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Alternate Reality Games Grab Mindshare
An nonymous reader points to articles at the New York Times and on the BBC about online games that require a lot more audience participation and curiosity than conventional games do. "Known as ARGs or Alternate Reality Games, these immersive experiences mix real world clues, phone calls, voicemail, email chatter-bots, real people playing roles in real life and a bevy of bogus and legit websites, to create a fully rounded gaming experience that bleeds over into everyday life. With central sites like ARGN, Unfiction, and endless forums and Yahoo groups, the BBC claims that this is not only a quickly emerging gaming trend, but that it may also have real-world applications like group dynamics and problem solving. Chasing the Wish claims to already have a few thousand people worldwide playing since it opened for play on Feb. 28. One sure sign of having people's attention is the fact that it's already spawned a parody site, Chasing the Fish."
Wasn't Majestic, the game released by EA pretty much the same thing? Charged a monthly fee to get calls in the wee hours of the morning, e-mails, movies, what-not. It didn't do so well, I guess customers didn't like waking up at 3 am to hear a poorly delivered line about the imminent danger they were in.
Last I heard EA scrapped the idea since no one bothered to keep paying.
As far as real world 'immersion', Electronic Art's "Majestic" game from a while back was a pretty damn good first attempt IMHO. Sure, the clues that were left predominantly lacked personalization (obvious pre-recorded messages being left on your voice-mail, generic fill-in-the-customer's-name emails etc), it still seemed good enough to be considered an admirable first attempt.
Sure, we'll probably never see anything to the extent of The Game (at least not until someone builds a Holodek - my favorite fictitious invention EVER), but it was a much braver step in a new direction than most companies are willing to take.
God knows how much money EA lost on Majestic though.
...with a game called Majestic. Ron Dulin at Gamespot gave it a 6.7 and said "Majestic is a very passive experience, and as the novelty fades, so will your interest". The game faded after a couple of months because it just wasn't immersive enough, since you had to wait for phone calls or emails or faxes for the game to progress. It was also pretty linear and didn't take advantage of collaborative gaming. Maybe these new games can improve on that. I can imagine ARGs in which you join a government agency or revolutionary faction and work with other players on your side on different tasks set up by the game server, like collecting counterintelligence information on the internet and saboting the other team's networks and...umm, I think I let my imagination run wild there. Sorry.
Lot's of people have mentioned EA's failed Majestic game, but no one seems to talking about the one ARG that was a huge success: The game based around the movie A.I. It was run by Microsoft, and had a very loyal and fanatical fanbase. The fans were so in to the game that they actually changed the dynamics of the game as it went along, even going so far as to create a distributed.net-style program to sovle a puzzle that was inadvertainly left unsolvable by the team.
Read more at Cloudmakers.org.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Doing so will *create* a file for you with the FBI if you don't have one.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
One of the first proper ARGs was The Beast, an AI marketing kinda game run out of Microsoft (although we had no idea until the very end, it was all very secretive).
:) near the end of the game, from an insane Teddy Bear. It was supposed to be a prompt to recognise the sound and revisit one of the earlier game sites as new information was posted there, but it just creeped the hell out of me.
I remember getting a really disturbing phonecall at 2am in the morning (the dialling software didn't take timezones into account
But then again, that's one of the biggest lures of this genre - getting faxs, phonecalls, e-mails... without breaking 'the illusion of the reality'. Eg, a game which - like The Beast - is set in the future has a hard time of keeping the players immersed without accidently breaking the 'immersion' by slipping up regarding methods of communication. That's why the Internet is great for this, as it can be considered a medium that will exist for quite some time - thus providing a base for all kinds of fanciful immersion storylines.
Majestic ran into two problems - one was that is failed miserably at keeping the player immersed. Contact from the game was simply too obvious, there -was- no chance to get spooked. Also it was badly paced.
I'm on the team that build and runs Collective Detective, mentioned in the BBC article (I havn't read the nytimes article). We beat TerraQuest for one of the same reasons Majestic sucked - nobody took into account the Collective factor, that people will play together for fun as opposed to playing alone to win a set goal or prize.
This particually threw Majestic off because they were not adapting to the play of the users. The Beast adapted it's pace, and threw in new elements just to keep players busy and distracted. Majestic just kind of idled, and TerraQuest threw in the towel. It's a new Genre so the main problem is, I think, the lack of previous work to help base something on.
Of course, it also shows that commercialised games are going to run into problems in this regard. The Beast was a small "black ops" group kept under tight secrery at Microsoft. People ran into it just on word of mouth, and because the team was small (two to four people most of the time) there was a lot of freedom to quickly adapt. Majestic, and to an extent TerraQuest, did not have the ability to adapt quickly enough to stay alive. Because, I believe, partly of "Developer Bloat" and partly because the strict commercial structures governed by marketing stiffle this kind of behavior in a conventional environment.
- Ender
Developer Dude, Collective Detective