one might think that in hard times, movies and games would do poorly as consumers hoard their discretionary dollars for more important considerations. On the other hand, one might expect advertising budgets to increase, as companies fight a little harder to get their piece of a shrinking pie. As it turns out, though, consumers are anything but rational, and neither are businesses.

Movies famously did well during the Great Depression and so are considered recession-proof. But that turns out to be nearly an urban legend:

Although the movie industry considered itself Depression- proof, Hollywood was no more immune from the Depression's effects than any other industry. To finance the purchase of movie theaters and the conversion to sound, the studios had tripled their debts during the mid- and late-'20s to $410 million. As a result, the industry's very viability seemed in question. By 1933, movie attendance and industry revenues had fallen by forty percent.

And there are some important differences between the environment of the Great Depression and of today. Most notably, in the 1930s, the much cheaper alternative, television, hadn't yet saturated American households. But how are movies actually doing? Well, there's some good news and bad news. Actual attendance is down about 3.6% from 2007. But apparently box office receipts hit 2007's tally in mid-November, before the traditional holiday movie season got started. This isn't cause for wild cheering, though, because total box office receipts for four of the last five years have been down, anyway. 

Movies are a doubly interesting metric for ARGs, because our fortunes are so often tied to theirs. Since so much of our work is promotional, rather than box office revenues, we should perhaps look at marketing budgets. Historically, marketing is where a movie budget's big bucks get spent. One could assume that these marketing budgets are hence prone to fall under the axe as times get leaner, as with Dharma Initiative. 

But perversely, one developer I spoke with indicated that he's seeing, if anything, increased interest from potential marketing clients. That's because a shrinking marketing budget means a more judicious eye watching where each dollar goes, and ARGs carry fairly modest budgets compared to traditional media buys.

Still, movies haven't been doing so well in years and years, even in good times, and even as the ARG has seen its star rising in the sky. So let's look at another cousin to see if we can find a more illuminating precedent. Next up in Part 2: Advertising.

This is the first part of a three-part series. Part 2. Part 3.

Harvest Moon and WoW, Separated at Birth?

A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness for the DS. For those of you who aren't initiates, Harvest Moon is... well... it's a series of farming simulation games. You can't see me, but I'm squirming on my sofa in embarassment that I'm admitting this in public.

In Harvest Moon, you can grow diverse crops (potatoes, corn, apples, wheat, eggplants to name just a few); you can sell your crops for money or cook recipes; you can fish; chop wood; mine for minerals; raise chickens, cattle and sheep; you can set up cottage industries making goods ranging from yarn to yogurt; and you can build relationships with the citizens of the island, up to and including wooing the spouse of your choice and getting married. I'd call it a straightforward resource management game, where the primary resources to be managed are time and money.

I can sit down with Harvest Moon and intend to play for just one day of game time. But then the next day is a festival, and well, I want to see if my prize home-made ice-cream is a winner... and then the turnip harvest is in and I want to ship them out before I forget... and before I know it, I've blown through a week of game time, and I've lost who-even-knows how much time in the real world.

I sat down to try to write a post about Harvest Moon, trying to define its appeal for me, and it was a real head-scratcher. It doesn't have any of the things I thought I liked in a game. There's not really a compelling story, for one. No puzzles to be solved, really. It doesn't have amazing visuals -- it's a DS game, for cryin' out loud -- and the barks and music can both get extremely repetitive. It doesn't bring out my raging competitive streak. So why do I like it?

I admit, when I first started mulling it over I thought: Well... maybe it's because it's a wussy girly game, and I'm a wussy girl. ...Not that there's anything wrong with that, right? Right? But then, in a spectacular flash of insight, I realized that wasn't it at all. It's that Harvest Moon is just like World of Warcraft.

And in fact, Harvest Moon is more WoW than WoW is. Harvest Moon is WoW with nothing but the grind. And the grind is why we play!

I refer, of course, of Clive Thimpson's article, "Back to the Grind in WoW." Here's the money quote, for me:

Why? Because there's something enormously comforting about grinding. It offers a completely straightforward relationship between work and reward. When you log into WoW, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you just plant your ass in that chair for long enough, you'll level up. It doesn't require skill. It just requires putting in the time. Play 10 hours, you'll do better; play 50, you'll do better yet; and yet more so with 500 hours.

The thing is, almost no arenas of human endeavor work like this.

...

But grinding? Grinding always works. Always. You get a gold star just for showing up. This is a quietly joyful experience. It feeds our souls, as well as our sense of justice and fair play. We grind because we can't believe what a totally awesome deal we're getting handed here, often the first time in our entire suck-ass put-upon lives.

If you've talked to me much about games since that article went up in July, I've probably referenced that piece. (I'm more than a little shocked it's taken me until now to talk about it here.) It's become a real touchpoint for me regarding what people want out of games; the more I think about it, the truer it rings in my ears.

So I play Harvest Moon: I plant my seeds and water my crops, I visit all of my townsfolk every day, I milk my cows and collect my eggs from the chickens and make it all into food to sell; I collect and sell, collect and sell, over and over again, and I do it because it's so restful. I think a little about Zen monks raking sand around rocks, over and over again, and I wonder if this feeds a similar human need.

When I play Harvest Moon, I know there are no nasty surprises in store for me. I know it will all turn out to be fair. And if a game can give you something like peace of mind, even for a few minutes, who the heck cares abut graphics or plot, anyway?

Retro-Futuristic

I've just been reading Isaac Asimov's short story, The Last Question. It's a lovely story, and deservedly one of the great classics from one of the Old Masters of the Golden Age of science fiction. If you've never read it, go take a look now and then come back.

Now look, I'm not going to be breaking any ground when I say that Asimov was truly visionary. This story was published in 1956. For a man who was writing over 50 years ago, he astonishingly sees a lot of the same things we're still writing and dreaming about today. In this story, you can see the fertile ground that sprouted transhumanism, singularitarianism, and a prophetic take on the way that humankind seems to be growing more and more inextricably linked with our technology. He writes about a future in which people ask computers for answers to everyday questions -- Google, anybody?

But what struck me, on reading this story again for the first time in lo these many years, were the subtle ways that he was wrong. The most notable, of course, is that reality's timescale has thus far collapsed to fit into the barest fraction of what he imagined. A hundred years or so into Asimov's future, a computer is the length of a family-sized spaceship, and it prints its answers on little slips of cellufilm. He sees an analog to a mobile data device: "It was only two inches cubed and nothing in itself, but it was connected through hyperspace with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind." But Asimov predicts this wonder technology a staggering twenty thousand years into the future! I've got a device lying on my coffee table right now that's not much bigger than that (and a lot more ergonomic). It's connected via what may as well be hyperspace to the great crackling data networks that claim to have answers to my every question.

And of course Asimov sees an optimistic future for spaceflight. It's difficult to be so enthused about man's future in space anymore. We went to the moon a mere 13 years after this story was written. In the 40 years since then, little to no progress has been made. In fact, nobody has gone back to the moon since 1972. Space exploration has veered heavily toward using cheap unmanned probes in favor of developing modes for human beings to travel in space. Still, he pulls a bit of deus ex machina to in the beginning, by positing a cheap and permanent solution to the question of supplying energy to do it. He was aware of the problems mankind would face.

Modern SF often envisions similar futures to the most distant ones in The Last Question -- but sees them happening mere hundreds or thousands of years in the future. This is a function of our fundamentally altered expectations about what the future will look like and how fast it'll get here. And why shouldn't we have a dramatically different expectation of the future, compared to the futures of 50 years ago? That future got here so very quickly (though as William Gibson would remind us, "The future is here -- just poorly distributed.") There are serious thinkers and scientists who suggest we'll see the end of senescence and achieve immortality in our own lifetime, a far cry from Asimov's twenty thousand years even if you assume they're wrong by an order of magnitude.

...and as I'm writing this, Bryan over at Infocult has posted an interesting piece that touches on some similar topics -- how our present informs the future we write about, or whether we want to read or write about the future at all. It's an old SF chestnut that the future we see reflects the deep sociological hopes and fears of the era that dreams it up. Of course the future of 1956 isn't the same as the future of 2008. But it's worthwhile for us to revisit these past dreams of what might come to pass to do a little soul-searching about how we as a society have changed.

The future isn't just a dream imagined by the present. The present creates the future. So if we peer into our looking-glass SF future and don't care for what we see there, then the answer is to look around today and see what we can change to make sure that isn't where we end up.

Escape Pod and the Rebirth of Short Fiction

The last few weeks, I've been listening to Escape Pod, a weekly podcast of short-form science fiction. I'm a latecomer to podcasts, both because of a strong preference toward text and transcripts, and because of my horrible continuous partial attention habits. It's hard to follow a story via audio while doing any other brain-engaging activity. But I've been conducting an experiment with podcasts while folding laundry, rocking the baby to sleep, and one near-catastrophic journey through Staples. The result: Escape Pod has completely won me over.

I can't speak for the entirety of the podcast's archives, but the episodes I've listened to have all featured spectacularly high-quality stories. The delivery is entertaining. The notes and feedback are thoughtful. This podcast is a jewel in the navel of the internets, and I'll be very glum the day I've fully excavated the depths of its archives. For these reasons alone, you should all go subscribe now.

But there's more. Escape Pod has single-handedly awakened my long-slumbering enchantment with short-form fiction. Sure, I've read a few shorts here and there. I've dabbled in the archives of Strange Horizons. I've devoured Shadow Unit (which is arguably not short fiction, but that's another whole post).

But it's been years -- decades -- since the last time I picked up anything like the once-coveted World's Best SF anthologies. If there was a Sailing to Byzantium since the late 1980s, or a Mimsy Were the Borogoves, then I've probably missed it. And that's a damn shame.

And more than that, Roger Zelazny, one of my absolute writing heroes, had a wicked, powerful way with the short story. While his Chronicles of Amber are certainly very powerful, it wasn't what inspired me. No, that mantle belongs to Unicorn Variations, a book of short stories. Those stories were often experimental, always fascinating, and particularly in the case of works like Recital, they stripped bare the actual process of creation for me. I could see what he was doing, and why, and it was Zelazny that first made me think, "I want to do THAT." Why would I abandon my roots, so to speak? Why distance myself from the kinds of writing that always spoke to me the most?

As with many things, it comes down to the bottom line. In recent years I've bought into the idea that the market for short fiction is on its deathbed. So it seemed more economically prudent to skip the writing of shorts in favor of novels. And anthologies simply slipped out of the scope of my attention, pushed out by novels, especially novels in series, and the cruel mistress that is my RSS reader.

But now there's Escape Pod, and I find myself plunged back into my love for short fiction as though it never left me. If there were an episode every day, I'd listen to it. I'm looking for more-like-that-please. I'm wondering if I should buy twenty years' worth of missed anthologies and scour the used book stores for copies of the last few decades of Hugo and Nebula winners.

And this fact brings me hope for the market for short fiction as a whole, too; surely I can't be alone, here. Maybe a new age of short SF/F is upon us. A Golden Age! A Renaissance! It might not be the most lucrative market, but it may well be one of the most rewarding. And if you're writing SF/F for the money, I hate to break it to you, but you're in the wrong business. At the end of the day, rewarding is the only thing that you can count on; and maybe it's the only thing that matters.

Gravitation

From the same digital artist that brought us Passage, Jason Rohrer, we now have Gravitation. This pixel art game is a thought-provoking way to spend eight minutes. I played the game before I read the creator's statement, and to me, it brought on a really powerful period of somber reflection about my creative life and the joy it brings me, compared to the joys and responsibilities I have as a parent.

I don't talk much here about my personal life, but I will admit that I often feel like an awful failure, both as a writer and as a mother, because there is no possible way to devote all of my time, focus and energy to both of these things at once. There just isn't enough of me to do all of the things I feel motivated and obligated to do. But despite the stark physical impossibility, I feel like I should still be able to find a way to pull it all off. Ah, the prisons we build for ourselves out of dreams and expectations.

Back to Gravitation: As it turns out, my own very personal interpretation of the game isn't far from what the creator had in mind. Though it's actually intended as a representation of bipolar disorder, I think the scope of it can be applied very broadly to creative life in general. From the creator's statement:

One night, while lying in bed, the idea hit me: I needed to make a game about this process that I was going through. About success, and creative leaps, and mania, and mood cycles, and the aftermath.

I think this will really resonate for a lot of us.

I bring this link to you via Making Light, one of my most favorite blogs on the whole internet. Check it out.

The Shredded Curtain

I like to make a joke about ARG developers being descended from underpants gnomes. This is a joke that works on two levels, and one of them is on my mind a lot lately, so please bear with me while I deconstruct it and render it completely unfunny.

The first level is pretty easy. For those of you who run ARG studios, the business model of the South Park underpants gnome may seem uncannily familiar:

1: Collect underpants
2: ???
3: Profit!

And sometimes that's exactly what it feels like we're doing, right? We're building awesome things and hoping that eventually, we'll work out how to make a living that way.

---

But the other thing underpants gnomes and ARG developers share, and the thing I'm here to talk about today, is secrecy. More specifically, that idea of puppetmasters hiding behind a curtain.

Secrecy has been a constant companion since the giddy days of the Cloudmakers, when we didn't know what the heck was going on, didn't know who was doing it, and loved every delicious minute of that uncertainty. Part of the fun for us was trying to catch the people behind this game-that-wasn't-a-game!

But this had a lot of pretty terrible side effects, from the actor at a live event who was followed into his off-duty life, clear to the internal strife over whether looking at packing slips for a return address was in the bounds and the spirit of the game... or not. It was exciting, I'll give you that. It was mysterious.

But it has to stop.

As alternate reality gaming reaches an increasing level of maturity and sophistication, not to mention pop-culture notoriety, there are a few incredibly compelling reasons that the habit and tradition of secrecy, of hiding the development team behind a curtain, is no longer sustainable. I'll even go further: That tradition has reached a point where it actively works against the interests of the genre, not to mention against the interests of any specific game.

Here's a prime example. There's a familiar song I see in comment threads about ARGs on places like io9 or BoingBoing, or in private chats, or in emails from friends. "I'd love to play an ARG," the lyrics go, "but I've got no idea how to find one."

It should go without saying that finding an audience is one of the top goals of an ARG. If you don't have an audience... well, you're just spitting into the wind, aren't you? So why has the convention persisted of not actually telling a potential audience that you're going to make something awesome and hey, you might want to pay attention, y'all?

Because it breaks the curtain? Because it's alien to our viral-marketing heritage? Because it admits there's a game? Shh... I have a secret for you. They already know it's a game. There aren't legions of wide-eyed innocents out there who think they're really finding kidnapping victims, infiltrating secret societies, or collaring insane artificial intelligences. No, really! There have even been games -- sequels and serials like Chasing and Catching the Wish and the Eldritch Errors series spring to mind -- where the players already know who's behind the game, and it doesn't seem to have hurt anything.

And here's another consideration, too, for those of us who are trying to build reputations, careers, and if I may be so bold, fan followings. If somebody is dying to see your next work, absolutely slobbering over the chance to participate in your next creative act -- go on, tell them what it is. You don't get bonus points for hewing to some pure ideal about rabbit holes and organic discovery of the experience. You just get a smaller audience to start with, and you risk the chance that a lot of people who'd love to play your game -- if only they knew it was your game -- are going to miss out.

There's one more consideration, too. If you can be open about who you are and what your work is, when catastrophe strikes (as it always does), you can open a channel of communication to deal with it. You can provide technical support for a Flash interface that isn't performing as well as it tested. You can apologize because your ISP was struck by lightning and you're having to rebuild three days of data. You can tell everybody that the live event scheduled for tomorrow is going to have to be pushed back a week because, sorry guys, but I have to go to my grandma's funeral, and anyway the actor you were going to meet, that you've seen on video fifty times already, has broken both legs and is in traction for the foreseeable future.

It's more elegant to write these things into the game. That should always be the first tactic. But some things really just won't work in the context of the story you're trying to tell... and that's totally OK. My experience is that your audience is going to be a lot easier on you than you ever will be on yourself. So cut yourself a break.

Am I saying that everything about an ARG has to be broadcast far and wide before play begins? No, of course not. That's ridiculous. Movie studios keep production details under lock and key, even while promoting the names of the stars, the directors, the screenwriters. Video games announce release dates far in advance, allowing the players to budget their purchasing decisions (and for some dedicated gamers, time off work). There's not a lot of reason for ARGs to have a different standard, and a lot of reason not to.

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The good news, of course, is that secrecy in ARGs is increasingly going out of fashion, anyway. I'm making a big show of calling out the practice, but the battle's already been won -- so much so, in fact, that I can easily name several instances where the cat's been out of the bag during the run, or even before, from the last few weeks alone. Obviously Six to Start announced The Shadow War ahead of time. True Blood had an article outing them in the New York Times. Luce's Lover's Eye, mere days after its ARGfest trailhead, was profiled by ABC News as being an effort by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Alpha Agency is experimenting with blogging about the run, during the run.

Now we just have to overcome that underpants-gnome-like business model...