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."

Comments

The Man Who Knew Too Little

[JediTrainer]

He's on a mission so secret, even he doesn't know about it.

One of my favourite movies. Stars Bill Murray, who's supposed to be taking part in a 'reality' spy play, but he accidentally ends up in the real thing. Hilarious!

Disturbing trends in anti-individualism

[AEton]

I've played MUDs and I've talked on BBSes and I've collaborated on all sorts of projects with AIM and cellphones (anyone catch the reference to "smart mobs" in the linked BBC article?). But I can't see how this could be fun, since the individual's efforts are always subjugated to solving someone else's computer-aided puzzle. The BBC article compares this online fake problem-solving effort to EverCrack, perhaps unfairly:

Already multiplayer games such as EverQuest struggle to cope with the groups that play and the creative communal tactics used to tackle each challenge.

But really, this isn't special. It's just people seeking an outlet for their otherwise desperate life-empty frustrations; they'd be far better off contributing talent somewhere worthwhile rather than playing with someone else's hacked-together Flash animation. It's nothing to write home about--just Internet puzzles that take away your individual exploration and innovation and replace it with someone else's idea of a good time.

No offense, of course, intended to anyone who does in fact derive a good time from this kind of thing; but please remember if you're that desperate to express your smartness, there are much more productive and creative things you could be doing. Read... Write. Scram.

"The Game"

[HeelToe]

This reminds me of The Game with Michael Douglas.

It would be unnerving to have an experience as completely in the real world as his character did in that movie.

Reminds me of a story

[forkboy]

Funny story related to this:

They held the Timothy McVeigh trial here in Denver in 1996. My friends and I all played Cyberpunk at a Denny's during the wee hours of the night just about every night of the week. One night we started kinda early, during the tail end of the dinner rush. In the game, we were planning this big bank heist complete with neurotoxins, automatic weapons, remote cameras, cars packed with explosives, distracting police attention by blowing up a wing of a hospital, and all sorts of other shenanigans. We were all so into it, even the waitress was tossing ideas back and forth with us.

Well, apparently, some concerned citizen heard us plotting these things and called the police. The next night, a bunch of goons in FBI jackets stormed into the place and started interrogating us about what we were planning.

I was like "Dude, come on...it's a game. Here are the books, here are the dice...wanna see my stats?" No legal trouble ended up coming of it, luckily, but I wouldn't be surprised if I am on some FBI database somewhere as a potential terrorist. Last year, I applied for an intership with the feds and was denied based on the background check. Considering I have no significant criminal history, I can only imagine that is what caused it. (They don't tell you why you fail, just that you fail)

Think about my experiences, and those of Steve Jackson games, and tell me that there won't be many many misunderstandings as these things become more mainstream.

Re:Reminds me of a story

[jeff67]

Use the Freedom Of Information Act to request your file from the FBI.

creepy

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, I wonder how this would effect weak-minded people who would be unable to tell where the game ended and their life and responsibilities began. I guess that's true for any game, right? But having to mentally divide your day into reality/fantasy could be difficult for some folks.

Would would worry me is just how much leeway these companies will have with your life. And you'll agree to it all in the terms of service! Can they scare you? Send people out to beat you up? Have a woman seduce you for the purposes of the game? The mind boggles.

(putting on my tinfoil hat and thinking into the future) I wonder if someday, people will lead entire lives (earning a living and working, getting married, etc) under the auspices of these games. Imagine having a child according to the rules of the game, raising it for the purposes of improving your "score", etc.

It would be exactly like real life! Except .. it would be under the control of a private company! Scary, isn't it? No more constitution, no more human rights. Just whatever the company decides to put in it's EULA.

Man, that would make an awesome movie, wouldn't it .. about a society that was actually two societies intertwined, one that was "normal" and one that was under control of a game company... has it been done?? What would the difference between this game company, and a government be?

Interesting ideas...........

A few other argn sites.

[SuperguyA1]

I'm one of the people totally addicted to this. Here are a few other great sites to check out.

collective detective
unfiction both of which are great message boards and have IRC groups.

Some other games include l3
search4e
Time Hunt
Collective detective there are also resources (irc/message) for game books. Welcome to my addiction:) Check out collective detective for many other games/resources.

Re:A few other argn sites.

[SuperguyA1]

forgot another one of my favorites. jmx Check out the irc channel on this one.

What I like about these games

[czarneki]

So far, the only game in this genre that could be called a "success" is "The Beast" -- the original secret promotion campaign for A.I. (I'm not even talking about making money. By "success" I just mean getting a large player base and keeping them interested till the end). I never succeeded in solving a single puzzle in the Beast ahead of other people, but I loved that game. Much more than the movie that it was meant to help. I've tried Majestic and the other games later on, but none of them compared with the Beast. I can't put my finger on why that is. So I'll just throw out some ideas.

Some of the appeal of this genre is obviously the immersive aspect of gaming this way -- the way it blurs reality and the game work. Ironically, "The Beast" was also the game that had the least bit of "reality" in it -- it was more alternate than "real" I guess. The game's reality was set centuries in the future (even after the events in the movie it was supposed to promote) and so you had to make an effort to participate and put yourself into that world. Every web site in the game gave you warnings about "downgrading" itself to adjust to your primitive 21st century technology -- so there were constant reminders that this wasn't "real." There were some phone calls -- but not many at all.

Now Majestic and the other games try much harder to be "real" -- they are set in the present, and they try to contact you in all sorts of ways. So if this immersion is the thing people are going for, then the Beast should have failed miserably...

I think the reason these later games have not been as much a success with casual players like me has to do with how they misunderstood the reasons the AI game was successful. The AI game succeeded because it had good content. It succeeded because the writer for the Beast, Sean Stewart, was a great sci-fi novelist, and he took care to create the characters and the world they inhabited with words that suspended disbelief. Sure the graphics and everything else helped, but the writing was what really made it all work together. I can't really convey how good the writing for that game was -- but you can get a taste for it from his novels. Some of the writing in that game, such as a dialogue in words-and-pictures between a man and his slave-AI who wanted to be free, was done with more care and more evocative than anything I saw in the AI movie itself. It was really art.

In contrast, Majestic and the new games so far have terrible content. It really looks as if the creators in these games thought flashy graphics could make up for poor writing. These games always play on a conspiracy/occult storyline that lends itself to cliches and trite tabloid-style writing. Of course, by focusing on these themes, the new games can link to a bunch of existing web sites devoted to conspiracy theories and the occult and save themselves a lot of effort (whereas the people for the AI game had to create everything for this future world of theirs).

Therein lies the heart of the problem for me. I think the Beast worked because Sean Stewart and the team at Microsoft treated the players with respect. They did not take the lazy way out, and they backed up the flashy presentation with good, publishable, professional quality sci-fi writing, and they designed puzzles that required the knowledge of a diverse group of people with specific talents to solve (there were puzzles that drew on genetics -- and the sort of genetics that only graduate students would be comfortable with -- and puzzles that drew on the artistic ability of players to mold clay). In a word, they thought their players were interesting people with diverse backgrounds, who were very smart and had an appreciation for literary writing. This kind of respect came across in their work, and this is what it takes to keep most players interested.

In contrast, the writers for Majestic and subsequent games were condescending to the players, and treated them as either socially inept geeks or as conspiracy-obs

Re:What I like about these games

[MalachiConstant]

This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far. I also played The Beast, I came into it a couple weeks after it started and was obsessed with it for most of it's life.

The main reason the game was fun was that you wanted to see what happened next, and you wanted to understand who these people were. Without a good plot and interesting characters it becomes a boring pattern of "we found a new puzzle, now solve it so we can find the next one". Solving the puzzles became something we did because we just had to know what happened next.

As far as I know this was the first game of its kind ever, and Sean Stewert learned very quickly how it worked and what was fun. That's why it was such a good game. I remember a post game interview with him were he said that once people had formed a giant group to solve the puzzles (Cloudmakers and to a lesser extent SphereWatch), he could make puzzles about ANYTHING and they would get solved. So he could make a puzzle about the mating habits of the blowfish and somewhere in the group would be a marine biologist who could say "I know this one!". There were puzzles involving Photoshop manipultion, the Fobbonacci Sequence, Base64, etc. And just ask someone who played about the time our buddy Dwayne was abducted and taken to the Statue of Liberty where we had to call and convince a security guard there named Mike Royal (who later turned out to be Sean Stewart), to take action and free him. From the Guide: "It's hard to describe exactly the excitement of all of this while it was happening, but while I was in the Cloudmakers IRC channel things were literally boiling over as people were comparing notes over what he'd said and what they should attempt later. It was a real triumph of the game, I think."

There were two things that occured to me while I was playing this game:

1) It could never be truely commercial. It takes a LOT of work done quickly to keep up with the gamers, who solve puzzles at unpredictable rates, and who is going to pay for a game where 99% of the time they are not solving anything, because someone else has already solved it? This was the problem with Majestic, it tried to parcel out the puzzles and make you pay for watching other people solve them.

2) There is a limit to how many people can play before it stops being fun. The Beast had zero promotion. The only way people even found out about the game was a credit in the trailer that said "Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla". If you searched for Jeanine Salla on Google you found the first site of the game. If 500,000 people were playing there would be so many posts and things would get solved so quickly it would be a complete mess. Even Cloudmakers was geting a little unweildy toward the end.

I think the only games like this that will be succesful are games made by people for fun, or promotions similar to this where making money is not the goal. Fans of the beast made a game (the solvers called themselves Jawbreakers) that was a success for the same reasons mentioned above.

As a player of Majestic for 7 Episodes...

[MarvinMouse]

I can tell you my biggest problem, and the reason I stopped playing was the linear gameplay.

The game was fun and exciting for the first episode, but then after that it was like paying for a really slow television show. Everything was predetermined to fit a very specific timeline, and there wasn't that much you could do to get out of it.

I just had to stop after playing for a few months because I just got sick and tired of being led by the hand through the episodes, and not really being able to change the direction of the storyline myself.

Now, if someone were to make a game like Majestic, but with a nonlinear storyline. I would pay big bucks for that. I loved majestic (I am a bit of an x-files fan), I just quit because I got tired of being led by the hand through it. I want a game, not a "reality storybook."

Re:Wait just a minute!

[toppsoft]

That is exactly why I'm not playing TSO.

I see lots of comparisons between MMORPGs and ARG and fail to see how spending hours mindlessly leveling up is compelling.

One of the biggest attractions for me to the ARG genre is the group effort and community involvement. The community is certainly small, but don't equate size with the entertainment value.

A well written ARG is like a good novel. You identify with the characters and can a little bit closer to the story than any passive medium offers. A great ARG truly blurs the lines between the fictional game world and your own reality. It certainly involves the suspension of disbelieve to accomplish this, but so does any other game.

How much fun would GTA be without all the little things that pull you in? The radio, the interactions with NPCs and everything else lets you lose yourself for a while.

Bill
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