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[addlepated]

Parallels in Film, TV, and ARG?

[Slyfox]

I'm of the opinion that ARGs are at the "Early cinema and the `train effect'" stage. i.e.

[MageSteff]

Re: Parallels in Film, TV, and ARG?

[GuyP]

Well, in some ways I'd agree that present-day ARGs resemble early 'othermedia' - we've got a lot of changes left to go through. Everyone can agree that this is a very young genre of gaming and storytelling, but while some people expect the medium to consolidate as time goes by, I anticipate it will diversify and fragment. Not only will the current crop of PMs seek to expand the format's possibilities, but the worlds of TV, film and so on will start to cross-pollinate with existing ARG structures.

It's easy to forget that The Beast itself was just (!) a wild experiment that might never have worked. It doesn't make any sense to assume PMs will suddenly decide the current format is the best one and keep rehashing the same old formulas. Experimentation is exactly why I Love Bees tried to avoid using puzzles, and why Last Call Poker brushed aside the conventions of Tinagacity (tm) - and that's just from the same PMs!

I expect that, rather than wait for audiences to start accepting our little status quo, PMs will continue to move away from presenting their games "as real" and provide more pointers that they are "only" games. In fact, there really haven't been that many games *ever* that have tried to be completely believable.

That's because no matter what media you look at, people are generally pretty hung up on knowing the difference between truth and fiction. They don't like feeling deceived or seeing other people buy into a perceived deception - ARGers are hardly immune to this, as hostility to wannabe ILB sequels has shown. From War Of The Worlds to James Frey, people get real pissy when they're unsure of what's real and what's not. From a commercial perspective, that's a seriously unprofitable reaction. From a creative perspective, it's equally unnecessary - tons of people are wrapped up in Lost, for instance, even though it's obviously just a TV series. TINAGness just doesn't make a game that much more compelling, unless by which you mean "the game doesn't know it's a game." In that case, the Lostaways don't know they're on a TV show either, so it's a moot point. The fourth wall exists everywhere.

(It strikes me that GMD Studios, with AOTH and Benjamin Stove, blur the line more than most by using comparatively realistic storylines, thereby potentially confusing a newcomer for a few more minutes. Ironically, by choosing subject matter that's more mass-market than scifi / fantasy, a new problem of transparency emerges. Ain't that just grand?)

Addlepated says "The fiction movies that came out angered people because they weren't real," insinuating that people who stumble over ARGs and shout "HOAX!" will one day just Get Over It. I think it's more likely that we are the ones lagging behind the curve, and the closest comparison to those early cinemagoers are UFers getting antsy over the AOTH easter egg films and suchlike.

(A couple of references: a very pertinent Sean Stewart interview that relates to my points regarding ARG's evolution, and an article by Adrian Hon in relation to ARGs vs. "hoaxing.")

[imbri]

Another reference to add to GuyP's list: Jane's A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play. (warning: pdf)


I think a lot of this comes down to "the uncanny valley." Yeah, I know, every sort of everything likes to point to the uncanny valley at various times, but I do think that it relates to ARGs fairly well.

I don't know how many times I've read or heard people saying they want things to be real! Make it more real! I don't want to know it's a game! And, frankly, I find that a load of hogwash. The truth is, we want to know where the lines are, we need to know where those lines are. When things look too real, we don't deal with it well. When we don't know exactly what we're dealing with we get anxious or, even, irritable. As a game designer (or author or filmmaker or artist), that's sometimes a great emotion to play on, but it has to be done carefully and it's easy to take it too far. And, the moment you do, people stop looking at the game and thinking "wow! this is so cool! it's so real!" and they start saying, "wtf?! this is game! can't you see that?! look! it's just a stupid promotion!"

So, I'd have to say that these same people getting mad over the promotional aspects of the game are not so mad that it's a promotion and they aren't feeling tricked or fooled, it's just that they need to reinforce the boundaries and they do this by expressing whatever it is that seems the most offensive at the moment. In some cases, it's the fact that it's a promotion.

(also, I pretty much agree with GuyP's post... so to save you all from one of my 5000 word essays, just reread his post in my voice adding in various random tangents, a couple grammatical errors, lots of ...s, a few howevers therefores and althoughs, and a handful of misspelled words and we'll call it a day)

[GuyP]

Actually, the promotion angle wasn't something I really touched upon. One does occasionally witness an ARG dismissed as a mere "advert" - it's as if people find the idea of entertainment-as-marketing more offensive than an out-and-out ad break. Perhaps because it's relatively unusual, people feel like they're somehow being "tricked."

Yet there's clearly no trickery involved, as (in the UK, at least) the really successful advertising campaigns are ones which don't really talk much about the product and instead seek to create something interesting or "remarkable", to use Seth Godin's phrase. It's fundamentally the same marketing concept condensed into 30 seconds of screentime. People are actually uploading adverts to Google Video! By the same token, just because my local rock festival is now the "Carling Weekender", that doesn't make the 100+ bands who play "adverts."

Some consumers don't seem to appreciate that ARGs and viral promotions are, in some ways, a victory - we've collectively become so media-savvy that marketers are having to provide real, valuable content and entertainment just to get our attention and get us talking to each other. Nearest analog: Advertisers not just producing TV spots, but having to produce their own TV series in order to create the commercial breaks. (I bet 24 featured Ford cards as much, if not more than, AOTH featured Audi cars.)

I agree with imbri's suggestion that some people just freak out and "it's an advert!" is the most disparaging criticism to hand. It also depends on how flexible one's attitudes are. If all marketing is bad, and ARGs are marketing, then ARGs must be bad too. That's probably a fairly widespread opinion, in truth, as not many people can honestly say "I love being marketed to!"

Do I have any simple answers to this? Not really. It might be an attitude that will wane with time. I'm confident it will become increasingly rare for ARGs that promote related IP (like AI, Halo 2, Perplex City cards, etc) as media starts to become more... uh, cross-media. "Don't go and see the Harry Potter film! It's just a dumb film to promote the books!" That sounds ridiculous already.

It's interesting to note that a book, allegedly penned by one of the Lostaways who died in the crash, is available for pre-order on Amazon. It's more interesting to note that it's been tagged with 'shameless tie-in', 'money grab' and 'genius marketing'. It seems nobody considers it to be an artistically valid part of the same creative work.