ARGspeak

Games for Change

2007-06-15T14:06:00.000-04:00

I attended two public sessions of the Games for Change festival here in New York.I wasn't able to hear my personal favorites, Ian Bogost (whose game Airport Security won a jury prize) or Greg Costikyan (whose rants against the game industry are pure gold). I was looking for some feedback about the game World Without Oil and casting out some feelers for possible interest in the conference on ARGs.

Almost everyone I spoke to was familiar with World Without Oil. Granted it was a limited sample, but these are people who are passionate about the game industry and the possibilities for change it represents. Since the vast majority of people I see every day are not gamers, I was quite happy to find this group. ARGs as games for change was definitely on the minds of the attendees. I hope that next year they may do a panel on ARGs. I've emailed the organizers to suggest it.

Of interest, people involved with MoveOn would love to come up with a way to use an ARG in their world. Here they are with an fairly organized group of politically active people; people who want to make a difference in the world. But how do they use games within that group? Could an ARG be useful to them in reaching their goals? I know that an ARG can teach the players the benefits of community and tolerance of diversity of thinking. I'm not sure what kind of a game would interest them. I don't think a game that directly says "ok now email your congressional representative" would work so well. I think ARGs work best through subtlety, not through such direct means. But I think a great game could be designed for them to play.

Out for the season?

2007-06-02T09:48:00.000-04:00

I keep complaining about the tendonitis I have in my left arm. As I am left-handed it is more than annoying to have to try to do as much as possible with my right arm. The problem: only with rest will my arm get better. All the physical therapy, ice, Advil and a brace can help it heal, but rest is what I need.

So knowing that, yesterday I spent all of my day on-line, typing and using the mouse with my left hand. I had a blast following the Eldritch Errors updates while waiting out the 90 degree weather. I felt fine then, today my elbow feels like it is exploding inside. Yes, I overdid it.

I need to face reality. It looks like I have to find some other hobbies, off-line and in the real world, to keep me off the keyboard. ARGs are so much fun, I start to read something, promising myself that I won't post anything, and the next thing you know I'm googling whatever new idea I have. Hours pass by. I can't do it anymore- at least for now. Staying away from the computer when I'm not working is the best thing I can do. What can I say, I lack discipline.

I'm training for the team in training marathon in San Francisco, I guess I will focus solely on that. At least that is ARG related because the beautiful and talented Maureen McHugh is my honored teammate. (By the way, I haven't started fundraising in earnest yet, but I will need to get about $4000 -so keep my charity in mind. ;) )

Even more distressing is the news that Perplex City is over. The dedication and passion of the creators of that game deserve a better reward than this abrupt end. The players deserve a better end too. But seldom in life do people get what they deserve. I'm very sad about this. I felt like crying when I read Scarlett's good-bye. Actually, tears came to my eyes. I didn't even like Scarlett all that much, but I will miss her. I'm hoping that we can arrange some sort of bon voyage party for the players and any PMs who want to attend. I know we can have something here in New York if Andrea can attend. I thought of having an online chat party too, but...see above... I hope someone else will arrange that.

I have another idea that I may be launching soon. I'm trying to start ARGwire, my twice a month report on ARGs for the advertising industry. I've been looking for good writers who understand ARGs and who can work on a very part-time basis. Maybe I can find a former Perplex City writer who would be available. I'm not going to do an all-volunteer thing only because I don't have the time or the patience to manage it. ARGwire will be ad-revenue based and can hopefully generate enough money to pay for itself with all profit going to fund, my true love, unfiction. Unfiction needs reliable funding starting with next year beyond Sean Stacey's income, Andy Darley's generous donation and the donations of everyone else. Unfiction also needs money to help get ARGFest going each year so we don't have to beg sponsors for everything.

More on this later. Time for an ice pack.

Cheers!

Eldritch Errors: META

2007-05-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

I started to post this in unfiction but I realized it would be the beginning of a threadjack. I'm not impressed by threadjacking so I decided to post it here.

I've given up trying to spec and predict this game. I really enjoy it! What a combination of lots of different genres and different views of reality. But I have a hard time following the story. I decided it works better if I don't put so much effort into trying to understand what is happening and just let it unfold. I think players that understand Lovecraft, tech stuff and other aspects of the story have a much better chance of speculating about the story and understanding what the players need to do next.

Though at least half the fun with this game is trying new stuff without waiting for direct word from the PMs as to what we should do next. I like that a lot. I think in some ways the players, and I speak for myself here, have become trained sheep. We have certain methods to attack a problem and if they don't work we just wait for a message telling us what to do. I'm finding I prefer this Eldritch Errors approach. The confusion is part of the mystery of the game.

Eldritch Errors Ate My Brain

2007-05-28T20:08:00.000-04:00

Do I need to say more?

game with a purpose

2007-05-17T11:37:00.000-04:00

ARGs are Serious Fun!

A “Serious Game” is one that is more than just fun. It’s a game with a purpose - it may be to teach you something or to get you talking about things. ARGs do that.

Brooke's great idea about the ARG roundtable
- a virtual conversation about ARGs - has me thinking , so much that I decided to limit my comments to three very different games that are happening now: World Without Oil, Year Zero and Eldritch Errors: bseeingu. World Without Oil, deals as the title suggests, with coping with an oil catastrophe; Year Zero, a crazy dark dystopia of which the recent Trent Reznor album "Year Zero" is but a part; and, Eldritch Errors, a fictional story of dreams, hacking and HP Lovecraft (if you've ever heard of Chluthu, and like me before this game started the blogger spell check has not, you need to look at this game.)

WWO is on its face a "serious" game, the idea is to raise awareness and solutions to a defined problem -running out of oil. The players more or less pretend they are living without oil and posting about it on their blogs. Most of them have live journals, I don't. I can barely keep up with this blog, I didn't want to start another one. So, to play this game I'm relying on that universal constant of ARGs - the player community. Another player, cissmiace, who lives in London agreed to work as a partner with me. I email or private message posts to him on the unforums, he posts them.

Year Zero. The best way for me to discuss Year Zero as a serious game is to quote a post I made this weekend on the Echoing the Sound forum. There is a political movement trying to organize itself from that game, people moving toward political activism. Some people have posted saying that the players won't be taken seriously or that what they are trying to do isn't serious, because it is based on a game, based on a band, based specifically on a band called "Nine Inch Nails." I wrote:

2. It doesn't matter that inspiration comes from a game or a fictional world.

A whole subset of gaming involves "serious" games. The most famous example is a online video game that involves raising awareness of the genocide in Sudan called "Darfur is Dying." The label of game as a "serious" game isn't important, although I would call Year Zero a serious game with a serious purpose well beyond promoting a band, the point is that people use games and fictional worlds as vehicles for change.

Here's another example: Leonardo DiCaprio starred in a recent film called "Blood Diamond", which examined the role of "conflict diamonds" in Africa. If a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio became involved with protesting the sale of diamonds because of that movie, would that matter? Should that fan be embarrassed to say, "I like this movie star, so I went to this movie and now I care about something I didn't care about before?" Should that fan think "no one will take me seriously because I'm just a fan who went to a fictional movie?"

I don't think so.

Political ARGs

2007-05-12T14:11:00.001-04:00

Last night I had a conversation about ARGs with some fellow players. One topic that came up was "what happens if there is a political ARG?" I'm still not sure what that question was getting too, and I hope to find out more about it tonight. I think the question is what happens if there is an ARG that polarizes the community of players.

I don't have a problem with that. To me the worse thing that can happen is that the power of groupthink overcomes the power of respecting diverse voices. The community has to know, even believe, that it will outlast and withstand any controversy, the bonds within the community are stronger than the forces that might seem to want to tear it apart.

Witness the latest example of players being bogged down in uniform thinking. The game Eldritch Errors is meant to be confusing and not to be played the "same old way", if in fact that exists. But we are going about it the same way we have played most games: looking for puzzles, viewing source, trying to find codes. And we are lost. The puppetmasters are not above getting impatient with us waiting around, trying the same old things, not keeping up. They make fun of us for being so lost.

What this shows me is that we are not as creative as we think. We need some new insights and ideas into how to play this game and other games that come along. We may have mastered how to play some games; we aren't excelling at this one.

ARGs are serious fun - part 1(beginning)

2007-05-09T08:04:00.000-04:00

The first topic of the ARG blogtable is in part inspired by the World Without Oil game and in part just good insight by Brooke. I have a few different thoughts on this subject: One, that ARGs are serious fun because of the experience of the community and the individual players; two, that ARGS are serious fun because we expect the puppetmasters behind the games to be professional; and, three, that ARGs are serious fun because they can raise awareness.

I'm going to start with the third one first. The game Year Zero is a powerful example of not only raising awareness but also moving players to take action. Through the game, players are helped to find their voice, through art or some other means, and given a public forum to use that voice. I have no doubt that the artists and players in the game feel a new empowerment to use their talent to speak up for whatever cause they believe in. Giving people "permission" to speak up or publicly display their art, can break down any self-consciousness, embarrassment or fear that may have been holding them back.

the ARG virtual roundtable (why is it round?)

2007-05-01T11:52:00.000-04:00

Brooke posted this at Giant Mice.

Let's get the ARG roundtable going. :)

Last fall I stumbled upon Man Bytes Blog, a good blog with a really great concept - a monthly round table of bloggers talking about the same thing. For the next few months, I found myself really excited to see the different takes on topics from Horror in games to making games out of Christmas carols. I almost participated in the Christmas Carol one but then thought it would make a great holiday diversion - so you might see it one of these Decembers.

That’s when it hit me - there are a ton of ARG bloggers and so few of us write or, if we do, it’s not on ARGs. Why not? Is it a lack of inspiration? A lack of topic? The idea that nobody is reading, so why bother? Are we so busy that by the time we actually write it down, it’s no longer topical? The round table solves those things! It can bring people to your blog and give you a topic to think about and enough time to actually write something on it.

Topics will be posted on the the first day of every month. You will have until the 15th to write your post. The topic will change every month - some you’ll love and some you may hate. You don’t have to participate every month and you’re welcome to jump in at anytime. But the more often you participate, the better this all will be. So, without further rambling on, the very first ARG Round Table….

ARGs are Serious Fun!

A “Serious Game” is one that is more than just fun. It’s a game with a purpose - it may be to teach you something or to get you talking about things. ARGs do that.

In honor of yesterday’s launch of World Without Oil, a game designed from the ground up as a Serious Game - a Game for Change, let’s explore this topic. Keep in mind that the topic is nothing more than a guideline and you don’t have to talk about World Without Oil. Maybe you’d like to see more ARGs as “serious games” or maybe you fear ARGs pushing an agenda. You don’t have to get all stuffy and academic, feel free to reminisce on the things you’ve learned as you’ve played or talk about the ways games have dealt with “serious issues” in the past. Are you feeling a bit more creative? Why not think about a game design that could get people talking about your favorite social concern (electronic voting, aids, Darfur, climate change) or about ways that ARGs can be used in schools. There are so many paths to take here and everyone is as good as the last - so have fun with it.

You have until the 15th to write your post. Once you do, be sure to send me an email or catch me in chat so that I can link to it. It might take me a while to get them all up, so if your blogging software allows trackbacks, be sure to point back to this post and if it doesn’t, put a link to your post in the comments. This way, anyone that stops by and reads this post will be able to find you. It’s not an “elegant process” but it’s temporary. Next month, it will all be smoother.

So, to recap…

Topic: ARGs are Serious Fun!
Step 1: write something by May 15th
Step 2: link or reply to this post
Step 3: Send me an email
Step 4: Come back after the 15th and find links to everyone else that’s participated.

I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!

Finally, I want to give huge thanks to Corvus at Man Bytes Blog for inspiring me to do this and generously giving me the code he’s been using. I also want to thank Brian Enigma for taking a look at that code and giving his time to make it better for all involved.

What ARGing has done to me

2007-04-27T14:02:00.000-04:00

I started out not being a geek at all. Then, I learn the 3 robot laws from Giskard and I suddenly tie SpaceBass, the unfiction site owner, in the Geek quiz. But I didn't realize how far gone I was until the latest IGDA New York get together. I was chatting with someone, asking him, as you do when you meet someone, what games he worked on. He listed several games, including a couple of the Monkey Island games. I replied, that I knew those games adding "isn't there a reference to Monkey Island in Kingdom of Loathing?"

And right then it hit me.

I had been completely assimilated...(and I won't say the like the Borg, because, no, I never watched that show and referring to it just proves my sad point.)

Worse, as I walked to the bar with bagsbee I told him this story and said "that's it, I have to firewall my geekiness." He just laughed and shook his head at me (as is his wont) saying it was too late, you've gone over to the dark side and there is no going back. He was nice enough not to mention my using "firewall" as shorthand in that context...because it was a pretty geeky thing to say.

I'm not giving up though, I plan to look for geekiness recovery behaviors, there must be a self-help book for this somewhere. ;)

TINAG is not only misunderstood; it is irrelevant.

2007-04-26T18:03:00.000-04:00

The Beast is known for not telling anyone what it was. Only a handful of people knew what was happening; what it was all about. Somehow this became the gold-plated standard, in fact, this concept in the Beast became a sort of hallowed hallmark of a game among ARG players. No game should ever announce that it is a game. No article should be written about the game while it is being played; no comment by anyone involved.

But that was a long time ago.

Now people realize that you need to let the world know what you are doing is a game. That, in fact, the characters aren't asking for your help in finding a "real" missing person, fixing their website or saving their niece. The characters are asking you to play a game.

Personality types in ARGs

2007-04-24T13:51:00.000-04:00

I took this Meyers-Briggs personality test a while ago. I assumed that it didn't work well because I was exactly even on two of the key indicators. Based on this, I thought the test must not be very precise, accurate or worthwhile.

Turns out, the test is extremely reliable. I just am right on the border line of two characteristics. Anyway, what about personality tests for ARG characters? Would it be fun to take a silly look at several characters from different games and see how they are? I'll save this for the summer.
But it came to mind while I was looking at the World Without Oil game. There are at least 10 characters, 8 of whom we know how to contact, one of whom is a bit of a mystery and the last we don't know.

So how do the puppet masters create all these various personalities, how do they decide what people to include, and who to leave out.

More later. ;)

Your toughest critic can be your most passionate supporter

2007-04-21T09:38:00.000-04:00

A thing to keep in mind. I have been critical of Year Zero. The world of Year Zero isn't a place where I can spend much time. Neither is the mind of its creator, for that matter. I don't know much about Trent Reznor, but I think it would be tough to spend much time inside his head. I don't know if I could handle living in a bleak world all the time. Not that he does, I do understand a bit about the creative process. But the idea of the world came from him, his world view.

AIR

2007-04-21T09:26:00.000-04:00

Year Zero implements a website where people can post art they have created. The site opensourceresistance.net is well worth a few minutes to skim through.

Much of it is stunning - I can't make art like that so I don't think I will contribute anything. Some of the best pieces have been taken and used in ads around the country. I'm trying to get my hands on the Village Voice edition. (I wish more people from unfiction were playing this game, the Echoing the Sound boards are harder for me to follow. But, less selfishly, I think they are not only missing a great game but also they are missing a cultural experience that they will regret. I mean, come on people, Year Zero is sitting right there on your doorstep, all you have to do is open the door a tiny bit. You don't have to make a lifetime commitment to the game.)

The acronym for Art is Resistance is, of course, AIR, which pleases me to no end because whenever I am in that game world, I feel like I am suffocating. Art is bringing air into the game. I like it. :)

By the way, if you go to Art is Resistance- be prepared to have your speakers down if you are at work.

The lingerie shop- a postlet

2007-04-18T09:55:00.000-04:00

A friend suggested that maybe my feeling about Year Zero is similar to one he felt the first time he went to the lingerie department in a store. (while this may be an interesting story, I didn't pursue it..sorry) Perhaps that is a similar sense of not belonging. While I can't know if in fact it is the same feeling, that idea triggered another thought.

Maybe part of the reason I feel pushed out of Year Zero is that, the parts I have been in, are extremely masculine. All the women are victims in some way or another. The heroic woman, Caroline, who feeds us the websites from the future, as the police are outside the door, is presumably killed. She manages to tell us somehow just before she dies "the hour is at hand" but that is a clue to a password.

An excuse for this masculinity is that in the world of Year Zero women seem to have little, or no, human rights. I think this is based on the extreme religiosity of that world, which seems to be based in part on some current religious thinking of some religions. So keeping women as victims in Year Zero is just part of the story...

I don't like it though.

Year Zero and me

2007-04-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

I'm not playing Year Zero in the fanatically obsessed way that I usually play a game. I find this frustrating because it goes against my basic mode of operation. I don't want to ignore Year Zero because so much about it is fascinating: the intersection of music by a famous "rock star," though I would call him simply a musician, with the ARG genre is something to be watched.

Trent Reznor, the musician in question, is imagining an entire world - just like PerplexCity in some ways - of which his music is only part. This imaginary world bursts to life in the format of an alternate reality game. The complexity and depth of the game pulls you into the world of Year Zero.

The design behind the game is brilliant. I think the design may not be noticed by many players, because the design is a seamless part of the overall story. I, however, have experienced a few jaw-dropping moments of appreciation at the creativity and strength of the design. Some examples: an audio file that turns into an image of the Presence; giving phones to players and using those phones as a way to set-up clandestine meetings; and, my favorite, those absolutely amazing murals. The murals may surpass the payphones in ilovebees as the best design element ever. I think I love them because like the phones, they are a part of the typical landscape. They are just murals on billboards. But the murals themselves tell a story, a complete visual story that you can understand entirely independently from the game. The payphone is just a tool in ilovebees, a way of communicating a story between two people, the storyteller and the listener; the murals in Year Zero are a story.

So if the design is so great -what keeps me away? Well, the story. As perfectly written and executed as it is, the story creates a world that I can't access. I said in an unfiction post, that I feel actively repelled by that world, not repelled by disgust or horror at the story, but repelled by the very real sense that the world of Year Zero has no place for me. It is as if we can't exist in the same space. (Probably if you have never felt this way, my comment makes no sense.) I'm trying hard to think of other instances where I felt this way - this active sense of not belonging. If I can remember any, I'll let you know.

Now, Year Zero includes a site where players can submit their own art making their own statement of resistance. So it isn't as if the designers haven't made a place where players can express themselves. That hasn't pulled me in though.

As usual, I need to think about this some more.

Spring cleaning

2007-04-18T08:52:00.000-04:00

It has been a while.

My blog was created as an outlet for me to get my ideas out of my head without cluttering up the META section of unfiction. For a long time, I haven't felt the need to make many META comments about ARGs. Planning ARGFest took most of my META energy. But now I am starting to think more deeply about games again.

When I restarted this blog, I decided to not allow comments. I simply don't have the requisite dedication to moderate comments in any realistically responsive or timely manner. As I think it is rude to allow comments but then be haphazard in reviewing them, I decided to just allow the "administrators of this blog", which means me, to make comments. I don't think I'm likely to comment on my own posts, but you never know.

We will see what I have to say. :)

All you wished for

2006-02-17T18:48:00.000-05:00

"If I find my own way," well, that reminds me of the need for guides in our little ARG world. (Don't ask, just chalk this one up to way too many repeats of Michael Stipe's various versions of "In the Sun" - the recording for Hurricane Relief, too bad this wasn't out for Christmas I could have showered copies of it on unsuspecting friends.)

To play a game properly requires a proper guide made by players, not just the in-game guide. In fact, in-game guides are relatively recent, but necessary to assisting the late-joiners and the casual fan. Before in-game guides, there was Adrian Hon's guide to The Beast, which stands as a shining model of clarity. Succinct and precise summaries lead the reader down the trail the Cloudmakers blazed. The in-game guide started perhaps with I love bees, as a way to help the Halo fans informed with the basic story. Most recently, Last Call Poker created a brilliant in-game guide on The Muck page. Honestly, I checked it throughout the game because I was afraid I had missed something.

The rise of the in-game guide seems to have hasten the demise of the player created guide. Let's face it, player created guides are a lot of work to do and maintain. Players who can code anything in any language claim to be intimidated by the unfamiliarity of the bizarre wiki mark-up. (yes, ok, the fact that 4 tildes make a signature with date and time of posting, is not obvious, but it is tres simple to learn.) Several of us worked on sorts of guides for LCP, but it turned out that all of us were at the New York Live Event, totally missed playing that update and lost our momentum.

I myself have a terrible track record of updating guides. Still, I think that the need for the player created guide is there. Right now, I am brainstorming on software that would make the guide easier. One guide for "Who is Benjamin Stove" a free wiki hosted site created by a player named Cross, seems that it may be a model for the future.

More later.

The litmus test

2006-02-05T10:09:00.000-05:00

A slightly interesting twist on the whole "out of game" concept - using the out of game forums or chat rooms as a means of "outing" a character. The theory is that a person, once identified as being a possible in-game character, is invited to post on the out of game forums or join chat. And, if that person can't or won't... they might be in-game!

In Orbital Colony, a character was identified by her unwillingness to join the general chat room. To be fair, the question arose only after she made comments which made the players suspicious. Now, a similar question has arisen about tipsila, a smart, insightful player who posts on the Who is Benjamin Stove boards. (tipsila in Lokata means prairie turnip, a beautiful, flowering native plant the root of which was a staple food of the plains Indians and early settlers. The Native American connection is relevant in the story, or so it seems.)

Two thoughts about this test: one, I can recall when unfiction was totally out of game and not to be mentioned in the game universe, at least not to characters, which I would think might apply to possible characters, but that is too META a path for me to follow this morning; two, I wonder about the player who just happens to be smart or makes an important discovery early in a wildly popular game, would they want to join every forum or chat room discussing that game?

For once this is not just a theoretical concern I am raising. In the very early days of the game i love bees, several players, including myself, were mentioned in an in-game way. Solves and comments were posted on Dana's blog (the equivalent of the in-game forum for that game) and Dana responded to those players whose posts advanced the game. The Sleeping Princess mentioned me and other players by name in her second email, along with adopting her signature line of "when I am __, I do (using an emoticon)" which was based on something I had written in my email responding to her first email.

It is easy to see that people unfamiliar with ARGs and the unfiction rules, could mistake us for in-game characters.

In the few days that elapsed between the first email from the Sleeping Princess and the second one, the game community exploded with new players. Those of us who had been mentioned in any way connected with the game were, if not harassed, at least seriously pestered by Personal Messages on the unfiction board, and in chat, from people wondering if we were connected with the game. These new players had not yet learned that we couldn't be characters or puppet masters if we were posting about the game in unfiction. Several people were seriously annoyed by the badgering they received. At least one player mentioned in-game simply left the chat room #beekeepers, which had been created for the game, retreating to a private chat room for the duration.

I doubt that any of us would have joined a chat room or message board unaffiliated with unfiction just because someone asked us to do so. The ARG community is so much larger than unfiction, I think it is hubris for players to assume that anyone who won't join, could be an in-game character.

I know that tipsila has posted smart, thorough comments, and could very well be a PM shill moving the game along, we saw that in the game Art of The Heist as well.(The question of the need to identify a person as a shill is for another post.) But either way, player or character, a person simply refusing to post on unfiction or join a chat room should be respected. I suggest we work out other techniques of identifying in-game characters, or, even, try patience and let the game unfold.

Community -collaboration without consensus

2006-01-28T11:34:00.000-05:00

A new META topic..proving once again there is nothing new under the sun. The whole collaboration and control of other players issue. I posted this at unfiction first, but I think I will quietly delete the post before anyone responds. I am trying to remember to keep my META views here on my little blog, which was the whole point of starting it in the first place. Sheesh!

When I first joined unfiction I had no experience of what I would call a "true" community. I think that too few people have, or maybe this whole issue of players "betraying" each other would not arise.

So here is one of my short summaries:

1. Trying to control what other players do, telling them who to talk to, and, excluding them when they don't agree with what you, or the majority of players want to do, is antithetical to a community.

[Also, controlling other players makes the game much less fun to play. No one wants to try sending an email to the "bad guy" if everyone is going to complain at them for doing so, yet that could be a fruitful and interesting avenue of inquiry in a game. Shutting down those avenues by trying to control player's actions hurts the game play as well as the community.]

2. People can disagree, express their disagreement and no one in the community, or the community itself, is threatened by that disagreement. We can disagree, even strongly, and still move forward together. We have, in fact, done that successfully on many occasions.

3. Respect for other people is essential. That means personal attacks are not acceptable, including troll-like behaviour in games that are not constructed the way someone think they should be constructed.

4. Being human, players and puppet masters make mistakes, misunderstand, and, are even flat out wrong. These mistakes are rarely important in the scheme of things in the game or in the world. Of course everything else we do: the brilliant insights, the emotional investment in a story and in each other, the way we keep finding our way back when we get off-course, is because we are human too.

5. Typically, we, the active, hard-core players are at most 10% of community. Sometimes we forget this, and can evince a sense of entitlement to we don't truly have. Anyone can send or receive emails, or interact in some way, and not post it here. So we can never see what the PMs are seeing.

hmm, after this much of a lecture, I know if I add "it's the journey not the destination" people will start throwing things...

The cultural divide

2006-01-18T15:48:00.000-05:00

I have mentioned many times the cultural difference between my working world of commercial law in Manhattan and my playing world of games in the universe of the net. No one values more than I do the culture of generosity that creates such wonderful games.

Still, I was astounded by the response to the general idea, which I raised today, that a commercial game should pay people it recruits to work on an in-game forum. To me, the concept of paying people who work for you seems as obvious as any cliched obvious thing, pick your favorite. Honestly, I saw a player not being compensated for doing a job that the commercial game would have otherwise had to hire someone to do. And that seemed not right to me. (No, I am not a union lawyer.) I just don't know anyone outside of the ARG community, who didn't say "they aren't paying her?"

To be fair, I am sure that Tucker, the in-game character, will give the player great swag, presents, maybe a trip to the final party, who knows. Also, my guess is that the PuppetMasters were not prepared for a flood of responses that required a forum moderator. I am not suggesting, at all, that the PMs are acting, or would ever act in bad faith. It seems more of an oversight than anything else. But, as I said, my reaction was that of outrage that an ad agency or studio would ask someone to work for free on a commercial project.

This is my new insight: my little cultural norm is that people don't work for free for people that can pay for it. Lawyers tend to save pro bono efforts for emergencies or for those who can't afford the cost of the help they need. Generally, the determination of when to volunteer our time and talent is based on need. Need is usually, but not always, determined by income and assets.

I now see that the ARG community cultural norm is different. Some people even thought that the whole point was stupid, which really makes me smile. I like people who think that expecting to get paid for work is not a valid point. I just don't encounter them often enough.

Define this

2006-01-17T10:11:00.000-05:00

In keeping with my focus on words and definitions, it seems there is one word we shouldn't try to define too closely, the word "ARG."

I have always defined an ARG as "a nonlinear narrative in which the characters interact with players in both the real and virtual world; as the players drive the story forward: solve puzzles, communicate with characters and do real world tasks in playing the game, their actions become interwoven with, and a part of, the game."

I am partial to that definition, although I am sure game designer lingo has more specific words that pretty much get you to the same point. Also, my focus is on the players, so my perspectivie differs from that of a puppet master.

But I did take advantage of the traditional post-game chat held for Last Call Poker to ask the 4orty2wo puppetmasters about their definition. To my delight, Elan Lee responded. As you read his answers, you can just imagine the ideas jumping out of his head onto the "paper."

My question: We spend a great deal of effort and energy defining "what is an ARG", that is, what we find acceptable as an ARG. How do you define an ARG? And has that definition changed over time?

His answer:
-This is a great question that I wish I had a good answer for. I meet people on planes a lot, and when I break out the laptop, the sketch pad, the sticky notes, the voice recorder, and my random assortment of toys, I inevitably get the question, “Um….what do you do for a living?” (To be fair, it’s a fifty-fifty shot as to whether they talk to me or just bury their faces in reading material and concentrate intensely on imagining I’m not there.) Mostly, I just reply that I’m a game designer, but when they push harder, I sometimes have to go into a lengthy description of the movie “The game” or those fortune cookie’s you get that say “Help, I’m a prisoner in the fortune cookie factory!” The truth is that I don’t know what an ARG is. I don’t even know what an ARG isn’t. I’ll try a few short descriptions and we’ll see if any of them make any sense:

1) An experience that uses your life as a game board.

2) A game where strange things happen to you the longer you play

3) An excuse to behave like a lunatic in public.

4) A convincing argument that you have super powers you’ve never known about.

5) A piece of entertainment that hates living in a box.

6) An opportunity to play in the real world.

I’m on a plane at the moment, so maybe I’ll try a few of those on the guy sitting next to me pretending to take a nap. Strangers just love it when I play with them.

---
Steve Peters has some comments on his blog http://www.mysdirection.com/archive/category/philosophy/
which I will quote, just so I have it all together:
I gotta tell ya, it’s becoming my pet peeve to read people’s (especially people who haven’t been around very long) needs to more minutely define what an Alternate Reality Game is, all the while attempting to draw a nice tidy box around it. If anything, ARGs should be being defined more broadly and broadly as time goes by, not more narrowly.

So everyone, please take note of the above attempt at loosely defining things by someone who is by all accounts one of the inventors of the whole thing.
And write them all down.

Especially #5.

------
Maybe my definition is useful to explain what an ARG is to the uninitiated and Elan's list works for the rest of us. ;)

Resolutions

2006-01-17T08:15:00.000-05:00

With all the new ARG action, I am reviving my blog, which is another way of saying that my brain is filled with ARG related ideas and I need a place to put them. My ARG pensieve.

So the newest thing: ARGs keep getting closer to the mainstream, even if the mainstream still doesn't get it. Thus, the IGDA ARG SIG, which I wish would make a pretty anagram, as anagrams are the only puzzles I do well and as we need an ARG vocabulary so desperately. Actually, that news doesn't interest me as much as the need for the vocabulary.

I was listening to a hockey game on the radio, don't ask, well, since you asked, I don't have a television at the moment, I have a screen that is hooked to an Xbox and a PS2, but no cable. So as I was listening, I had the not too original insight that every game has a vocabulary that it invents.

But, more important, at least some of that vocabulary has to be coined by the game creators or players at early stages in the game. Take "puck" for instance...why "puck"..."goal" and "goalkeeper" make sense... but they could have chosen something else... what about "check" ....and why "hattrick...I know it was created because fans threw their hats on the ice after three goals were scored by one player, but why three? ... I suppose the point is that people make words and actions up to suit the game. To that point, George Carlin has an old, but very funny, routine where he compares the language of baseball to the language of football. In baseball overtime is "extra innings"; in football it is "sudden death."

We truly need a whole ARG vocabulary, words don't exist that adequately explain what we do, what we share, what we feel and think. Just the other week, I was trying to explain what xnbomb calls "collaboration without consensus" to a group of new players. They needed convincing that the IGDA ARG SIG boards are out of game and that characters would not glean those boards for secret information. They seemed to think that I was acting as an independent agent - and that they needed to, if they even could, keep a limit on other player's actions. Hence, the need to explain that we collaborate but don't need consensus.

We also need a word or phrase that expresses what catherwood calls "the intimacy of shared experience." Maybe a few different words because of the various aspects. Watching genius, inspiration, hard work, intuition and luck combine to solve a puzzle is magical. And behind that is the beauty that it is all for a game with a share purpose.

We need to describe the elastic and adhesive qualities of the group dynamic. We can disagree without feeling threatened that the group bond will break apart.

We need a word that described that we the players help create the game as we play it, that the game ultimately absorbs our personalities and actions. This makes the game ephemeral yet permanent -like an insect caught in amber- another word we need.

We need an adjective for the relationships we form with other players. I feel a close friendship with the players I know, and I trust and rely on them, even though I spend little time in my practical day to day real world with them. People don't understand this relationship.

And, one more word we need, which Scrappy referred to as ARG OCD - ARGs are addictive, and compulsive in the sense that we enjoy it so much that to not play causes more stress, hence the addiction.

Games and Gifts

2005-12-27T14:34:00.000-05:00

The generosity of puppetmasters making games for anyone, friends and strangers to
for free captured my interest in games. I mentioned this before, but as much
as I love the Matrix and Neo's quest toward enlightenment, my curiosity about
Project Mu all those years ago was about the maker, not so much the game. That
someone would go to immense trouble to create a game that I could just find, join
and play -simply for the pleasure of making it -was an an irresistable, and in my
world, foreign, concept.

And then I found unfiction, another gift given freely.

So I admit a biased, fierce attachment and loyalty to the makers and the creators.
The discussions of how to make money from games is something I can't really
contribute much to, I think that the impulse of generosity behind a game, even a
game that is part of marketing, by not charging for it, is an important
underpinning to the community that develops around the game.

Right now I am playing a game that started immediately after Last Call Poker ended,
a game called "Orbital Colony" and created in the tradition and spirit of
generosity. For some reason this game has attained a misnomer of a "training"
ARG, for beginning puppetmasters. Although the training concept may have inspired
the start of this game, I can tell you that it is anything but simple.

The game has competing interests: supposed advances in technology and medicine are
opposed by people who question the legitimacy and benefits of these advances. Most
happily, the game is perfect for conspiracy theories, we don't know who to trust or
what any character is really up to. Also, the puppetmasters have added something
new, a child, a lonely little girl whose father is missing. We can email her and
her robot dog.
I highly recommend this game. It has just started and I think we are going to be
in for a wild ride before this one ends. Already we are on a puzzle trail that is
frustratingly difficult, but the famous solvers from unfiction are coming out to
play.
Some game sites:
http://www.orbitalcolony.com/
http://www.maefamily.net/
http://www.saipets.com/ - the video of the cat is priceless.

Last Call Poker: if I could write like this....

2005-10-30T09:24:00.000-05:00

The exceptional writing of the story of Last Call Poker... I could rave and ramble on about it, but that would serve to make my own writing only weaker by comparison. So I decided to share a few of my favorite bits.

From Major Damon Michael : the Flesh of Pale Roses

And suddenly, like an echo, the sound of her voice returned, achingly familiar, and he knew who she was.

She came into the back room where he lay, her skin glowing in the dim light like the flesh of pale roses. A little door opened in his chest and he could feel the heat of her eyes on his heart. He struggled to speak but his voice was broken and he hissed instead.

She stifled a little shriek.

Despair bloomed in his body. She didn’t recognize him! He lifted his hand but she recoiled and started to back away.

"Mei Lu?" he whispered. “Don’t you recognize me?” He wasn’t sure if he was speaking Chinese or Spanish. The words scuttled from his mouth like little crabs, clicking and hissing. “It’s your father!”
------------------
From Kerry Tucker: Blind Spot

A long, low exhalation. Silence. In his mind's eye Kerry could see the priest, his Deli-Mart jacket. Receding hairline leaving a high forehead with a sheen of sweat, as big as the two middle rings in a bull's-eye target.

"See," Kerry said, "before this, I had only killed one man. Not counting the army. And I knew that he was bad. And I knew he was going to hurt some people. And that no one was g-g-going-"
He stopped. Touched the grip of the USP tucked in his jeans. The gun calmed him down. "No one else was going to stop him."

"What about the others? Were they bad men, too?"

"Yeah," Kerry said. There was a long silence. "Yeah," he said again. He looked to the acoustic tile ceiling. This church smelling of microwave burritos and coffee. He could feel the pressure of the priest's waiting and it occurred to him in a flash that priests must be good at waiting, as good as soldiers. Or better. Kerry had out-waited cops and teachers and enemy troops, but he found he didn't have the stomach to out-wait God. He'd shot the Schoolteacher because he couldn't wait one more day for God to get off his ass and see the right thing done.

If you looked around at this world, Kerry thought, you'd have to be some kind of patient to out-wait God.
-----------------
From Maurice Pikar: Lovely German Forests

Maurice hadn’t been much of a Jew growing up. His family ate bacon and pork chops and never fasted on the Day of Atonement, and though they gave money to UJA, they admitted that the Zionists were a little crazy. There were some Sephardic families who lived in the same building, all from the same shtetl in the Ukraine, and Maurice and his brothers used to make fun of the separate sets of dishes for meat and dairy, and the sidelocks and the heavy coats and big fur hats and the Yiddish. The Sephardic kids viewed the Pikars with contempt, and sometimes made nasty comments so Maurice had to sock them, and then there was trouble between the parents. None of this made Maurice feel very interested in being a Jew.

The only times Maurice actually felt Jewish was when the kids from the Catholic school called him a Christ-killer, and then he’d have to sock them, too.

When he joined the army he was worried that if he was captured, the “J” on his dog tags might motivate the Nazis to do something special to him, but that didn’t make him a Jew, it made him a highly motivated combat infantryman.

What made him a Jew was Buchenwald.

-----------------

And a hint of ironic humor:

Simon Bassi (cf. spacebass?) cardprofile Hashochet: Drop you on the concrete

Kerry started to struggle and Simon said, “Stop, or I will drop you on the concrete.”

He carried Kerry through the laundry room into the workshop. The workshop was unfinished, bare cinderblock walls and cement floor. Simon dumped Kerry onto the floor and then stopped a moment to work out the kinks, before taking the blindfold off.

“I am thinking of killing you,” Simon said.

Kerry said nothing, of course, since Simon hadn’t removed the gag.

Another one from Major Damon Michael - Sugar skulls and bones made of bread

"Major, this is Juarez, not Peking."

Damon looked around. That explained the Mexicans. He drained the glass of water and shook his head. Juarez. Mexico. Villa.
-------
If these examples make you yearn for more - all the texts are on the wiki- linked by character the main page:

http://deaddrop.us/lastcall/index.php

Endings

2005-10-23T00:20:00.000-04:00

Playing an ARG about death and cemeteries makes me consider endings. How hard it can be to let a story or characters go, even when it is the right time for them to end.

I watched the end of the Firefly episode when they carry out the body of their friend. The scene is his funeral. (like most TV shows, guest stars don't have a long life expectancy. About an hour, less commercials is the going rate.) In the DVD extras, the show's composer explains he knew when writing the music that the show had been cancelled. The end sequence is a loving farewell to each character and the show, as well as to the enterred guest star.

The actors talk about the strong emotional bonds they had formed and, how hard it is to say
good-bye. They know they will never be together again (except for filming the movie !)

I tend to think that if saying farewell is easy, you have done something wrong. Missed a chance for an emotional connection or overlooked a quality that should have been appreciated. Walking away with nothing touching you is a shrink- wrapped way of life.

But with ARGs, we travel a different way than an actor on a show. When a story ends, we still have the bonds we have formed with each other. People come and go. Other events take precedance. But there is something enduring. The story may end. But our part, our friendships with each other remains . Unlike actors who separate to their next job, we
stick; we fool around in the meantime;we find each other when the next game starts.

This makes me very happy. Because we choose each other. We choose to do this, not for our work, not to advance our career, not to social climb for our family, not for any financial advantage and not even for any religous belief. We choose this and we stick. How great is that.

Mad Skills

2005-09-07T07:16:00.000-04:00

I remember being upset that the Red Cross was going to spend some of the money raised for 9/11 for new computers and IT infrastructure. That was before I knew you guys of course.

Now I regret that-- we need faster computers and better tech support. The information is so location specific that the databases we access lag badly behind reality. We don't know in real time what any place offers. Only the biggest centers have telephones so we can confirm information before sending anyone to them. Luckily, thanks to the unfiction crew, my google skills have improved. So if I need something, I just find try to find it myself.

The other day a man called about his father who had been evacuated from a nursing home and his brother-in-law who had diabetes. (Diabetics are considered an immediate life or death risk.) The caller was upset and so much in shock he couldn't remember the name of the nursing home. He remembered the street it was on. What to do? A report without a specific address isn't useful. ( Is that mostly because of linking data to GPS coordinates?) Wait, I know how to use google maps. I looked for the street. And I found the name and address pretty quickly. Then, he couldn't remember the street address or phone number for his brother-in-law. A quick search and I found it for him.

Small victories. But I feel so good when I can problem solve and help someone inch a bit closer to a solution.

Another item: I was telling the Director of the Red Cross in New York that we needed to invest more in lo-tech communications. I mentioned my interest in getting a Ham radio license. Someone mentioned that I would have to learn Morse Code. As if I don't know a bit of it all ready. As if that would be a difficult hurdle. Wisely I didn't mention my profound understanding of the Solitaire cipher. While I am ready to admit that unfiction has turned me into a geek, I don't want everyone to know.

Later. :D

ARGFEST AMSTERDAM

2005-09-01T16:08:00.000-04:00

You heard it here first. Be there. Plan ahead like wishi does. :)

Coming in March or June of 2006 . Hosted by Giskard:

ARGFest Amsterdam.

(see, not everything is gloom and doom.)

It's all about...

2005-09-01T15:05:00.000-04:00

Forgiveness? Or do I mean its?

I totally regret not sticking to my promise to myself to take a break. Maybe my deep grief from the massive distruction from the hurricane is changing my priorities - but I have no patience or sympathy for stuff like:

I'm willing to forgive ......

What are people talking about? Forgiveness for spelling and grammar errors?
And who among us has designated someone as the forgiveness dispenser? Did Spacely annoint someone? How does one obtain forgiveness? Is there some penance someone has to do to earn it? Or some good act? Or is it simply by grace - unearned and undeserved.

Someone wondered if we have turned this into a religion.

I know cooler and calmer heads of those who have an intact sense of humor will prevail as it always does. But, I have lost my sense of humor and am tired of the petty self-satisfied posts of know-it-all forum vigilantes. The least entertaining subset of which is the dueling forum vigilantes. Why they think that anyone else in the whole world gives a rat's ass is beyond me.

Anyway, sorry. I love the community. So for the good of everyone I will stay away until my ability to laugh at the ridiculous hilarity of this meaninglessness returns. Eventually it will, I promise. :D

In the meantime - I've been watching the coverage from www.wdsu.com and www.nola.com . Maybe that accounts for my mood. I just finished a brief two-hour Red Cross volunteer training course so I can help man phone banks for them. I plan to be there as much as I can.

love to all.

Stuff I know about disasters. Break Time

2005-08-31T05:05:00.000-04:00

This is not about ARGs - but my huge frustration at the devastation at New Orleans inspired me to make this little list. I've lived through a few disasters and have dealt with many refugees and refugee agencies. Here is my little list of common sense device:

1. Use your own judgement if it is more conservative than what officials advise.

Simply put, get out of where you are when you can. If you see a large hurricane approaching you or the streets below filed with people covered in dust and debris or you survive an earthquake -don't believe reassurances that everything will be fine. If nothing happens, you can return safe and sound. If the worst happens, you will be safe and sound away from danger.

One weather reporter from New Orleans had to decide whether to evacuate his wife and literally hours-old baby who doctors said needed medical care or stay at the hospital. Staying meant medical care would probably be available. Leaving meant no medical care until they got to their destination.

He choose to leave. Being a weather reporter may have given him more insight into the magnitude of what New Orleans faced. He choose to risk getting his wife and infant son out of the city. Good choice don't you think?

2. Don't think officials will take care of you.

You have to act proactively and with your own interests in mind. The officials see you as a logistical challenge not as an individual. This mindset shifts but doesn't alter perceptibly as a disaster progresses.

3. Be prepared.

If you can get everything you need together or at least keep a few basic supplies with you. I always have a tiny flashlight with me. I have one at my desk at work along with a little backpack of stuff. Everyone teases me about this. Still, it came in handy during the blackout.

4. Children.

The most important factor in how well children manage a crises is the stability of their parents, primarily their mother. If the mother does well, the children do well. If the mother gets exhausted and overwhelmed and confused, the children have problems coping. So parents may have to form mutual support groups that are committed to caring for each other. Stick together, stand in lines for each other, help watch the children as a group.

5. Rebuilding.

You may want to think that everything will be fine and you can go back. Trying to return to your old life may not be in your best interest or even praticable. You may be better advised to start over somewhere else, somewhere that has resources, jobs, functioning infrastructure, and family and friends. Letting go is difficult. Holding on to a place that now exists only in your memory may not be in your best interest.

----
Break Time

As bagsbee once told me "without a game, there is no community."

I have decided to take a break. I am still working with GDC on our proposal which I submitted a month ago, writing two papers, and networking with some professional and grassroot PMs to set up our developers group. Perplexcity is playing, but I am just a puzzle card collector/player there. Without a major game proceeding and engaging its interest, the community slants towards irrelevant META posts, pissy and lengthy etiquette reminders and more triviality. And I start to not have fun anymore.

There is of course Ehsan's brilliant puzzle trail! Go to #soogees for more information. Everyone should participate in those- you can learn so much and have fun at the same time. Ehsan always includes these little side hint pages as you get close to the answer. Thanks for making Soogees Ehsan.

This time the board vigilantes did me in. Under their self-proclaimed role of telling people what to do, how to do it and generally intimidating new players, the board vigilantes are not the force for good they pat themselves on the back, often and publicly, for being. But they seem to enjoy their little egocentric power trip.

I wonder how they would feel if they knew what people said about them. Or if they knew that the same comments they condescendingly make about others (and worse) were said about them when they joined. I know that can hurt - people still make comments about me and my ideas thinking I won't hear about them or even post images - and it does hurt. But it doesn't stop me from moving forward. It just clarifies my tenuous position.

When I get irritated because someone posts a snotty response to a new player about how "we don't copy lengthy posts in answers" and then I scroll down and see the same person self-satisfyingly copying a lengthy discussion from another thread (um, ever heard of a link?) - it is just time for me to stay away for a while. I lose perspective about our little place on the board which is a sweet, treasured but oh-so-tiny dustmote in the internet.

Another basic rule: when you lose your sense of humor it is time to go.

Technology failing

2005-08-31T04:42:00.000-04:00

Jane McGonigal and others have mentioned the intertwining relationship between ARGs and technology. Without the dramatic advances in technology allowing far-flung people to connect with each other at any time, ARGs, in the form imagined by the Beast anyway, would not be possible. On their current website, 4orty2wo talks about the "wired generation" being always online. But the assumption that "online" communications are always available is flawed. Communications seem to fail when they are most needed.

One unforgettable lesson we learned from Coachella is that failure of communication technologies can be pretty fundamentally catastrophic. While we were discouraged and troubled by the outcome of Coachella, we knew that our friends were safe and could easily leave when they needed to get home.

So New Orleans and the total failure of communication technologies due to the hurricane is a true massive, dangerous and life-threatening version of our little game. There was no cell communication, as towers were down, no landlines as wires were down, and as far as I know, even pagers weren't working. Along with the total failure of technologies, the incompatability of the radios and other equipment between state, local and federal officials compounded all the problems. Though FEMA and other officials claimed they had been preparing for and even expecting this hurricane for years, the woefully inadequate response speaks for itself.

The only real time communications were from people who somehow maintained internet access and used battery powered laptops. It seems that much of that eventually disappeared as well.

At any rate, we need better lo-tech communications. We need to revisit ways to have older, simpler technologies as back-ups to our hi-tech ways. Why don't we have more ham radio operators --if that counts as lo-tech--or even other basic signaling technologies readily at hand?

ARGs: more than advertising

2005-08-18T19:07:00.000-04:00

Another article about the marketing power of ARGs appeared today. The more press the better I suppose. They even quoted Steve Peters from ARGN who is the man to interview about games.

Now when the press people start writing about the other aspects of games as Henry Jenkins pointed out in this article "Chasing Bees without the Hive Mind" http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/12/wo_jenkins120304.3.asp :

* generating "players who feel more capable, more confident, more expressive, more engaged and more connected in their everyday lives." (quoting Jane Mc Gonigal)

* knowledge cultures represent an alternative source of power that exists alongside the political authority of the nation state or the global reach of commodity capitalism. We will someday learn to use this power to change the world.

then we will be getting somewhere.

Expansion: why?

2005-08-18T14:40:00.000-04:00

My use of "expansion" is based on Donne's incredibly famous poem "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." Not at all directly on point, as the poem is about true love surviving a separation, it contains one of my favorite concepts- that our life expands almost limitlessly with experiences. The exact opposite of a zero-sum existance.

The stanza is "Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet. A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat." (emphasis added)

Two reasons I choose this word. The poem beautifully describes the growth that I find accompanies game experiences. And, for some reason I cannot fully ascertain, words about gems, jewels, precious things always come to mind when I am explaining games. When I first joined unfiction, I thought of it as "Spacely's little jewel box." I still think of it that way. I find myself using words like "treasure" and "precious" to describe people and things associated with games.

So the phrase "like gold to aery thinness " just fits.

As for "Spacely's little jewel box" I mean that to be evocative of the little black velvet bag that holds your grandmother's imperfect strand of pearls or the turquoise and mother- of- pearl ring shaped like a butterfly your father bought for you on a family trip to Santa Fe. Not everyday jewelry or party jewelry, the beautiful stuff with value beyond the monetary.

Immersion and Expansion

2005-08-18T13:53:00.000-04:00

Today I found myself at Barnes & Noble flipping through the book Word Freak. An answer to a Perplex City puzzle card called "Freak Word" is from that book ( I won't post the word here because I can't spoiler it.) I was searching for the board set-up in which that word was played so I could compare it with the board shown on the puzzle card. Don't bother looking, it isn't shown.

And I had one of those moments when I suddenly looked at what I was doing -spending time searching for something from a game. And I smiled.

My favorite aspect of games is what I call expansion which is when I interact with the tangible world (we need a better word than "meat space") because of a game not related to game play. A corrollary of immersion, which is when the game calls you or when you do something - like answer a phone in ilovebees or attend a live event in Heist- to play the game, expansion is when I do something, learn something, met someone as a result of a game.

One example is Will Star, the DJ at our ARGFest party. I learned of Will, and the DJ Scratch Academy where he teaches, through Heist. Will made some trax for Ian, one of the game's characters, and Will himself became a minor character in the plot. It so happened that during the game,my son and one of his friends had school vacation, so I took them down to the Scratch Academy for a lesson. My son's friend now has a monthly pass there so he can practice DJing. And yesterday I walked by an ad for Scratch Academy. Over an image of a turntable the sign read "F#$% piano lessons. " Then below the image "Scratch Academy." I took a picture ( with the Treo I got from Heist by the way.)

How would I have known about Toy Tokyo, a tiny store with odd hours one flight up a graffiti filled stairway, if not for Perplex City? I work around that neighborhood frequently, because the Public Theater, one of my favorite places, is nearby. Yet I had never noticed the store. Now, I buy cool gifts for people as well as cards there. (And yes, I am starting a robot collection when PPC is over. Toy Tokyo has a great selection.)

[NB: Expansion includes the friends I have made because of a game. These friends are true colleagues and companions along the way. I treasure them. Walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with xnbomb, my spec partner from ilovebees - yes, we won the award- was a gift. Looking at the actual paintings used in a Heist puzzle with Chippy, the prescient creator of the "Dude where's my car" CD cover, was equally fantastic fun. I suppose I will make a separate entry for this - Expansion Deux will be forthcoming. ]

So you get my point, games bring things into my life that I wouldn't have known about any other way. Even this, looking through Word Freak I find an amazing series of plays mentioned: one guy played "thionine" which is a dye; the next play was a three letter word which added an "e" creating "ethionine" which is an amino acid; the original player of "thionine" then played another three letter word which added an "m"creating "methionine", which is another amino acid. My first thought was "how cool is that"; my second "I wonder if I should post this?"

The failure of language

2005-08-12T00:32:00.000-04:00

Like the law, language fails to keep pace with technology. As both Jane McGonagal and Jim Guyenthall mentioned, we need a lexicon to express what an ARG is, and what playing an ARG is. We need precision and exactitude in place of the stumbling, too-long definitions we mutter. These "definitions" are more accurately descriptions of what happens in a game. "ARGs are a nonlinear narrative in which the players interact with the story in both physical and virtual reality." Bleh - how tedious does that sound. I am not up to formulating one at the moment, but I am working on it, suggestions welcomed!

Our paucity of language extends to communications between players. I have even seen confusion induced by the use of the word "new" as in "Is this new?"- something found in the past hour may be new to a player who just spotted it, but no longer new to those who have seen already.

Similarly, words accurately reflecting what happens within the collective group of players are limited. Is it "the hive mind without the hive", as suggested by Henry Jenkins; the "collective intelligence" described by Pierre Levy; the "collective detective", a phrase that has fallen out of use at least since the demise of the collective detective forums; or perhaps simply that bland generic "community?" Language truly reflective of community hardly exists. The only term for collective, collaborative decision making I could find is "consensus" which isn't at all how the game or the community works. I found nothing to express the idea of individual action within the context of a collaborative group.

The absence of vocabulary reflects a cultural void. If true community, as in the community of players, was commonplace, the variety of descriptive language available would be rich, varied and nuanced. If people outside of academic gaming circles or marketing associations wrote about ARGs with some understanding, then we wouldn't be hindered by graceless terms like "interactive cross-platform or no platform networked based media." I mean talk about "sucking the joy out of a game. "

As it happens, I am attempting, with a collaborator or two, to write something about ARGs from a player's perspective. We refuse to follow that sort of jimmy-jumbo-jammer "we'll just string adjectives and nouns together in a row instead of defining a word" academic or marketing jargon. I just realized we will need to create our own lexicon in the process- which will be fun but will take at least twice as long to complete.

(hee - just writing about "having no words" could make an article in and of itself. But that is just too existential for me. Abstract "This article is about the fact I have no words with which to write this article." )

Steganography and PPC

2005-08-09T01:44:00.000-04:00

I thought that "steganography" only meant data hidden in image files. Actually, steganography is derived from the Greek words for "hidden writing" and can refer to any message hidden within another message. The existence of the hidden message, which may be encoded, is concealed - such as: the message may be invisible to the naked eye due to color or type of ink used, the message may appear only at very high resolution, the message may be hidden within an image.

Many of the initial limited set of PPC cards use steganography. Two favorites, "Between the Lines", which needs to be held at a certain angle in natural light for the message to appear, and "An Invitation", which requires a certain type of UV light to reveal a hidden message. These cards are just beginning to be explored and I am certain that more hidden messages will be found.

PPC for beginners

2005-08-08T14:19:00.000-04:00

I hesitate to add to the jumble of information sites about Perplex City. I know that they will someday be launching their own forums. But in the meantime, I threw together a list of links and some basic card information for the very newest players. Some people find unfiction intimidating. But, if you can find this blog, you probably aren't a beginner.

Anyway..

About the cards:

*The puzzle cards are available from 8 (or 9) stores worldwide and from firebox on-line. They cost $5 for a pack of 6 cards.
* There are a total of 256 cards (plus possibly some limited edition cards) right now 66 of them have been released.
* Each card has a number, a title, a color (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black and silver) and a set ( hex, star, pixel, circle, maze, [and assuming things remain consistent, three others]).
* Each card indicates the number of perplex points it is worth and the set it belongs to in the upper right hand corner. [About points - we don't know how they work yet, only that there will be a leaderboard to enter a card's unique code and the solution to that card's puzzle.]
* The color indicates the difficulty of the puzzle and how rare the card is. Silver foil cards are the most rare -- about 1 per 10 packs -- and the most difficult.
* Some of the cards have been treated with special inks so that not all the writing is immediately visible to the naked eye. These inks may appear under heat, sunlight, black light, etc. Do NOT heat foil cards in the microwave.
* Some of the card have a suit (spade, diamond, heart, club) and number of a standard playing printed in the lower left corner. These cards have what appears to be pieces of large letters printed in light grey ink on them. So far, the numbers of the cards that contain playing card marked on them are prime numbers.
* The backs of cards that are yellow and above contain pieces of a map of Perplex City. For more information try: http://www.perplexcity.com/howtoplay.html And for information on ordering try: http://www.perplexcity.com/buycards.html .

As for the growing list of links to the PPC world:
META site: http://www.perplexcity.com/
Sente's Academy: http://www.perplexcityacademy.com/
PPC newspaper (Earth Version) http://www.perplexcitysentinel.com/
Bank: http://www.perplexcitybankingcorporation.com/
Ceretin: http://www.cognivia.com/
Cheap Ceretin: http://www.cheapceretin.com/
Ascendancy Point: http://www.ascendancypoint.com/
Open Design: http://www.opendesignagency.com/main.html
Brotherhood of the Six: http://www.brotherhoodofthesix.com/
Ice cream! http://www.whipsmartice.com/
Subway Map: http://www.perplexcitysubway.com/

Character blogsites:
Scarlett Kiteway: http://www.thescarlettkite.com/
Violet Kiteway : http://www.quirkyacuity.com/
Kurt McAllister: http://www.thepathofleasttime.com/about/index.html
Sylvia and Pietro Salk: http://www.salkfamily.com/

And now a football ARG?

2005-08-08T14:05:00.000-04:00

ARGs aren't just about crazy AIs, car thefts or objects in space, now to add to the Egyption-themed site, we have an American football based game.

The story seems at a first glance to be about a crooked football league and an expose by a former player. The league is interfering with publishing, but the player has hidden parts of his story around the internet. Woo. A puzzle trail. The first part is simple, but cute, and the first few pages of the book looked intriguing.

Lucky for me, my home team-- the New York Nightmares-- are actually supposed to be good - now that is a true alternate reality for a New York based football fan.

Here are the sites:

http://www.blitzleague.com/main.php - the leagues official site

http://www.blitznewz.com/ - the insider scoop - fictional Mike and the Mad Dog in print on the web
http://www.reddogdown.com/ - the author's page

Works in Progress

2005-08-03T18:01:00.000-04:00

Some stuff is cooking and I am very happy. Maybe by Monday I will have something concrete to share.

A new game emerged yesterday - thanks to our sleuth Chippy. Akalesh- ascendant has a Meta site :

http://www.akalesh-ascendant.com/

And the obligatory puzzle page:

http://www.akalesh-ascendant.com/puzzle.html

Don't know who is behind this and couldn't say if I did- despite some current practice, identifying Puppet Masters is pretty rude. If you know who is behind something, be considerate enough to set your ego aside and let everyone else keep guessing. No one but you cares what you know and when you know it. :D

Akalesh is now on the horizon but won't launch until February.
PPC is the only game currently playingwith its own forum at unfiction. But I know that orbital colony launched at ARGFest.
www.orbitalcolony.com

And omnifam had a spiral clue - I honestly didn't notice who put those out. Too busy checking everything I guess.

. Rumors about games being close to launch made by the companies and people we know make games swirl constantly. Just bear in mind that, like most everything in our community, it was ever thus.

ARGTalk- one more time

2005-08-03T17:55:00.000-04:00

ARGTalk showed us all that we can have a voice, an opinion, a viewpoint about ARGs in general and any ARG in particular. What I think happened is this: the creator originally intended for the game to launch much sooner than it did. I think he implies as much in the PM chat. But then, life being what it is, other realities intruded and he didn't get to launch the game ...the kidnapping and rescue... which were intentionally designed to sound as if inexperienced Puppet Masters were running the show....until much much later. In the meantime, the rabbithole became yet another controversial place for us to dish about.

I guess Sean Stewart is right - a primary function of the internet is gossip. Our little world is no different than any other community in that regard.

The only thing we have to fear.

2005-07-31T21:36:00.000-04:00

Just to restate the patently obvious, I have complete faith in our ARG community, in our values and resilience. I trust completely our ability to disagree and still remain whole, even when disagreements devolve into unproductive chaos, eventually we find our back to community.

Yet, we seem to make decisions based on fear. An example. We have an open policy of posting opinions, actually a fairly liberal policy which is part of our strength. Then, why do we censor a simple poll about a boycotting a games sponsor? That game had some fun moments and great sites but I know people were grumbling for weeks about being left hanging at the end. To me the poll was just a statement of dissatisfaction. And, I doubt that anyone who voted in favor of a boycott would have followed through .

The argument is we don't want sponsors to come to unfiction, see one negative thread with a poll about boycotting a product, and decide not to make games.

Does anyone believe that would happen? Perhaps the players seem ungrateful and complainative- but, yes, that is part of who we are - we tend to complain. Not everyone and not all the time, but complaining is definitely an acceptable behavior in our little world - certainly I am not proud of the times I have indulged in whinging about a game. Maybe that post would have been better off unsaid, as it didn't go to the merits of the game and wasn't productive. Still, I can't agree that one poll would frighten major corporations from making games.

I think we falsely perceive ourselves as a larger part of the world than we really are. We don't see the true numbers of participants that a game generates. The Art of the Heist was a major success for Audi, yet because it didn't have as many players as Ilovebees or Perplexcity, or as many players as it deserved, players at unfiction didn't tangibly experience that success. Perhaps a reality check is in order - the marketing reports of key measurable statistics like number of unique site visitors and number of leads of people going into Audi dealerships indicate a truly successful campaign. We are just a little site in a very large world.

All indications are that several sponsored games are being developed right now, at this very moment. Would one poll affect that? So what are we afraid of again?

ARGTalk: again

2005-07-31T21:14:00.000-04:00

I was completely fooled by those mischievous puppetmasters behind ARGTalk. Never once, until the kidnapping, did I think that it was a game. I even posted an angry attack denouncing them for being anonymous. I fell right into their evil trickery. Some deductive thinker I am. Time to formulate an additional rule for playing: always consider that people hiding behind anonymity may be puppetmasters!

As it happens, I stopped reading ARGTalk and started this blog - so I didn't follow the story. I found them so irritating and aggravating that I needed a place to vent. So I turned my back and marched out the door straight to blogger.com. There is a lesson in there somewhere about conflict being a creative, or at least energizing, force. And one about maintaining a sense of humor. I can only laugh at myself about this one.

What a great idea. I was on candid camera ARG-style.

About the community

2005-07-30T17:36:00.000-04:00

For me the genre is all about the community. My microcosm to understand the world around me. One of our challenges - to maintain diversity of opinion while at the same time being able to say who we are...Even harder, to maintain perspective about our tiny patch of the virtual world.
Trying to articulate the magic that happens in the way that we play games....Stay tuned....

New Projects- To do

2005-07-30T17:22:00.000-04:00

So I have a few new projects percolationg:

1. ARGCon at E3 ...?????

2. Perplex City card meetups in New York....(on hold until joebrent lifts the NOP LANNING ban or until September, whichever comes first.) I am thinking somewhere near Toy Tokyo and we could do a joint meeting with the IGDA New York Chapter. We may as well seduce some more local gamers into our world.

3. Finishing an article or two on ARGs from a player's perspective....in draft

4. ARG League....we need a better name, but ARG Institute doesn't work. The League of Extradordinary ARGers ??? Suggestions welcomed. The idea is a to create a resource for developers PMs.....very loose circulating idea at the moment.

5. Creating a tax-exempt club or something for us --- including a co-op to buy electronic equipment. This one just came out of my head, but there has to be a way we can save some money and help support games or the board. And have a more formal status. Or something.

6. A series of articles by PMs -- this is underway. ... will it happen? Time will tell.

Yeah, I know. I get carried away. I have way too many ideas which is why I started this blog in the first place. My idea pensieve.

All the lovelies

2005-07-30T17:16:00.000-04:00

ARGFest was one of those better-than-I- had-hoped experiences. What can I say? I would do it all again in a heartbeat. And even better, this time I would check the air conditioning in the bar the week before I confirmed the party!

Planning a party for great people that you really like is one of the best uses of free time. I highly recommend it.

It is all about me

2005-07-17T05:06:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: I take no credit for the following idea. Someone else saw this pattern.

Perhaps the fundamental flaw in some recent games is the failure of the PMs to respect the audience in favor of their own ego. Examples : "I want to launch my game even though it will probably fail." "I want my characters to be able to post on unfiction." "I want my obnoxious characters to react in-character even if it means being rude to players." Actually, the "I want to..." may be all you need of those sentences. At some point, PMs need to set aside their ego. Respect for players is the foundation of the game.

On the flip side, players can fail to respect each other. Threadjacking to satisfy insatiable narcissism. Post-whoring that costs resources, clogs the board and contributes nothing. What is the point exactly? To some players, the community matters not at all compared to the dictates of the ego.

The roundtower of my heart

2005-07-12T08:04:00.000-04:00

I started to write a post about players going behind the scenes. I want to explore another emerging grey area - what happens when a player knows more than the others but doesn't share it or is prevented from sharing it because of a secret arrangement with the PMs.

But not today. I spent part of a sleepless night--too much caffeine--flipping through the threads of the game formerly known as syzygy. The respect, concern and emotional connection the players have for each other, the puzzles and the game permeates the whole forum. I remembered the thousand, sweet, ineffable reasons these games and this community captured me.

My favorite example from the Perplex City threads: An incredibly difficult (silver level) puzzle requires breaking a code encrypted at an insanely high level of encryption. All of our computer resources clunking away at it would have no hope of cracking it. As in the dialogue of War of the Worlds, we would have "no effect on the target." One of our resident brilliant programmers posted some code he hacked together to try to solve this puzzle, along with some background information on how crazy hard this puzzle is, so the rest of us could understand. A bit later, another brilliant programmer, after reviewing that work and diligently reading through the background, posted a correction to the hacked together code. Even later, another player, like me hopelessly out of their league with this one, posted thanks for the explanation. This morning, an expert on this sort of encryption chimed in with suggestions. All in all, a lovely moment to witness. And moments like that, of intelligent, sensitive, collaborative play can be found throughout the boards.

Just so people understand, these players are playing a game that has high stakes. Only one person will find the cube and win a large cash prize. For most, if not all, of us, that cash prize would have a significant positive effect on our lifestyle. Cynics would not think it possible for people to work together so seamlessly, effortlessly and, ultimately, beautifully, when only one person can win. They need to spend some time with us. We know how to do this.

The damage done.

2005-07-11T10:22:00.000-04:00

Any PM who launches a game expecting it to fail seriously impairs all future games. Perhaps the first page of any game should come with a warning "do not attempt this at home." Gradually, as game after game has failed to successfully conclude, players have been adopting a "wait and see" approach to grassroots games. Only after the game has been going for a while, and like "ARGTalk" shows signs of being a well-crafted game, will people gradually move to play. Actually, the number of people who join a game in progress, seems small - I don't know the numbers.

So, after Saturday and the end of the insect length life of "gipsysoft" I decided to join the crowd. The PM of that game expected failure, but rather than seeking assistance, went ahead. He managed to ignore the repeated warnings and META discussions about the harm done to the community and the genre by grassroots implosions. Perhaps he was just trying to save face by casting himself in the role of "let me be a lesson to you all", perhaps he is the smartest kid in his class and he arrogantly thought "these warnings don't apply to me." Whatever, to act as if he didn't cause harm, or it accept as a nice try by a teenager, only encourages additional arrogant or oblivious PMs to launch a game they know is probably a futile effort.

Each game that fails drives more of the core community away from grassroots games and quickly jades the attitudes of enthusiastic newcomers who only want to play a game. So let's not forget the new PM and the damage done.

Trust

2005-07-11T10:21:00.000-04:00

So, the unforums boards prohibit a PM from posting about his or her game. A PM who breaks this rule finds his or her reputation ruined faster than the seconds it took to click the submit button. Recovering from this damage may not even be possible, or at least I haven't seen anyone succeed. People find this hard to forgive, and justifiably so.

Why is this rule so essential to our community? We operate as an open collaborative online community. For the most part, we have never met in person. For strangers to collaborate and coordinate at such an extraordinary level requires a certain, fundamental trust. Trust that the person posting is not a PM trying to steer the game in a certain way. Trust that the person is another player, just like you, not a PM shill who is working on insider knowledge.

When a PM violates the "No Posting" rule, he or she violates the fundamental trust that allows us to play. Without that trust, we can't function.

Board Vigilante

2005-07-08T08:21:00.000-04:00

That would be me, although I have recognized a few others here and there. Unlike the trout police who scout for redundancies to keep the board tidy, board vigilantes watch their key issues for chances to pounce. Extreme cases act as if every post is directed to them personally like a hand engraved invitation to which they must respond instantly.

Like the real world, vigilantism is a dangerous substitute for official action. We don't really need Charles Bronson running amok when the cool, calm and professional moderators can handle it. So, I am not proud of my self-appointed role. But this is my task: to welcome those new players who make a mistake at the beginning.

I recognized the need for this as I watched SpaceBass so kindly and fairly treat an new ilovebees player. That player had committed the almost unforgivable faux pas of hacking a password protected thing of Dana's- her blog I think. My hyperfocus on the game, the genre or whatever meaningless-in-the-real-world thing I was obsessing about made me blind. I was so incensed by this player's behavior, I didn't even consider that he could be new player who made an error in judgment. I forgot that behind that wayward keyboard was a real person with real feelings. And I resolved to change.

I believe that the community intends to welcome, educate and support new players. A relatively recent article in the UK version of PC Gamer suggests that our open arms are not as open as I thought. The hostile response the author received from a few players simply proved his point, although there were some gracious, open-minded responses as well.

I began to wonder if we welcome some players, those that immediately fall in line, more than others. While we claim to value diversity, do we tolerate some errors or opinions more than others? And if so, why?

I am still collecting data on those questions, they aren't the sort that can properly be answered by a skewed impression of reality. In the meantime, I try to vigilantly be aware of the new guy, the one who hasn't read the rules, isn't invested in following them, or simply doesn't recognize why they matter.

The easy way to recognize an inadvertent error....one word ...."sorry"..... followed by a shift in behavior.

ARGtalk: a few questions

2005-07-08T08:04:00.000-04:00

I have a small bit of fondness for ARGtalk - the opinions expressed there inspired me to start my little blog here. At the time, I didn't realize that my blog would provide a safe little ledge from which I could view the ARG landscape. Having a cozy spot apart from the board gave me a new perspective as well as a place to express my opinion outside of the messy META monolith.

Until I realized the writers were Puppet Masters hiding their identity in true TINAG style, I was furious at their refusal to identify themselves. Pronouncing scathing opinions and spweing inflammatory rhetoric while hiding behind anonymity is contemptible. I admit they fooled me. I stopped reading it after the first few days and didn't go back. I failed to recognize the writers as PM created intentional caricatures.

That the inspiration for my blog turned out to be a trailhead is one of those surprising ARG moments. A TINAG stealth launch so convincing that no on knows what it is about. Isn't this what the community yearns for?

Music by Will Star

2005-07-06T13:30:00.000-04:00

The audio portion of your Heist program was created by the New York DJ Will Star - I have been trying to confirm him playing for us at ARGFest.

Here are a couple of links:

http://www.willstar.tv/beats/funkylittledrummerboy.mp3

http://www.willstar.tv/beats/thegetaway.mp3

You will like it. Give it a click.

Fighting the last war

2005-07-06T09:39:00.000-04:00

The nature of ARGs means that players are primarily reactive. No one knows what to anticipate or what the next game will bring. As a result, while we are superb at criticizing, even nit-picking, every aspect of a game, we tend to lack vision. An example: while the boards function well for people who can religously follow every post, they can be improved. New players and casual players have trouble navigating them. People mention how hard it is to catch up on games, when in reality, most games are not so complex that they can't be easily explained and the key websites referenced. I think that an improvement in the forums can greatly reduce the time investment playing a game seems to demand.

Another example: some people seem to judge games based on factors that have largely lost relevance to the larger ARG world. The question of whether an in-game board makes a game not playable may still matter to some people, but I think that the world, at least the world of commercial games, has moved on. An in-game board helps new players and casual players follow along. I expect that most commercial games will feature in-game boards or other meta sites to help gather in players. I know that I could have used some assistance in playing Metacortechs, I didn't find unfiction until after it ended. And I know other people who had the same experience with ilovebees.

More on this later.

Heist ends with both a bang and a whimper

2005-07-06T08:20:00.000-04:00

The inventive game, The Art of the Heist, concluded at a signature live event showcasing its strengths - visual style, real time updates and player-PM interaction. As we followed along on the webcast, Nisha clobbered the traitorous mastermind Emile with a laptop to the head; later a bereft Virgil is left with a cardboard cutout of the woman he coveted--as she departs with her boyfriend. No doubt these PMs know their way around a visual metaphor.

The impressive visual aesthetic of the game supported the story of a video game designer and a planned robbery of masterworks from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The designof the game sites conveyed authenticity as well as style with tiny details like: screenshots from Virgil's previous games showing the progression of video game design and complete background of case files from previous cases handled by Last Resort Retrievers. The PMs used superbly filmed Easter Egg videos of key story events as little treats for the players. Even the Meta sites, created to help players follow the game, had a bold design.

An ambitious schedule of real-time updates probably spoiled heist players, as impatient as any ARGers for updates, for future games. Typically brief, the updates might consist of a phone call followed by an email or an IRC convo between characters. But the flow happened realistically in real time, or as close to it as a game could manage. Example: Ian complains to Nisha about Virgil in a fit of jealous pique; Nisha realizes Ian may appear at E3 to confront Virgil; a bit later Nisha calls Virgil to warn him that Ian might appear but not to hurt Ian. At the same time, Ian recruits Retrievers to help him track Virgil through E3. None of these updates are massive, but they work to maintain momentum and player interest.

Still, the game will be most remembered for the risky emphasis on live, unscripted interactions between characters and players. Just how large this risk was became apparent at Coachella when the ride was blown off the proverbial rails. The failure of players to follow instructions as well as their interference with the story led the PMs to abort the Coachella operation. The PMs compounded the problem and greatly lost favor when they abandoned the players, later dubed the Coachella 5, with no direction. The players following along online were up all night trying to establish some communication. I don't know what was meant to happen at Coachella, but it seems safe to assume that the story as written had to be substantially revised.

The PMs managed to successfully pull the game and their reputations out of the Coachella nosedive. Other live events followed, including a rain delayed Chicago event where none of the video cameras carried by the players worked properly. Other events went well, an appearance at E3 and an Atlanta retrieval. The New York event was hampered by our inability to find the card, but ended successfully. And the last party was a live event extravaganza with characters interacting with players: a member of the Coachella 5 watching out for Ian was kidnapped and "killed" before the event, players went onstage with the real life DJ character Will Star (playing himself) to untie the previously kidnapped Ian, and players online chatted with a desperate Emile just before the Nisha arrived. No question that Heist boldly set a standard for live interaction that other games, even well-funded ones, will struggle to match.

The puzzles generally were well integrated into the story. That the heist plans would be doubly encrypted made sense. That Virgil (or was it Emile) would make puzzles to test new employees also made sense.

As for the puzzles, no review of Heist is complete without a mention of the Evil Cube. Like the secret island lair of Dr. No, the exterior beauty and elegance of the hated cube hides its true nature. A 20 by 20 by 20 word grid from hell - we solved it in 3D(yay xnbomb), got harshly berated by Virgil, solved it some more in 2D (yay everyone), got berated by Virgil, solved it some more in all directions without realizing what we had (yay everyone), got more impatience and some desperate hints, found a key answer using the 2D words(yay Ehsan) just as the whole chat room verged on revolt, felt content and ignored the cube, got more impatience and hints, stared at letters until we were blind, and finally.... the PMs gave us the answer. Actually we had the answer...we had all the answers... just didn't know how to use them. The combination of the harsh criticism and the lack of logic in the use of the 2D answers scared us off of using the 3D words. And yes I am still bitter.

Honestly, just writing about the Evil Cube makes me exceedingly tense. The Evil Cube came close to breaking the some of the best puzzle solvers in unfiction and the rest of us suffered along trying to help as best we could. No question the Evil Cube will retain a place in ARG history. They say we will be able to joke about it one day....

I hate to end a review of a brilliant, ambitious and fearless game like Heist with the Evil Cube. Even though my bruises haven't completely healed, the memory of the Evil Cube pales next to the sheer joy of exploring the crazy hidden directories, watching the backgrounds, reading Virgil's story, participating in live events and watching my friends play their parts as well. If you didn't play this game, you missed something special.

Indie/student ARGS

2005-06-28T14:05:00.000-04:00

So my idea is slow to catch on, but I am certain that it will and very soon. The basic concept is that some grassroots games are akin to indie films, experimental theater or student ballet -- the audience for these art forms expect excellence from any performance they attend, but they understand the creative people involved may still be learning their craft and art, that they may be trying a new idea, that the performance may ultimately fail to succeed. Why can't we do this for our fledgining art form?

The cute sweet girl blog ARG

2005-06-27T09:29:00.000-04:00

Personally, I could go the next few years without a cute girl blog ARG. Maybe I could tolerate an angry punk girl that we have to help despite herself, or just accept her as she is, or a story where she doesn't end up all happy at the end, marginally content or satisfied would be ok.

I read an article about the punk club CBGB in New York magazine which had this quote,"[i]n the psychic economy of the known universe, there needs to be a place, even if you never go there, devoted, even if no one actually does it, to getting up onstage and screaming out your heart." Now that is a sentiment I can appreciate. When used sparingly, a little screaming onstage can go a long way to energize a story.

Hindsight is fifty-fifty

2005-06-27T09:10:00.000-04:00

Puzzles are so easy once you know the answer, sometimes they are so laughably obvious that you feel frustrated and irritated for not seeing it in the first place. And sometimes the PMs have to step in with a "solve assist." For some reason, in Heist we as a group have been struggling to follow some of the clues and solve the puzzles. I think part of the reason is that the character who wrote them has a convoluted mind, which makes him good at creating complicated stories but limits our ability to follow him. Also, as he is an arrogant, yet conflicted and emotionally damaged person, he likes to show off how much smart he is, and fool us by making a seemingly complicated puzzles have a very simple answer. I imagine him laughing at us struggling with the puzzles he presents us; but he gets irritated if we seem to give up.

I like Virgil because he is scarily complex and incredibly smart. His descriptions of his emotional life can break your heart while simultaneously make you want to get up from your desk and make sure the front door is locked. That is a pretty thin high wire for any character to walk, and I think he does it gracefully.

DMZ: a new chat room- what I learned from reading the board

2005-06-06T09:39:00.000-04:00

As I have mentioned before, ARGs, after you have been playing them long enough, are a little crucible of human experience. ARGs are perfect for that because, at the end of the day, the issues involved just don't reach the same level of importance as Sudan, fixing public education in NYC, refugees and torture. ARGs matter, the community matters and the individual people matter-- but my justifications for why ARGs matter is a whole other topic.

The enormous advantage of an online community is that you can be in it and apart from it at the same time. I would never be able to get the differing opinions of say, every person at a cocktail party or every teacher at a school, in the same way I can access the opinions of players willing to post to the board. I can be part of the community by posting, chatting and playing the games. I can create threads for discussion if I want to gauge reaction to an issue. Yet, simultaneously, I can observe the community just by reading. How beautifully simple is that

The other day, an unexpected post, carefully and thoughtfully covered by my favorite shade of spoiler red, announced the creation of a chat room with rules. (Note: I have learned that among ARGers posting rules in advance is usually not a good sign.) The main rule: no partisan discussion between Immersion Unlimited and unfiction. Well, now this was interesting. As a sporadic, but intense, participant in the chat room #unfiction, I can't recall anyone ever having a tirade about IU. I am sure it may have happened, just as I am sure the occasional snarky comment is made about just about anything, including Immersion Unlimited. Snark is sometimes the currency of chat. Perhaps intense discussion ensued when IU was created. But, I haven't heard this topic for a long, long, long time. Somewhat of a shock, then, to find that a whole group of people felt this room was needed. People at IU had been experiencing unfiction so negatively they felt a need to offer an olive branch to resolve a conflict unfiction didn't even know, or at least I didn't know, existed. A disconnect somewhere in the system.

What does this mean? Differing groups interpret the same event differently, based on their different preconceptions, biases, and experiences. Not a new insight, people have always known that. But it is much easier for me to grasp concretely in this little world. For example, I can see different groups respond to who is a moderator in a chat room-- IU people, feeling an imbalance and unfairness in power, see themselves kept out of positions of authority; unfiction people don't see it as an issue, as they don't perceive that any real power struggle exists, don't feel that IU people have ever been unwelcome, and so are bewildered or indifferent to the issue.

How does this help me work more effectively? When dealing with the competing claims of different groups, especially when I identify strongly with one group-- i.e., in educational settings I am a parent, not a teacher or administrator; in immigration battles, I am an advocate for the refugee/civilian victim of war, not a government employee raising an impenetrable wall against immigrants-- I can better perceive the other group's viewpoint. If I can understand that a teacher may see what I feel is a simple request as yet more work for them or that the immigration judge doesn't want to be the person who allows a terrorist into the country, I can reach them.

Virgil Dark and Darker

2005-06-05T16:30:00.000-04:00

Virgil Tatum is a main character in the Art of the Heist game. And, other than Jane McG, I am his only fan. Maybe because he seems a bit twisted and creepy; or because he is arrogantly, intellectually superior to the rest of the world; or because he reminds people of their rude, demanding bosses. Whatever the reason, he is the most disliked main character in any game I have played. ( We didn't like Thin Kinkle or Standish, from ilovebees, but we could had no direct link with them, only the wave files. ) And that includes Jake, a main character from Acheron, who was a total bastard to everyone around him. Our dislike didn't stop us from saving him at major cost to the world. I don't know how far people would go to save Virgil.

Virgil's site is dark and the hidden pages are darker. His life story: no word at all about his Father, who wasn't around much, his very strange Mother died when he was 11, his wife was killed by a hit and run driver 12 years ago. In between, he learned to pretend to be something he wasn't, found his niche in gaming and created phenomenal video games. Not all of these games sound that great, actually, but the screenshots from each game show a progression of game development- like a mini museum of video game history.

A disadvantage of an unpopular character is that players don't spend that much time looking at his site. We have missed clues, hints and puzzles. Virgil tries to prod us along by his blog posts, but his clues are deliciously subtle and his puzzles are annoyingly difficult because his brain is complex and obscure.

Why do I like Virgil? He's complicated, he has an edge and he isn't afraid of us. Like characters in any story, ARG characters can't be just one note. I mean the sweet nice girl needing help blog is just so over for me. A long time ago, I jokingly told danhon in chat that we need a goth girl blog. You know, a conflicted person hiding her true beauty from the world, etc. No one in our little room agreed with me, and, seeing the response to Virgil, I suppose they still don't.

The wire

2005-05-21T23:59:00.000-04:00

Speaking of immersion, the Art of the Heist braved another live event last week. This time at E3 in Los Angelos. The players are helping Ian track Virgil at E3. Ian believes Virgil had him beaten up and, even worse, suspects Virgil is seeing Nisha, his lover, behind his back. Ian, not the brightest bulb in the pack, decides to confront Virgil at E3.

The players find Virgil and the confrontation happens. (along with a line of dialogue that I keep thinking must be a clue.) There is video and audio of the whole interaction between Virgil and Ian. At the end, a player gets tossed out along with Virgil.

The best part? Ian wearing a wire while he gives instructions to his team of players. Just give it a listen. http://iannet.lastresortretrieval.com/ian/001352.html

Immersion

2005-05-21T23:32:00.000-04:00

A week ago I was at the Games Workshop Games Day in Baltimore. A major event there is "the big game" which involves a huge battle between two armies. All the models are provided and the scenery is already set up. About 50 people play, 25 on each team, at the direction of a few enthusiastic games workshop employees. The battle lasts all day, with 3 or 4o turns of about an hour and a half each. Each side only has a certain amount of time to set up moves and take it's turn.

In this particular battle, the Space Marines - a human based design - were fighting something called the 'Nids - evil insect like creatures. The Space Marines can talk and shout but the 'Nids, being insects, are limited to some strange sounds and, I think, one sort of cheer. As the game progressed, the leaders would call out for cheers and things from the players, who proceeded to shout their lungs out. At one point, in the middle of the Space Marines turn, one of the leader interrupted them, made them leave their places and join together in some prayers and chants. I found this highly annoying. The people playing the 'nids were just standing around waiting. The battle could not progress until they were finished with whatever it was they were doing.

But, when I looked around the room at people playing the 'Nid army, I saw no trace of impatience. They were more than content to wait for the Space Marines to finish this ritual, even though the 'Nids had nothing similar they could do. Being used to people complaining about fairness, I expected to hear some murmuring and complaints. The crowd equivalent of a horn honking. Still, I was the only one out of the many spectators and players who seemed at all irritated by this delay in the action.

Being an action oriented person, I asked one of the players why these people were wasting time and what could we do about it. He just looked at me, perfectly calmly ,and said "Oh, they have to build up morale, they are being swarmed." Looking at the board I could see, as all of the players did, that a 'Nid onslaught was rushing down upon the Space Marines. ( In fact, even though the game is set up not to favor one side over the other, the Space Marines were almost obliterated by the time the last battle ended.)

Thus, immersion.

Information overload

2005-05-12T18:56:00.000-04:00

Quick thought about the Art of the Heist. I think this game is extraordinarily well-done and is settting whole new standards in live interaction, variety of puzzles and complexity of characters and plot. The sites have great back stories and lots of information to explore with new information added at a rapid pace.

The question is how dense can the sites become before they become too hard for the average new player to follow? What can we do to help them? Does the in-game board stolena3.com need our input as an additional way to explain things to newbies? As well as those of us who have been playing, but become distracted by real world events and lose track of what is happening?

There is rich detail here. I love it.

Rules for ARGs

2005-05-12T18:47:00.000-04:00

Someone posted a META issue complaining about the number of rules that seem to exist in ARGs. I don't recall exactly, but I think that person had been a community member for less than a month. Nothing like jumping to conclusions or making snap judgments!

Anyway, I am starting my own list of rules. Not namby-pamby be nice to everyone, hold newbies hands or properly label your posts; these are real honest to goodness rules. I have three so far:

1. Do not break any applicable laws, including those relating to trespass and copyright.

2. Do not hassle, harass, intimidate or "hound" any person involved in the game, including PMs and actors portraying characters.

3. No whining. Whining should be a bannable offense.

The syzygy prize

2005-05-12T18:26:00.000-04:00

In the game Perplex City, the reward for finding the cube is over $150,000. (Before I continue, I note that the game has not started yet, despite all the hundreds of posts, so if you're new, don't worry.) Clearly the PMs are not directing their game at the tiny little jewelbox world of unfiction. They are directing the game to everyone in the world who can meet their terms and conditions, which haven't yet been announced, they want as large a player base as possible to be self-sustaining.

So good for them. I hope they meet with unparelleled success. Still, the amount of the prize and the fact we are competing to win in has created stress on the existing community. Our core value is collaboration. Our basic principles are sharing information, mutual support and helping new players. When a large amount of money is at stake, the value of open sharing of information comes into question.

I will have more to say about this -- I still need some time to think about it. But I do forsee that an onslaught of new players, lurkers or not, is bearing down upon us. I think we will see a whole range of responses. Some new people will delight in collaborating and become part of the active community;others, even existing, active community members, may decide to withhold information. The comment that I find most striking is the idea voiced by several players that they don't mind if someone else in the community wins, just as long as it isn't a lurker!

People have to be comfortable with the idea that they may be sharing information that could not only benefit someone else but actually hurt their own chances of winning the prize - if that is their goal. Lots of players, have decided to play, at least initially, as if the prize didn't exist. That means they will share information, solves and resources as they do any other game. Maybe as the game progresses, collaboration will diminish. Or, maybe as the game progresses, we can convince people that collaboration maximizing diverse viewpoints is the only way anyone can win.

Blame. Oh! Canada.

2005-05-02T12:11:00.000-04:00

Something happened at the Art of the Heist operation at Coachella. A result of poor communication and bad timing it seems. The players were there, but arrived too early. They snuck in a back way instead of meeting the PM where and when they had arranged. A misunderstanding made them think they were supposed to do so. Not knowing what was happening, the PMs aborted the operation. From the character's perspective, that decision was justified. They didn't know what the players were doing and the players didn't know what the PMs were doing. Confusion!

In the end the players stayed around waiting because they didn't get a clear message from the PMs about what they should do. The PMs can take heart from the fact that the players didn't follow my suggestion. My final best idea to try to get the card was to find an Audi representative and offer to sell Ian and Nisha out in exchange for the card in the A3. Not that I would have turned them in when it came down to it, but it was the only idea I had left. So, be happy PMs, player loyalty to Nisha and Ian is strong! When is the next op? :D

Things don't go as planned. My tendancy is to lose my sense of humor and to blame people for stuff that happens. When I find myself thinking about whose "fault" something is, and that something is really of no consequence ( by definition almost everything is of no consequence in the long run), I just go ahead and blame Canada. That always makes me feel better somehow. Makes me laugh, cuts the tension and lets me focus on the main questions which are "where are we now" and 'where do we go from here".

Patience, and shuffle the cards.

2005-05-02T11:49:00.000-04:00

So syzygy is going to have a card component and a reward. A huge cash reward it seems if the amount given in leeks is equal to, what we here on Earth, call "hard money." And a couple of hundred thousand of it, more or less, depending on your time zone and local currency.

Thoughts on the reward, the cards, the combination of the reward and the cards, are, as usual, all over the place, with the negative opinions tending to be the prevailing view. ARG players complain about everything at some point; not to dismiss the many valid concerns that have been raised. Just, bear in mind that the negative tends to take hold and spread - as an aside, if I were a Machiavellian player and I wanted to eliminate my best competition from the game, my first move would be to spread dissent and lower morale. If the best players can be removed simply by creating a negative environment, then that is what I would do. How better to do this than to create tension about the game and the "flimsy" community? Not accusing anyone of doing this, I'm just sayin', you know?

My first thought about the reward was: if that much money is involved, this game is going to be really difficult to win. My second though was: this game is going to have to be amazing in depth and complexity to justify offering a reward that large.

About card collecting, I need to see more about it. My son has collected everything, Star Wars, Baseball, Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh ; Magic:the Gathering cards. Most of them are cluttering up the apartment in cases at the moment. So card collecting could be an innovative way to bring more people into the game (which, you know, I endorse) and to raise money.

Comments on Groupthink

2005-04-29T14:49:00.000-04:00

I decided to turn on anonymous comments. I got the following comment from Fi at unfiction:

"I think groupthink happens in any group of people. A bunch of employees working in the same company are likely to end up following the same pattern, in order to maintain the status quo and not rock the boat, lest they single themselves out. Or in a group of friends - they will eventually follow the same way of thinking, wary of proposing a new more drastic suggestion, in case it is viewed negatively by the others and jepordises their position within it. It seems to happen in any type of community or society. Luckily, I think in ARGs, and on UF in particular, wacky suggestions and new ways of thinking are at best embraced, and at worst ignored. Keep up the good blogging!"

Bickering characters

2005-04-29T14:26:00.000-04:00

If I could make one absolute rule about character interactions it would be this:

"No bickering."

I can deal with flat out conflict, passionate arguments, deceitful behaviour, even self-pitying whining. Just please no pointless, peevish arguments. Bickering characters are either just saying "I told you so" or "did not" "did too." There is almost no place for bickering to either advance the plot or reveal the characters inner selves.

Characters bickering remind me of being stuck in the middle of the backseat between my sisters on a long car ride. Now I understand why my Dad would be reduced to saying "I'm going to stop the car if you girls don't stop it." Listening to people argue over petty things because they are bored or irritable is maddening.

Even Shakespeare has trouble making bickering work -see, the scene in Act IV of Julius Ceaser where Brutus and Cassius bicker because Cassius has refused money that Brutus needs for his troops. In that case, the bickering shows the division between the characters, exposes Cassius for the low-life, untrustworthy manipulator he is, emphisizes Brutus' inner strength and shows the need for resources that spurs Brutus into the all or nothing gamble of the battle at Phillippi. Even given all that, it is tiresome.

Or maybe the absolute rule should be :

"If Shakespeare can't make it work for his characters, you probably can't either. " heh

Ender's Game II

2005-04-29T14:13:00.000-04:00

The Ender's Game argument against ARGS is so specious. I have tried to think of examples where works of science fiction are used to bolster an argument. I mean, no one waves around a copy of Jurassic Park as proof that cloning is dangerous. Or if they did, no one would take the argument seriously. I even checked some basic logic texts, I couldn't find one example of anyone using fiction to bolster their argument.

Maybe rhetoric and logic are not valued in the academic gaming community.

Groupthink

2005-04-25T14:04:00.000-04:00

Playing an ARG requires collaborative teamwork among people who are,basically, volunteers. The best collaboration happens when many viewpoints, many ideas are expressed - lots of free exchanges of opinions. A problem is that as a group becomes more cohesive, the inclination of the members may be to preserve harmony over independent critical thinking. Over time, an astonishingly short period of time, the group establishes norms. Things begin to be judged agains those norms. As new people enter the group, they feel pressure to conform. People avoid confronting the status quo. Outside opinions are ignored or discounted. A person expressing a negative, opposing or critical view may be attacked personally. Thus, groupthink is born.

Groupthink tends to happen when:

* a group is highly cohesive
* core members of the group have worked together for a long time
*the group values harmony over all else

Signs of groupthink:

*unanimity is very important
*alternatives are not considered
*members exert pressure on those who disagree or question
*members are quick to dismiss different perspectives

What makes me think about groupthink? I see it happening all the time. I also see that it can be almost impossible to avoid completely.

Overtaken by Events

2005-04-19T01:09:00.000-04:00

Is the OOG concept largely OTB? To me there are only two OOG rules that have any meaning:
1. Any forum or chat room determined by the players of a game to be OOG must be respected by the PMs. That is, no posting as characters or behind the scenes shills to promote the game or solve puzzles. No characters stopping by to say hello.

The mention of ARG sites and player created resources in games like ilovebees (unfiction, fireflies wiki) and the Art of the Heist (unfiction, ARGN, Rowan and jamesi's trail) has gone blurred, if not eliminated, a line that these sites were not to be acknowledged to exist in the game world. I think that line is gone forever, like the whiskers down the drain.

2. Any person, place or thing that belongs in the real world. Even if that person, place or thing is mentioned in the game, it doesn't mean they are in-game. In the Art of the Heist, for example, the Uffizi is an important setting for the game. But, we are not supposed to be calling their security to warn about a possible crime. This isn't the best example. I will think of better ones.

In syzygy, mentioning a PM doesn't mean that everything is in-game. Maybe it would be more useful to talk about what in-game means.

Ender's Game

2005-04-16T22:55:00.000-04:00

Can an ARG become Ender's Game? If so, is that a bad thing? Stay tuned for discussion about academic worries based on a novel in which the military's pretense that reality is a game tricks a brilliant, pre-programmed and emotionally blackmailed child into committing xenocide. Oh, and saving all humans, but not exactly.

My first question: Ender's story doesn't end with the game. Maybe academics should read the rest of the series. That Ender...

Who can you trust?

2005-04-16T21:48:00.000-04:00

Last night in IRC channel unfiction a couple of former characters from the cute game Project Gateway dropped in . They wanted to warn us, we will regret thinking this is/was a game!

The PMs certainly know that people in that channel vociferously object to characters popping in. So I assume they just don't care. Maybe they hope to provoke a reaction? Reminds me of the old, discredited theory that certain children misbehave just to get attention (and not because they have underlying, unresolved emotional issues.)

I don't see the point in ignoring the group values. Perhaps they are trying to attract a certain subset of players that find this terribly amusing. My fundamental requirement is trust in the PM. I choose not to trust someone who intentionally disrespects players and obtains no discernible benefit to their reputation, their game, or their story.Several of the players are friends I miss; and, the ultimate quality of the game may be fine. No matter. I simply don't trust the PMs. So I will pass on Project Gateway 2.

Somehow this incursion into the channel devolved into the tedious immersionunlimited v. unfiction discussion. I thought this had been resolved! The joke is on me. Some people think the entire community remains at an emotional orange alert level. Other people, like me, forgot all about it. What exactly is the problem?

People can't seem to accept iu is great for certain games and uf is great for others baffles me. They have different purposes. Players gravitate to the forum and community that plays the game they prefer. Perhaps some intense , unresolved emotional issue underlies the tension felt-- by those people who feel it. (see above) I don't.

Here is a thought: imagine signing up for a game on immersion unlimited expecting frequent posts from characters, copies of private IM conversations between characters and players, critical comments, popularity polls, and other juicy stuff. But, the PMs have decided to do something different. No character posts! No interaction on the board at all!

What would that be like? You might feel the PMs couldn't be trusted to respect you.

sean stewart

2005-04-14T11:21:00.000-04:00

Sean's talent is a gift to us. When Melissa said :

Starship, sailship, rifle ... melting down to a clumsy quartz knife.
But that's life when a weapon is what you are. Not all you are, but the first thing, the most important thing.
With so few resources, that's all that will be left. I know it already, even if the Spider doesn't.
There was a time once when I was more than a tool: but a tool is all I'm going to be. A weapon and the hand that holds it. My dreams and desires, the jokes I thought were funny and the philosophy I decided was too abstract, The Tempest and Stormy Weather all reduced to a single distillate:
survive evade reveal escape.

and, my favorite quote:

"Melissa", he called me Melissa, never used my nickname, "It's a sad thing I'm married, You could break my heart". The weather was stormy, scratched vinyl and all of us, a long way from home: I felt real.

The game, ilovebees, had me hooked. So I looked at his site for a bit today and I found a link to a conversation he wrote for The Beast:

http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/martinbrutus/

Click and enjoy. The guy has skills.

Note: I don't know if he personally wrote the quotes I selected from ilovebees, or supervised the writer. I don't want to incorrectly attribute work. Nothing torques writers off more than getting credit for something they didn't write. So let me just say, he was the lead writer and responsible for all the written content. If you like this, read Perfect Circle.

blog your sillies out

2005-04-14T09:52:00.000-04:00

Not everyone knows Raffi, but, whatever. What I like about this little blog is that I have my own tiny perch in cyberspace. I can sweep the rug, hang the home sweet home sign over the fireplace, stock the bar for a party. Having this little space give me an emotional distance from the forums, which can only be, as Martha says, a good thing.

I know I can add photos and lots of links and colors and typefaces of varying sizes. But I like this for now, unadorned.

P.S. The spell check for blogspot doesn't recognize "blog" as a word. I dare to use it anyway. :D

The new phone books are here (almost)

2005-04-14T08:56:00.000-04:00

Yes, ARGs are getting famous, and growing beyond the little cozy community that existed well before I made an appearance on the scene. Most anyone who plays an ARG, or even understands the concept, knows that ARGs are a big thing. Not the next big thing, or the next next big thing, they arrived as a big thing with The Beast. Ilovebees may have put ARGs on the map of another gaming community, the Halo crowd, but The Beast was the beginning. The potential for creative storytelling by talented game designers has just begun to be explored. Awards and press coverage are one gauge of popularity of the genre.

The Innovation Award 4orty2wo's game ilovebees won at the GDC was just the beginning of an award season and publicity featuring ARGs. Now ilovebees and Regenesis are nominated for popular awards; Perplex City has major press even though it hasn't even started; my current favorite game, heist, is bringing the blog-ad crowd. Imbri and vpisteve spoke about the buzz ilovebees created at the conference, and people's schemes for developing games. The New York Times, my paper of record, even given their ghastly record for accuracy and relevance, has written several articles about games. Once a "new thing" is recognized by that moribund paper, it is already old; still, it is exciting, nonetheless, to us to have national coverage of our favorite hobby.

You don't need a crystal ball to see that the floodgates have opened and sooner or later they will be filled with new, eager and excited players. To me, this can't happen soon enough. The most important lesson I have learned about ARGs is that the diversity of a player base is the foundation of a game. In another post I want to talk about groupthink, how easy it is to fool even a massive group of players-- the faked Herzog waves in ilovebees is a prime example; and how scary I find that actuality. Groupthink stagnates progress and blocks insight . A large group of players, with each person sharing his or her unique view, is the best way to avoid groupthink. Diversity and individuality, paradoxically, are the keys to a massive multiplayer game.

Enthusiasm; the new viral, anti-viral marketing

2005-04-12T08:56:00.000-04:00

Accentuate the positive

Maintaining enthusiasm and commitment to any project can be daunting. When a game is greeted with cynical comments about quality, story level, puzzles, whatever, pick a topic, the temptation is to join the ranks of those who dismiss or criticize. Why is it so much easier to be negative than it is to be positive?

I never object to reviews with substantive and constructive criticism. Few things in ARGs or real life attain perfection. Perfection tends to come in moments or events -- so no one expects a game to proceed flawlessly. Most criticism is valid and done with the intention of improving the game. But nagging, cynical appraisal of a game and continual put-downs of the premise or execution drains the joy and vitality of a game. Fighting this drain, and focusing on the positive aspects, can be exhausting.

viral anti-viral marketing

One simple example: the Art of the Heist, the game that is grabbing my attention at the moment, has an in-game board. Any in-game board is the perfect setting for trolls to strike. Put that in-game board in an advertising campaign and you create the perfect opportunity for what I call "viral anti-viral marketing." Shills representing competing firms or agencies have a free shot at derailing their competitor's game. My favorite post this weekend was from a troll who claimed that "any American teenager with $100 and a computer could create the game." Players know that comment is ridiculous--even veteran lurkers have been compelled to post by the combination of Virgil's creepiness and the complexity of his website. But does it dissuade new people?

Viral anti-viral marketers post comments on blog's, forums, anyplace that they can be heard without having to show themselves. On their own sites and forums they can just spread their contempt and utter disdain for what a "waste of your life" playing an ARG is. Whatever, these trolls don't get me down.

ILBys and Private Chat Channels

2005-04-11T11:41:00.000-04:00

Shad0 added to his ilovebees contributions, as he did when being one of my fellow fireflies, by conduction an awards ceremony. He collected the nominations, tabulated the votes and wrote the whole awards show. Another instance of creativity generously applied to our favorite games. I hope Jane McGonigal adds this final piece to her list of player creations.

I shared an ILBy for best speculation, which I think means being pretty much right about predicting what would happen next, with xnbomb. Xnbomb has wonderful insight into a story along with strong puzzle solving skills. I would vote for him as the best all-around ARG player, although singling one person out can be difficult.

When Shad0 took nominations for the award, for some reason, xnbomb and I were the only nominees. Unbeknowst to Shad0, xnbomb and I collaborated almost constantly throughout the game. Since we felt uncomfortable competing with each other, we both decided to resign in favor of the other person. Eventually, we decided to just go forward and let the public decide.

Whether there was really a tie or Shad0 was being diplomatic, is not the issue I care about. The question is the use of private IRC channels during a game and the idea of elitism by players, particularly the more experienced players, using them.

Our little channel was not intended to be elite, but how can it be considered otherwise when only certain people could use it? We had two issues to contend with: one, after xnbomb was named in Dana's blog, he was deluged by people who assumed he was an in-game character. The level of harassment he got from players, and the potential interference with his life from trolls or even well-meaning, but misguided players, bordered on threatening. Second, the sheer numbers of people in the #beekeepers channel that fireball had started in the first days of the game, made conversation almost impossible. I was ready to quit and said so in #unfiction. (In retrospect I can see this sounded unbearably pretentious, but at the time I was totally bewildered by scene.) People need to remember the inundation by well-meaning, but confused, players at the time. The scroll was too fast to follow. Most of the remarks were "Dana is hot." For a day or two after the Sleeping Princess, though we didn't know who she was at the time, acknowledged my translation of her email, I couldn't even join #beekeepers without being overwhelmed.

So I was talking to xnbomb in a private message and complaining that I had "nowhere to work." There was no public channel where I could just talk about the game, the puzzles or spec about the characters. (Even much later in the game, when I tried to point out that Melissa's memories were like that of Kamal's sister, I couldn't make the point in #beekeepers at all. No one would listen. Everyone was talking about how she a version of our hero, John 117, the Master Chief. Both ideas turned out to be right. ) So, we decided to make a private channel.

Was this wrong? I know that I spent as much time as I could in #beekeepers, trying to share ideas or just chat with people. I tried to answer questions when I could and help keep the fireflies wiki up to date. The channel ops in #beekeepers deserve special commendation, which maybe I will address tomorrow.

But, when I could, I shared my insights and ideas first in the private channel. I needed to "bounce ideas off" collaborators that I knew. I tried posting all of my thoughts, including one I had early on about the Artefact being a sort of Trojan Horse, on the board. Maybe it is a problem of information management and ideas getting lost. I don't think I could have played ilovebees without using a private channel.

.

Limits of this is not a game

2005-04-09T17:43:00.000-04:00

I think for the game the "Beast" the "this is not a game"concept added to the mystery. Like the "this is not a movie" concept helped the film The Blair Witch Project seem not like a movie. In the Beast, players knew they were playing a game. But the game could never refer to itself as a game. The theory developed that if a game admitted it was a game, the aura was destroyed.

I may be in the minority when I say that TINAG is over-rated. While I enjoy stealth launches, if you can call a website named at the end of a movie trailer a stealthy move, the constraints of TINAG are not vital to me. I think I love bees would have benefited from publicity of some official person acknowledging its existence. It didn't have to be from 4orty2wo or anyone behind the scenes, just a brief, official explanation. Any kind of official press about the game would have assisted us. Before you say that we were inundated anyway, remember the painstaking effort to answer 777 axons. A simple press release would have helped us.

Players know they are playing a game. Has anyone ever played a game and not known it wasn't real? Aren't we already suspending disbelief? What actions truly destroy that illusion?

Now the Art of the Heist had a bit of a dilemma. By using blog-ads to promote the game, they generated curiosity about Virgil, Ian and the car. Nowhere did they state directly state that it was a game. We players love this stuff. I think many readers loved the idea of unexpectedly falling into a game world. But others hate being tricked. One or two people bothered to object on the in-game forums, some of them strongly, to Audi's "lies." To clarify those unsure about searching for Ian or looking for the stolen car, Audi had the character Todd explain on the www.stolena3.com forums that this was a web-based game.

Does this explanation ruin the game? Not for me.
-----
The Search for the Hidden Urns also used blog-ads. One of them is even used as an example of a good ad on the blog-ad site. Perhaps the difference between the Art of the Heist and that game, is the subject matter of Urns was obviously fictional. In the Urns, the in-game forum explained that the search was a game that people could join, which eliminated the whole TINAG issue. But, the Urns game was not truly popular in the ARG community, maybe knowing that it was a game turned people off.

Websites of beauty

2005-04-08T22:16:00.000-04:00

What is an alternate reality without a little spot or two of it's own in cyberspace? That question is too existential to consider tonight. Maybe later we can talk about it under the heading of "how many websites would an ARG have if an ARG had to have websites."

And, no I haven't been drinking, dancing, but not drinking. I blame those silly but addictive Television Without Pity writers for magically altering my intrinsic attitude toward the written word. Like a Smile of a Golden Mr. A that lasts for 15 turns.

All my time has been spent on the "Art of the Heist." Perplex City and Ares Station, which is not Orbital Colony --thanks bill-- , just have to wait a bit. I still think the hon brother's are waiting to launch. Ares Station is too disjointed for me to follow right now.

The Art of the Heist has detail, depth and immediacy. I have started scratching the surface of a wiki guide, but Rowan and jamesi's trail is the place to go for the scoop. If you aren't playing this, you are missing something you will regret. Example: today Nisha's inbox has an email from a player with information about Ian, and then a conversation between Ian and Nisha in which Ian denies knowing the player. Because, how could he, the player is a real person and he and Nisha are just imaginary creations. Have they forgotten that?

Ian, on the lam from the big, bad guys chasing him, calls Nisha to save him. They seem to resent his stealing the car. Nisha thinks there may be a bug in the car, but we already know the A3 has some kind of super navigation- wireless connection going. And we love Ian, but for a hacker he just isn't that bright, they could have been following that red car all the way from Jersey.

So while Ian is bored, waiting for his girl, he blows off steam by dancing, shirtless to his Ipod tunes. A little Easter Egg movie for us. A sense of humor in a game is like a happy nod and a wink to the players. ARGgirls are drawn into the game by his little movie. This always has the effect, like the ARG version of Ladies Night, of bringing more guys into the game. Album covers for Ian's upcoming release are photoshopped.

The fantastic group of players in this game, and the quality we have seen in every aspect of it so far, make me want to stand in front of the Audi dealership where the damn A3 was stolen, handing out flyers to spread the word.

Now to the topic at hand. As much as I enjoy Ian's dancing, I love the birds, the trains and all the stuff moving around on the site of our crazy guy Virgil, the truly 1337 at www.virgilkingofcode.com . That's why I called this post "websites of beauty." I was thinking about the topic of "who can live in a world without beauty" and how the websites are the stage the alternate reality is played upon. Anyone interested at all in ARGs should look at Virgil's site. Not just the background, but the site layout and the access to the hidden files are all discussed at unfiction. I'll add the links, but click around on the site on your own first. Virgil may be dangerously insane, but his site is a world worth exploring.

Blog this

2005-04-08T19:40:00.000-04:00

My blog is a work in progress - so I am playing with the format, voice, tone and stuff over the next month or two. I have more to say about the ARG community than I thought when I started this, so it seems you will have to put up with my opinions for a while longer.

Now if blogspot would stop sending my hard work into the lost void of cyberspace I could add something substantive. If a blogspot post flies into cyberspace does anyone hear it scream?

Community and chaos- lessons learned and applied

2005-04-08T16:57:00.000-04:00

A brief intermission from my diatribe on art and conflict. The sun is shining; spring is starting, got a new garden underway in the courtyard of my son's school; radio paradise is on, I thank Dmax every time I tune in; why not be happy?

This is the thing I know about communities, from time to time, often for no evident reason, the whole group devolves into chaos. People stop listening and start trying to convert. Things fall apart a bit.

Another real life example. My church in Manhattan is a powerful, liberal Episcopal church. Our Rector is a woman, we have several women priests on staff and we tend to do things that are not supported by conservative churches.

You may know that the recent election of a gay Bishop in the US has caused a fracture in the Episcopal world communion. A perfect example of a community in chaos has resulted. The conservative church denounces the liberal and wants to start their own group. The liberal church pats itself on the back for being "inclusive" and turns a cold shoulder to the conserative side's deeply held conviction. Both sides point fingers and mutter about politics being elevated over Christ's true teachings.

Me? I get no joy from anyone at Church leadership meetings when I point out that the liberal church isn't really being inclusive. We are saying we will include you if you believe what we do. But if you look at it closely this is just the same thing the conservatives say about us. In other words, we proudly think we are "better" because we will include gays. Of course, this means we exclude anyone who is against gays. The conservatives say they are saying they will include everyone except gays. Neither side is embracing everyone. And the real work we should be doing--Sudan genocide, anyone?-- suffers.

So when I advocate that the liberal church needs to act as if the sun will rise tomorrow; that the community will survive despite this deep rift; and, that the attitudes and beliefs of both sides need to be treated with profound respect; and, when we can do that, then , we can have a true dialogue. Well, the room gets pretty quiet. People have to stop and think.

Guess where I learned that this works?

It wouldn't be from watching the culture clash of the Halo players with the unfiction ARGers, would it? Could it be possible to learn lessons from playing ilovebees? What would my friends think if they knew I was applying tto serious matters the lessons I learned last summer while writing to a rogue ai in an on-line game? Hehehe - I can't help but laugh.

I learned that attempts to convince and convert never really work. I saw that when people know they are being heard and their views are respected, everyone can relax. And, then, we can talk. We can stop trying to prove that we are right. We can join together in the things we share rather than let our differences break us apart.

Maybe I could have only learned this by playing a game where nothing truly crucial was at stake.

ART and conflict: Part 1 (recreated)

2005-04-08T12:08:00.000-04:00

I love the way an ARG becomes a virtual microcosm of the real world. Some people like to quote aphorisms like "there is no prize for winning an argument in cyberspace." Maybe no one gets a trophy, but I have learned a great deal from observing, participating in, and, even starting, heated discussions that turn into "flame wars" on the board.

The beauty of a flame war in cyberspace is that words written in heat, anger and defense of a point of view remain written in full view of the group. A flame war can only go at the speed that people can type and post, which is much slower than people can yell, curse and hang up the phone. Other people follow the argument along and get in on the action. It’s like the board is a huge party telephone line where your neighbors can pick up the receiver, listen to the discussion and add their two cents to the conversation. The thread turns and twists as people respond to only the most recent posts and lose sight of the original topic. Eventually someone will respond to the conflict with some sort of "can’t we all just get along?" or even threatening to leave. Not surprisingly this doesn’t work.

What have I learned? That conflict is not something to be feared. That the community won’t fall apart, disappear or split into factions. That our group must embrace diverse people and diverse opinions to thrive. That an opinion that differs from mine is not a personal attack against me. That sometimes people assume posts are meant for them personally, even though they aren’t named in them. That conflict on larger issues can be incredibly creative and productive.

An example from my real world experience. Friends of mine are members of a theater company, a group of stunningly talented people who are committed to writing and performing only their own work and to supporting each other’s artistic development. In a few short years they have become well-known, one member just won a Pulitzer prize for the play "Doubt." The actors are famous for giving such passionately fearless performances that audiences sit frozen, hardly breathing, in their seats. One actor explains that he has so much trust and support from every member of the company, he is free to explore the brink of human behavior in his performance. He knows they will catch him if he falls.

So you might think that the actors, writers, directors, stage people all get along like the Walton family. You might think their biggest conflict would be who was having the next sing-along at their apartment.

Not remotely true. During rehearsals I have seen arguments, lost tempers and seething anger that appears to be seconds away from igniting into a barroom brawl. These actors know every four letter word ever coined in English, Spanish and some other languages I don’t speak. They combine them in ways I had never heard of or thought before. Lots of emotion and passion explode. Watching this as an outsider, I feel scared and threatened and start inching toward the exit.

But this is the thing. The conflict is based on the attempt to create the very best art they are capable of making. In the theater, as in real life, the difference between what is very good and true art is just a small percentage, a tiny bit of genius and courage that lifts a moment from the mundane to the sublime. These conflicts don’t destroy the group. The group is unshaken in their commitment. But let me tell you people get really mad and stay angry for periods of time. But no one tries to say lets all just get along. Just getting along isn’t the goal; making art is the goal.

How this applies to our little world is something I will add next time.

Interaction

2005-04-07T11:21:00.000-04:00

Interaction between the game world and the real world is the key to ARG storytelling. The games are active, not passive, so player's responses help create the story. Some examples from current games:

*Syzygy - even though the game is frozen, players have sent in letters to the editor to the Perplex City Sentinel. Some of these have been published and the editors have addressed these letters.

*Orbital Colony- players have posted blog comments giving characters advice or information. Characters have responded. Players have created fun posters and some are even being invited to be part of the colony...Not sure why they would want to, going to Ares Station sounds dangerous and unpleasant.

*Various AIM games - I haven't played any of these games, but the players and characters talk on AIM. For some people, these games aren't really "ARGs." Definitions are not a subject that interests me. If the players enjoy it and these AIM convos suffice as a realistic means of communication, then I don't see what difference it makes. People enjoy expressing their opinions about games. Every game generates a META conversation of some kind. META conversations are useful when exchanging ideas as long as no one takes it personally. We all tend to take our games and our space on the board very personally. Maybe that is because when a game feels real, we feel as if we are directly involved in the story, as we might in real life. So criticising a game that a player has spent hours thinking and talking about is almost like criticizing one of their friends that you haven't met, but have just heard about. People get defensive, misunderstand what is being said, peacemakers step in to try to make it better, blah, blah, blah and eventually it all dies done with no real resolution.

The Art of the Heist has brought interaction to new levels. The characters interact with each other in real time and using different means. A phone call early in the day, might be followed up by an email or a late night IM conversation Just as in real life. Watching this progress enhances the reality of the story. We have interacted with the characters as well. People have emailed the characters and gotten responses. One person was sending formation to Nisha to help her find Ian. So we would get information on Ian's location in Jersey City and then tell her about it. (We think Ian is beyond his own resources and tried to get her there. Why he is running from his girlfriend doesn't make complete sense to me. )

Interaction is key to making a story "real." In ilovebees, Melissa could have called every pay phone in the US, but if no one answered, she would have just been a character in a radio play. By talking to her, we did more than activate axons, we made her real.

unfiction april fools day

2005-04-03T22:24:00.000-04:00

If you tried to get to the forums on unfiction on April 1st, you got a notice that the board was blocked. A really funny insider joke of course, and once you viewed three specifiy pages you could get access. Sorry if you missed it, SpaceBass did archive it on the site. Just make a note, like New York Mets fans, wait til next year.

Speaking of that, opening game, Yankees-Red Sox, Johnson v. Wells. At home. Finally spring is here.

Updates, updates, when are we going to get updates

2005-04-03T22:13:00.000-04:00

Having spend too many hours trying to solve the futures column in the Perplex City Sentinel, I am taking a break until I know that the damn game really has started. I know this game will be amazing, but I just don't have this kind of time to spend until it is going. We did get one update, we found the blog of Sente's daughter. (My next meta rant is going to be about blogs.... If we have to have in-game blogs, let them be written by complex, twisty characters. I jokingly metioned that I want to read a Goth girl's blog... but anything is an improvement on this treacle. ) Guess what? Sente knows Adrian. Sente is using Adrian Hon to created the game for making the Cube. We knew that already, or inferred it once we found out, through meeting Dinah, that Sente was making a game to get us to find the Cube. I am not knocking a clever idea. Maybe I am just grouchy from trying to solve those Futures.

When this game takes off - I will make sure to post about it here. In the meantime, I will look for that Audi and check in on the Earthlings living on Ares Station.

Marketing ARGs;ARGs and prizes

2005-04-03T21:37:00.000-04:00

Creating a reality around a product that includes an intriguing story and attractive characters maybe one of the strongest ways to create a brand identity. And what better than a mystery game, tied to commercials ,to immerse people in that brand identity. Most people, those who are not hooyists or ARG fanatics, need an incentive to invest time and effort into solving a web mystery game. The answer: a prize.

A complicated game started last week, sorting it out took so much of my time and attention that I didn't update here. The websites that we have found so far a well-made and invite hours of exploration. As the week went on, we came to believe that this game, the Art of the Heist, is an ad campaign for the Audi A3.

The story in brief: a video game designer who has been out of the loop for a while meets a fascinating and beautiful woman when he hires her to find a missing art object. (Part of me thinks this is a set-up -meaning he created the circumstances so he could meet her, but who knows at this point.) She finds it easily. He decides to base a game on her life and some cases she has solved.

The blend of reality and alternate reality in this game includes a real Audi A3, which has disappeared from the New York Auto Show on March 31st. In the game, the woman's partner, Ian, has stolen it for some reason. In the real world, the red Audi A3 was on display at the Auto Show, was removed on March 31st and not returned. I made a trip across town to the Javitz Center in the pouring rain and for $12 was able to confirm that the car had been there, kept on a revolving platform cordoned off from public view, and then taken away.

Another crossover includes a real life event at the Audi Park Avenue dealership (it isn't on Park Avenue but close enough to get to use the mailing address) the character Ian was supposed to attend with a friend and music collaborator, the DJ Will. [ Note: Will is a real person, I plan to take my son down to the Scratch Factory for a DJ lesson from him on Thursday night.] Luckily, one of the unfiction people playing this game was able to attend on very short notice with his understanding wife. When they got to the dealership, a woman was handing out notices and their were Security Guards by the door. The Audi wasn't there... Why? It had been stolen. The notice had a photo of Ian from a fake press pass he had and a number to call. The number was for Audi of America.

Pretty inventive. The Audi site is supposed to update on April 5th with more information. Want to check it out? Look here for the world of Art of the Heist:

www.virgilkingofcode.com

www.lastresortrestorers.com

Now, about the prize part of this. Prizes and ARGs are a mixed blessing. Prized bring in more people, but for obvious reasons, they can hamper cooperation. My friend Varin solved the hardest puzzle in the Search for the Urns game, a promotion for Sharp TV that had a media center for a prize and posted it on the board for everyone to use. Someone else won, and I don't know if that person solved the puzzle on their own or not. If not, then Varin helped someone else get a prize that arguably belonged to her. The point is, after seeing what happened to Varin, I can understand if people keep the answers to the hardest puzzles to themsevles. Also, people tried to post misleading stuff to keep other players off the trail.

Both hoarding information and misleading other players are attitudes that I object to in a game. I like the cooperative, collaborative nature of sharing and learning from smart, fun people. Maybe I spend enough time working with cutthroat people that I don't need them in my favorite entertainment. ARGers are as competitive as law students trying to get clerkships, its just mostly we like to help each other out.

Prizes change the character of a game completely. Experienced players are wary about the effect of a prize. The mention in syzygy of a reward for finding the lost Receda Cube created much angst and META conversation. When I mentioned to someone we would have some small prizes at ARGFest, our upcoming get together for ARG players, he was immediately concerned he "didn't believe in giving prizes for ARGs." But our ARGFest prizes are going to be for other things like trivia contests and door prizes, fun stuff, not a major reward for playing a game.

Imagination

2005-03-29T08:51:00.000-05:00

So just a bit of a rant here, I mean, what is the point of a blog if not to be a soapbox for your views, whether anyone listens or just walks by. What irks me is the lack of imagination or maybe fear of imagination that non-players have about ARGs. People like to make ignorant comments about their fear of the "group mentality" fostered by playing a game. Like we are the villagers chasing Frankenstein's monster mindlessly through the rainy night waving our pitchforks and torches.

These people have no understanding that independent thinking, unique insights and individual talents are treasured, nurtured and emboldened in a good game. Every player makes a contribution by seeing the story from his or her own perspective. If anything, ARGs tend to make people less comformist. Even assuming, as alleged elsewhere, the old guard advocates a restrictive and critical view of the way things should be, the reality is that the impetus of games is expansive innovation. If the genre works, it will always be that way.

Besides, the ARG community is unusually law abiding. Can you imagine any other group of people arguing about whether to copy DVDs given out for free? I can only say we argue about everything, in a generally productive way that makes us closer and that I am still trying to figure out.

I visualize the imaginations of these onlooking nay-sayers as the deserted artic tundra at midnight. Empty of all except cold barren thoughts about what other people might do.

Puzzles

2005-03-29T08:01:00.000-05:00

Many people feel that puzzles are essential to an alternate reality game. Solving puzzles is part of "playing" a game in a definitional sense like batting is part of baseball. A difficulty for the game creators is to include puzzles in a realistic way. Maybe I lead a boring, uneventful life; but, in real life, no one has ever emailed me a hint that leads to a login/password for a backdoor entrance to hidden files containing essential information to solving a crime or understanding the science of time travel. So I tend to be skeptical about puzzles in a story; the way puzzles are used sometimes destroys my otherwise impervious "suspension of disbelief ."

One criticism of ilovebees was that the puzzles were an emergency graft to the story after the ARG community started a minor revolt about the dearth of puzzles-- and websites--in the game. Elan Lee mentioned in the post-game chat his original plan called for the story to be told over pay phones. When that wasn't enough to keep people coming back to pick up the receiver, assuming the damn phone worked and people could find it at the right time, the puzzles (and the live calls) were created. A character in ilovebees was an aspect of the Melissa personality we fondly called the Sleeping Princess. Because she was a mischievous girl, she created little puzzles for the players to solve as a way to access secret clips she had found. I think this was enough of a story line to hang the puzzles on, but not everyone agrees.

Still, Elan, Jane, and Sean had the worst of the puzzles in ilovebees because they designed themselves into a corner. From the first, the Sleeping Princess hid text snippets in images found on the website. Thereafter, when the puzzles were added as a regular Friday update, they too appeared hidden in images. Imagine the headaches, eyestrain and general irritated bad moods created by spending all night Thursday writing puzzles and then putting them in the source code of the images. I thought they had a cute software tool to do this, but Elan did each one by hand.

Both Perplex City and Ares Station deal with the puzzle problem in creative ways. The hon brothers had the genius to create a world where puzzle solving is the atheletic event of the culture. So puzzles are de rigeur in Perplex City-- characters can credibly create puzzles for each other all the time, just for fun, the way ARG people make puzzle and birthday trails. ( As a note of full disclosure, the novel "Player of Games" by Iain Banks uses this premise- someone else pointed that out... it sounds like a good book.) Last night in #syzygy while we debated if the Futures page was a puzzle, trout or just nothing, Yanka asked why a puzzle would be obscure. I think if someone wants to hide a secret message in a newspaper presumably read by expert puzzle solvers, then the puzzle has to be obscure. In this way, Perplex City has a built-in premise for making any puzzle they throw at us believable.

Ares Station uses a different approach. Each puzzle there has a unique genesis but each has been pretty carefully blended into the story. I mentioned the music puzzle that was posted by a brother just to keep his sister happy, others include a mysterious graffiti posted to show the damage caused, a coded message in an employment offer that had to be solved to get the job, etc.

As far as I am concerned, both of these games are handling the use of puzzles well, and, like any true ARG addict, I can't wait to see what happens next.

Perplex City Sentinel edition 3/28

2005-03-28T08:23:00.000-05:00

So check the new issue of the Perplex City Sentinel.

Prelude to Still Life

2005-03-28T00:40:00.000-05:00

The game Still life, in which you play a detective searching for a serial killer, announced a "prelude" game a few weeks ago. While this game doesn't offer any real interaction with characters, it does offer the chance to play as if you were the detective, solve puzzles and interact with other characters in programmed ways. The player accesses the desk, FBI database and other programs of Victoria McPherson, the protagonist FBI agent of the story. The prelude game is found at http://stilllife-game.com/ . Click on prelude.

The game can be played in German, French and Italian as well as English. ( I think the days of limiting marketing games to English only are close to over. I know that the "Search for the Sacred Urns" the marketing campaign for Sharp television could be followed in several languages as well. The final contest was limited to residents of the United States for legal reasons, but the story and websites were multilingual. )

A handy part of the prelude is a tool that allows you to decrypt different codes. If you need a bit of polishing up on codes, at least take a look at the gadget they provide.

Still life itself will be available in April as either a PC or xbox game.

Games for free

2005-03-28T00:14:00.000-05:00

When I first played Acheron, having just missed Project Mu, I was impressed that people would create games at a cost of time and money for strangers to play for free. Coming from the world of corporate law in New York City, this sort of generousity was something I had never experienced. I have since learned more about the open source movement and the world of wikipedia, but I am still impressed at the amount of sheer effort and dedication it takes to create and run a game. The creators of ilovebees were compensated for their efforts, but they worked ferociously hard and slept very little during the game. Jane McGonigal mentions on her website that during ilovebees she basically disappeared from the world. The same is true for the creators of the satire site ilovebeer, most of whom were running unfiction, ARGN or smirkbox, managing the game, their real life paying jobs and their home life at the same time.

So I am still impressed, surprised and grateful that I can play games like ilovebees, Ares Colony and syzygy for free.

-------
Syzygy - reminder to new players. Yes, despite the thousands of posts on unfiction, the game is just starting. You can easily catch up if you just read over the paper of record at www.perplexcitysentinel.com , and don't worry about the links you can't access yet. Neither can we, we don't know how yet.

Along these lines, I have the slightly heretical view that you can join a game at almost any time. It is possible, even easy, to catch up if someone has produced a decent, succint guide. Even in the absence of a guide, it is possible to catch up. I have read posts from new people who basically say:" I'm new and I need a summary" and someone will oblige. Even without a summary if you read over the websites that have been found, you will have a good grasp of the story. So don't feel that just because a game has started that it is too late or too hard to get up to speed.

Ares station;syzygy;loving the board

2005-03-25T01:23:00.000-05:00

Quick notes:
Syzygy update includes new email addresses at the Perplex City Sentinel.
Maybe they are waiting for someone from Earth to write explaining about Sente's game. If I have time I will draft something and see if I get a response.

Ares station: Hannah Redfoot now posts to the blog from Mars and is going to do her first autopsy. Another new character is complaining about the poor science done on the station. All in all these people on Ares Station sound like a big bunch of whiners. I'm still looking for a likable character.

About the forums
Someday I will understand why I, like so many others, got so attached to the board. I guess something is working right when people identify strongly with the space that they are working in. Or maybe we all spend too much time staring at that space, hoping for an update. Whatever it is, the board definitely attracts a sort of loyalty and possessiveness - like a neighborhood perhaps - that translates into emotional responses to what other people write. Some people s feel that every post is directed to them personally. Others feel that they can write limitless off-topic posts and expect that everyone will have read them. People object to a game claiming too many resources, or too many small games, or someone posting something they think belongs somewhere else. Whatever it is, people get irked with the "idiots" who post in the wrong place, repeat stuff that was said pages earlier... anyone who doesn't know how things should be done dammit. Funny how a little page in cyberspace can command so much loyalty and commitment. Funny, too, how players in an innovative genre like ARGs resist change, become judgemental and harshly critical of new ideas, new ways of playing, new people. But that is a different topic.

I've found that the forum system has definite limitations. I haven't used other forums, but I doubt that drawbacks of the forum system is limited to ARGs. I think this is a function of design more than anything else. We need a better form of collaborative software. It can be too hard to find the informative nuggets buried in threads that become pages long. If you haven't followed something from the beginning, and there isn't a primer or a guide, finding what you need can take hours. The wiki system is just as imperfect as the bulletin board. Anyone who has used a wiki will understand about the problems of spamming and people who mean well changing pages you've worked hard to create.

I am not a programmer, but if I were, I would be designing the next thing in collaboration. We need something simple to use, with an excellent search engine and an organization scheme that is easy to follow. Maybe a system where you can create your own labels for posts, ignore posts from people who are known threadjackers, read only posts from people you know make solid contributions, organize your own threads. You can search the forums by author and date, but that can be too limiting. I had the idea of having posts emailed to a gmail account where I can then label them, index them and create my own threads. I am trying to create a better system of managing information. We'll see what I can design.

Orbital Colony

2005-03-23T15:22:00.000-05:00

Perplex City (the game also known as syzygy - the name used in the development stages) is not the only game running at the moment. I am playing one other game known as "Ares Station." Ares Station has a very different story arc- we don't even really know what our mission is yet.

A manned orbital colony exists around Mars as described in the main website. www.aresstation.com. Happily, a new communication conduit has been opened so we can communicate directly with the assortment of characters working there. http://citizens.aresstation.com/ (Note not all ARGs call in-game newspapers "The Sentinel.") Three main groups of characters emerge: the miners (collecting pure seed crystals for money and research), the scientists (who are researching development of crystals and hydroponic food sources) and the administrators. Things aren't going well on Ares Station and, like all good mysteries, the outward surface hides many secrets.

At least one murder has occured, there are conflicting reports about whether another earlier death was also murder. At least one of the characters, Beth Applegate, sister of Chris Applegate, has severe mental disorders, according to her brother. Another mysterious character named Hannah Redfoot (who had a blog of her own at http://hannaredfoot.blogspot.com/ ) has made her way from Earth to Ares Station in search of David Severn, who sounds like her long lost love, but we only have her rather cryptic views on that.

Other conflicts exist among the different characters, including my least favorite, Mary Haynes, who claims to be a reporter. She reminds me of the typical village gossip crammed into a space setting. And she has already accused someone of the crime, thereby guaranteeing his innocence. At least in my book, she is just too stupid to get it right.

My only quibble with the game is that we have no basis on which to make decisions about "who to trust." A basic concept of ARGs is that at least some, if not all, of the characters are not 100% truthful. The players have to determine who they want to trust. An example: Chris Applegate gave us a puzzle in music that his sister had written. A player decoded it and posted the message in a very carefully worded message to Chris. That was a fine, smart move. But other issues will arise when we aren't sure who we should tell what we know. Nothing like inadvertantly helping the bad guy. (I'm speaking from painful experience here. :) )

I'm not going to write a whole summary of each character. Most of the basic stuff is easy to find from the in-game websites. As in syzygy I recommend looking over the game websites first. The information about the game is a bit scattered at this point as no one has created a guide yet. After looking at the sites, I suggest you read the unfiction forums.

This game will be fun. There is a good core group of players following it. So check it out.

The ARG community

2005-03-23T09:07:00.000-05:00

Alternate reality games are designed to be played cooperatively on a large, sometimes massive scale. Some games have been designed with seperate teams playing against each other. Even on teams people work together to solve problems, advance the story, create player resources.

I have worked in many different types of groups in the private and non-profit sectors. Nowhere have I found more collegial, supportive, creative, generous and very smart people collaborating on a project. The group aspect of the game known as "i love bees" was described by Henry Jenkins of MIT as a beginning successful model of collaboration for other groups to follow. This does not mean that we all "just get along'. That would be boring anyway. We have opinions and views that conflict, sometimes painfully, yet we manage to keep working together. It is actually quite remarkable that all these people with opposing ideas and personalities stay together and even develop respect, affection and admiration for each other. I am still trying to figure out how this works exactly myself. I think a great deal of the credit goes to the leaders of the community who create an atmosphere of respect and tolerance.

Lately I have noticed a few mentions of a supposed division within the player community. I have to say that I have never, ever experienced it. So I can't directly comment other than to wonder what purpose the people writing about this are trying to serve. To me, it seems they are looking out for their own interests --generating traffic to their sites? dealing with a permanent chip on their shoulder? Who knows -- they may even have convinced themselves they are only acting in the best interest of the community. Yet what they write doesn't support that claim. Not one of these comments about "community division" has been specific as to the either nature of the problem or their suggestions for remedying it, if, in fact, it exists. That is to say, these commnets are veiled opinions based on an assumption that I don't agree is true. Perhaps they would be more creditable if they appeared to be constructively trying to resolve a problem they claim to perceive, rather than wringing their hands and sighing about it.

~that's just my opinion.

So much to say about syzygy

2005-03-23T08:41:00.000-05:00

I have so much ground to cover here but staying au currant for my first topic I choose syzygy (otherwise known as Perplex City.) Launch is near or maybe even upon us.

For those not in the ARG loop: a summary followed by some comments

Perplex City exists in an unknown fictional world that has to find ways to interact with us in our real world here on Earth. The Receda Cube, an object of immense value, cultural, historical and economic importance was stolen by person or persons unknown and brought to Earth. To enlist our help in finding the Cube, Sente Kiteway, the head of the Perplex City Academy where the cube had been on display prior to the theft, has created a game for us. A reward has been mentioned, but not identified.

The best way to catch up on this game is to carefully read the website which contains a version of the paper of record circulated in Perplex City, www.Perplexcitysentinel.com. Not all the pages are accessible, so don't be discouraged if you click on something and it says "point your key" here or something similar. We haven't sorted out what the authentication process will be, but all the basic information on the cube and Perplex City is in the paper.

I strongly suggest that people start there because the amount of information, much of it speculative, that has been generated over the months of waiting for this game to launch is staggering. Players have helpfully created a guide, a primer and other tools - all of which can be found by going to www.unfiction.com - the primary forum for ARG players. As I mentioned, don't be overwhelmed. Start with the paper and then the primer . Stuff you don't know can be checked in the wiki.

Then I would wait and see what happens next.

You can also check here for updates to the story. I am not creating a guide here but I will try to keep a summary going for people who happen upon this blog and are looking for some help in getting started or catching up.

Launching ARGspeak

2005-03-23T08:33:00.000-05:00

As everyone seems to be creating their own ARG conversation space, I thought, why not me? Now I can have a place to say what I want without rather than just responding to other people's stuff. And I don't even have to make a whole website for it. Leaving comments enabled means that the ARG community can say whatever they want as well.

This should be fun.