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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.
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!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
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:
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.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
...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.
Imagine how pissed off the NSA is going to be if this sort of thing takes off. All those intercepts of evil people planning which turn out to be a couple of bored 23-year-old guys somewhere...
But I don't know if If I'd like to have all those sleazy chicks calling me at work. (-;
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.
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.
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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.
.. 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.
.. 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?
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
Man, that would make an awesome movie, wouldn't it
Interesting ideas...........
There's nothing wrong with doing things for no other reason than fun.
This is true. But at the same time, the atmosphere in America (at least from where I'm sitting) is getting so passive that the thought of sitting down and actually doing something is really getting foreign to us. Why bother making a game, you can just wait for the next one to come out? Why bother writing? You can just wait for another novel to come out. Why bother learning an instrument? You'll never be as good as your heroes.
The bar has been raised so far it's effectively beyond the reach of your average person, unless they dedicate their lives to it.
Strangely enough, a lot of people like that wind up really good at games, because it's just something they find themselves in front of long enough to excel at. I think that's kind of the point of the parent poster. If instead of saying, "fuck it, I'll go play EQ" they said, "I'll spend an hour on my guitar tonight, and an hour writing, and an hour beating off" they are quite likely to eventually find themselves very good at guitar and writing. You can't help but improve if you do something enough.
And there are two good reasons to have your fun doing something "productive" as you put it.
1. You'll feel better about yourself. When you're laying in bed awake at night wondering what you're doing with yourself, it's easier to remember your skill with whatever you've been doing. It helps your memory ("remember when I was totally pathetic at Python? That was four years ago!"). You're not going to remember that you made it to level 30 in EQ after losing countless hours to the game.
2. You improve the world for other people. Commercialism pervades television, radio and is a visual nuissance in basically every direction you can look. Originality is unheard of on TV and the radio. Bringing some originality to the world is something community doesn't forget. You make friends, you make fans, you grow in vision and perspective. None of these things happen on EQ, except perhaps for making friends, and you'll be lucky if you can retain an EQ friend outside of EQ.
Also, to specifically knock EQ, I haven't met anyone yet who claims that EQ was a "pure joy." The players are confrontational, the company is disinterested, etc. At least with a pen-and-paper role playing game you're spending time with people you honestly enjoy and exercising your imagination.
All that said, if you spend all day being "productive" I understand if you don't want to do it at night. But in my experience, we put a little too much faith in the power of money to make us happy. It shouldn't be about that.
--
Daniel
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