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[Crowfoot]

The thing is, as the ARG community grows rapidly and more games arise, finding something new and original for your own ARG is really difficult.

[Duckie]

[Crowfoot-]

[MageSteff]

[rowan]

[C_Brennan]

I really believe the elements of the ARG should really depend on the effect you are trying to achieve. Some games can get away with the more puzzly aspects, but others can/need the heavy interaction to drive them. I feel I can vouch for this by the clashing nature of my two games, Project Gateway and the currently in-play Wildfire Industries.

Project Gateway was more of an old school mystery with a small cast and a weird set of circumstances. The one reason the cast was so small was because the "true" main characters by reason of the series of writings I based it off of were all locked up inside of the Project Gateway website, all 31 of them. That only left 4 other important characters outside, and some I had to make up during the play of the game in order to support the game and the game only.

This lead to a very low amount of interaction that would only take place in a small window of time (Midnight EST to 12:30 AM EST). To replace this, the puzzles shot through the roof. There were puzzles everywhere. Some easy, some hard.

By a severe contrast, Wildfire Industries has already exhibited the opposite behavior. Because this is a story of two wacked out companies (as the players can certainly tell you), there is less of a need for puzzles. Why would a company put a puzzle on their website? Why would a company hide things? In fact, the only puzzles they had to conquer as of today's date were the puzzles required to be hired with the company.

But, Wildfire Industries slaps back with a severe amount of interaction. There is no player in WI who has not had a conversation with a character. I'm certain of it. Anyone who is playing right now has met someone like Seraphina Wildfire Angela, or Laura Clockheart, or Delton Wildfire himself, or Bart Sidewinder of the Rainman Group, or the Rainman Group's AI, Callista. In fact, at the beginning, it was forced because the players had to attend interviews with the characters to get their jobs. In one day, the Wildfire Industries Board of Directors, a wacky crew of 12 characters and 4 chosen players interacted with players for 4 and a half hours straight. No breaks. A solid 4 and a half hours with 12 characters. That's alot, and I haven't seen anything like it so far in my past readings into other ARGs.

But, if anything, we can see that there is a balance here. The less puzzles, then you make up for it in interaction and story. If there's less of story and interaction, then you make it heavier with puzzles. And, if you're really good, then you get a balance of both to really drive players forward.

Plus, we as PMs have our styles. Mine just happens to be one that's heavy on story and characters. The DaemonWorks PM doesn't do what I do, but he does it very differently and succeeds at what he does. The Sable + Shuck PMs do things very differently, but they succeed. Alzheimers did some things that I never thought of, and he did them extremely well. And, I'm sure by the same token, I've done things he hasn't done and I've done them well. And the same goes for the past PMs Archeron, Metacortechs, etc. We all have that story, or that idea that we want to tell, and we're going to tell it in the medium that we feel makes the most sense for it.

That's my two cents though.

[Wishi-san]

[GuyP]

Well this is awesome, one of the most articulate and thoughtful discussions I've read here in ages! Cool stuff.

I concur with a lot of what's been said about plot and narrative in ARGs, and I don't believe that a game can truly be successful without a good story to drive the action and bring about an emotional investment in the player. But I think it's important to remember the great truism "It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it."

It's not the plot - it's the writing. There's nothing worse than clunky, hamfisted dialogue full of cheesy clichès.

"You don't want this, you really don't..." It's on the front page of UF and to someone who discovers the genre I'm sure it's very exciting, but if I read that in an ARG, I'd probably start thinking about getting my coat. I am one of the more fickle players I admit - after I downloaded the MP3 of Jersey going "Daaamn!" in ILB, I didn't download anymore.

That's another thing about "plot" - it's great if you can find a way to mess up the formula a little. I guess that's how time travel got involved because it gives the PM an opportunity to tell the story in new ways. Think about movies like Pulp Fiction, Memento, Mulholland Drive, etc etc - the plot in reverse, cut up in chunks and mixed around, and so on. The intertwining threads of ILB was why I continued to follow out despite some of the voice-acting being decidedly straight-to-video. The challenge for the PM is how to do something like that given that it's supposed to be "real" and for the most part, time moves in a linear fashion.

I think it's a bit more dull when you know Nice Character A is going to meet Nasty Character B on Monday at 9pm to talk about Project X and it's all very laid out for you. My favourite threads are always {SPEC} which does require the 'unknown' to actually speculate about.

It's the same kind of problem for 'puzzles', you need to find a suitable and realistic context for them. And when in our lives do we really have to solve 'puzzles'? I didn't like the writing much, but having a dead guy leave clues in The Da Vinci Code was a pretty smart way of doing it.

I think it's kinda lazy to suggest that it's hard to do an original ARG anymore. It seems hard if you try and take your inspiration from other ARGs, but that's not what great PM's should be doing. Spy novels, political thrillers, innovative movies, bleeding-edge technology blogs, the New Scientist and most of all NEWSPAPERS and you should be bursting with inspiration to create something genuinely new. Stare at a rut for too long and you too could get stuck in it.

In terms of gameplay, cool puzzles and so on, previous ARGs are probably a better place to start, but look further afield - somewhere like http://www.avantgaming.com/ would be cool, I think, and then follow the sidebar to a hundred sites on the latest ways to have lots of fun.

[Alzheimers]

Re: homogeneousness in ARGs.

I don't consider myself a Veteran or an Old-Timer, but recently I have taken a special interest in re-reading about the games that ran once upon a time. What I have found is that, while many players these days consider games such as ILB to be suitable models for their all-encompassing idea of what an ARG is, they have no context on which to base their opinion. The result is that ideas floating around about how a game is run will tend toward mimicing recent successes.

The success of recent games like ILB and UrbanHunt have set the standard and become the model for newer players looking to experience the thrill BTS. Which isn't in itself a bad thing -- I freely admit to using my own experiences playing DreadHouse/UrbanHunt when I was planning my game. What happens when you have such a small sample of games that you have experienced is that you'll tend to stick with what you know when designing elements of your own personal creation.

One post in particular, asking why every game had ROT puzzles, stands out for me. Not because it was a strange question, but because it was an obvious one. It seems that players and new PMs have become so accustomed to certain types of puzzles that when composing their own they go with what they know. Again, I count myself amongst the guilty.

The bottom line is that PMs need a diverse and wide breadth of experience to draw from before considering elements of their game. While we now have great creative ideas on the table, it has to be said that we need more games of all different genres. While it seems counter-intuitive, I think the only way out of a "Creative Funk" is to have *more* games running at once. This way, prospective PMs can draw from many different points of experience when trying to find their own path.

[Varin]

[Diandra]

Very good points!

I'd venture one step beyond that and say if you really want to PM your own game, first see if you can join a team that's currently working on producing an ARG. Playing is a lot different than PMing. There's no way you can possibly know what you're getting yourself into -- until you get yourself into it!

Wet your feet a little. The audience isn't going anywhere; if anything, it's growing as the genre gains popularity. Your good ideas can marinate a little while (as you gain some experience)...and become great ideas.

Teaming up with an established PM can also help you get to know others you may want to recruit for your project when you're ready.

[imbri]

I've started to reply to this thread numerous times, always to close out as my thoughts became too long winded, too tangential, too academic. Perhaps I will again, but I'll give it a go mainly based on what varin said:

[Omnie]

[Nightmare Tony]

one thign nice is when games take on a different flavor and different ideas.
The variety is nice, instead of just replaying the Beast over and over.


Synagoga I like, also interactive heavy. I think its being run by a single person with a heck of a storyline. Its clever and I do want to see it finish.

Its all really a joy, and with everyone having their own interpretation on running a game, it makes it more joyful.

Colin: two wacked out companies, I LOVE that description!