unforum

[catherwood]

How can you replay a game which supposedly happened in real time? For example, if a web page one day in April says "Stay tuned for our big announcement on May 1st", then changes on May 1st, then the next day changes with a synopsis of "old news", that portion of the game is no longer playable in real time.

To replay the game later, either the game sites need to be changed, or the timeline of the action must account for events happening in the past rather than the future, or the game simply doesn't progress in REAL real time.

If i ever do finish my survey project, I envision different levels for this attribute of ARGs. Some games have no specific timeline, others might very well be tied to real world events and have a fixed timeline; there are probably ranges in between, too.

The games with a fixed timeline (fixed in synch with our real world events, that is), surely cannot be replayed, but I don't think ARGs must strictly follow this model.

[rowan]

As one who got started on ARGs from going through and 'playing' a finished game - here's my perspective.

I think that as long as a game has a good archive system and a good guide to go along with it, newcomers can experience just about all of the game as it occured. Sure, they may not be able to experience the rush of getting to go to a live event, or having their emailed answered, but they can still solve puzzles and figure out the interconnecting story lines. I may not have played The Beast when it came out, but I believe I obtained a vast majority of the experience by going through the Guide and archives at Cloudmakers. It definitly got me hooked on wanting more and it gave me a great basis as to how to approach other games that I played.

I can see there being problems recreating games that are IM/email/live event heavy. The more individual a game talks directly to its individual players, rather than a large group, the less 'welcome' late-latecomers will feel. It's one thing to read a bunch of emails that an entire group got. It's another thing to slog through pages of personal IM convos only to find out that absolutely nothing was said.

[catherwood]

[imbri]

[FLmutant]

Brooke, I'm in your camp: I don't see that ARGs would have to be unrepeatable. In fact, when I see questions like got raised in this thread, I find them to be fodder for creative thinking, I start rolling around ways they could be repeatable, maybe even repeatable by new PMs working from a rough script (one could use the RPG comparison of "modules" purchased by "dungeon masters" -- was each play session in each basement of that module "the same"? did they share a common experience for different audiences?)

[MageSteff]

[imbri]

[MageSteff]

[krystyn]

Sometimes I cry at Kodak commercials, and sometimes I don't. (depends on the time of month, or something. I dunno. Life is so complicated.)

I can re-read the same book a million times, and get something different out of it every time, because of life experience, the day I've had, or that I am analyzing the lead-up to the plot resolution.

Like, I am totally looking forward to someday watching Season 1 of Veronica Mars again, knowing what I know now.


So, even the SAME audience could play the same game, but maybe wearing new pants, so they're definitely at least cosmetically different, and it would all still seem new and interesting. Possibly.

[Rolerbe]

[Puppy_Zwolle]

I agree, any ARG can be 'redone' but indeed the experience will not be the same. If I replay an old adventure-game like 'Discworld' I don't play it because of the puzzles, I know thse so well I dream about them. It is the fun I had following the story that makes me come back.

In an interview the Monty Python crew gave after their historic performance at the Bowl, click the following anecdote came up (paraphrasing):
We did the same routines we did but nobody laughed at the spots we expected them to. Then I looked through a hole in the curtain and saw almost the whole audience mouthing every word utterd on stage. They knew ever word.

The Mousetrap, longest running play ever (afaik), is a 'whodunit'. After all those years people comming to the theatre should know who did it but still they come.

Reruns are nice but don't hold the experience the new article has. They should have a label of their own. I suggest calling it Vintage-ARG. V-ARG.

[krystyn]

/me starts affixing labels to all of her books and movies and games, too. "V-Momo, by Michael Ende," "V-V-My Cousin Vinnie," "V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-Chrono Trigger."

Soon, my whole house will be a shining, catalogued paean to Fly Lady!

[Puppy_Zwolle]

V-krystynsleepdeprivation.

No, that does not work. My point being; V-ARG's (can in most cases) have more speed to them as almost all debate about what's next and on the puzzlefront will be skipped. So probably no V-krystynsleepdeprivation. As a new player you should know you are in a "time-condensed"-version of that ARG.

I did not mean for you to paste every item in every collection you own with shiny V's....although that will look stunning by some standard.

A V-Momo? NEVER!!! Time is relative, it is how you use it that matters. Great example thanks.

[catherwood]

Hard to believe that I've left my project dormant for two weeks now. I did build a template for the survey I had in mind. Attached is a non-functioning example of what you would see when selecting the (imaginary) game "Horton Hears a Who" from a list of games in the database (still being built).

Every game will be subjected to the exact same questions. The answers will be stored and combined to create a weighted profile for each game. The results will not be purely factual, but a snapshot of what our player community remembers about the games they have played. People will have differing opinions, so this will amount to voting on whether "Horton Hears a Who" had deep vs. superficial immersion, for example, not whether or not it was successful or enjoyed.

I did tack on a general "thumbs up, thumbs down" opinion question at the end. All this will show is how varied our personal tastes are on various gaming styles as a whole, not the individual elements. The number one question (as promised) is whether or not in your opinion that specific game falls under the category of ARG. We're going to disagree here too, and that's really all I wanted to show -- that we each carry our own internal working definition of what is or is not an ARG. We're not all using the same terminology, so let's see just how divergent we really are.

I will consider contructive criticism while i start to build the back-end to run this on a server. BTW, I wasn't planning on having any log-in system, so it wouldn't know who was voting on which games; you would have to remember if you already filled out the survey for a particular game, and people could skew the results by submitting multiple times on a single game. It's not perfect, it's not scientific, but it's also not claiming to be a major research project.

[vpisteve]

Hey guys.

For some more Meta goodness to throw in the pot, Sean Stewart has recently updated his site, and included an article about ARGs he wrote a while back, between ILB and LCP.

Link.