Deus Ex Machinatio

And Now For Something Super!

So yeah, that soup thing is pretty crazy, right? Just to spite Campbell's, I totally ate a 320-calorie frozen meal for lunch today. 

This is the kind of post that was on my mind when I was talking about personal and professional personas a few weeks ago. I've traditionally shied away from talking to much about ideology, unless it's related to my work. But this is something that is important to me, even though it doesn't have much to do with games, and certainly is only a tangent from my career as a storyteller. 

Which brings me to today's topic: My Super First Day! I'm gearing up for another round, folks! If you're an MSFD alumnus, you're free to build onto your Super Second Day, work with others on a big collaborative Rashomon piece, or start fresh with a new character. 

If you haven't participated in MSFD before, it's dead easy! Just scribble out the story of your Super First Day and email it in by... oh, let's call it Feb. 7 at 6pm EST. 

Read the MSFD FAQ for our guidelines and other important info. Get cracking, supers!

Doing Your Best, No Exceptions

I just read a brilliant post on always aiming to do your best work by ann_leckie at LiveJournal. (Found via the wise and talented Elizabeth Bear, who has an ongoing habit of posting things that make me think harder and write better.) Go read it yourself. 

It dovetails nicely with a couple of the bullet points I wrote in my March post, Some Things I've Learned About ARG Design. Particularly this one: 

• 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. 

And this one too: 

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

It's getting at the same thing: Always try to do the best you can. Make sure you're making every possible piece of content that your audience will see is the best that you can make it. 

But this is an ideal -- or to be more specific, it's my ideal -- and it's really, really hard to do. It made me think about doing your best and trying your hardest. Comparing it to my many years of hair-raising tales from behind the curtain, I thought: "But Andrea, if you were really trying your best, why did you...?" 

This is where I think transmedia as a performance art has a particularly soft, weak point, where it hurts if you poke us too hard. We get a lot of our ideals and standards from related but distinctly different disciplines. With a novel, for example, you generally have the liberty to look at the story a month later to see if it still makes sense. With a play, you can rehearse every day for six weeks before your premiere. 

But you can't revise an ARG. You don't get much time to rehearse, either. The show must go on, even when something doesn't go according to plan, even when you've missed a deadline, even when something has broken. In my experience, an ARG is by definition never, ever the best you could have possibly made it, if you had had a little more time, or a little more money, or or or... 

Sometimes you craft an amazing piece of content or game mechanic, and it gets cut or unrecognizably altered or is simply never built for cruel but undeniable reasons like timing or budget. Or maybe that perfect idea conflicts with a throwaway line you shoved into the first week for color, and now you can't do it without breaking the story. No take-backsies! And sometime the implementation of an idea isn't as shiny as you'd hoped; maybe there are bugs, maybe there are typos. (And I promise you, there are always bugs and typos.) 

You could fix these things, sure... in a perfect world, with unlimited resources and development time. But you know, we don't get that. Not even close. Probably never will, either.

So I do try to live up that lofty ideal, to always, always do my best work. But at the same time, I wonder if I couldn't be more forgiving of myself during all those coulda-shoulda-woulda moments. Like the actor who falls on their face during their big entrance, it's not that I'm not trying my best, it's that sometimes my best isn't perfect. And maybe... maybe that's OK, too, as long as I'm always striving and always getting better.

The Sims & Second Nature

I am thrilled to tell you that I have an article on The Sims and narrative in the current issue of Second Nature, or as they call it, the 'International Journal of Creative Media.' It was an interesting piece to write, and I hope you enjoy it as well.

Of Writing and Rabbits

Some random musing from me on IM this evening, and with thanks to Naomi Alderman, who first made the magic trick analogy and let me run with it:

Well, and you know, you're right, that writing is something of a magic trick

You're pulling a rabbit out of a hat each time you sit down

And sometimes you know how the trick is done and you already knew you'd put the rabbit there

And sometimes you pull out a squirrel instead and it surprises you as much as anyone

But there's always SOMETHING in the hat, if you go through the motions of pulling something out of it

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.

---

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?