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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.
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...
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.
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Daniel