unforum

[FLmutant]

However individual players choose to view their desire for the curtain is great, but that isn't really going to influence what companies do, just take a look at the games happening now (not a one of which has anything close to a traditional curtain in the way most people have described it here.) Sadly, what you are arguing for is also, in many cases, the definition of a hoax, and I think hoaxing is essentially incompatible with the trust mechanisms necessary to make a good ARG work.

In my perspective, if I was forced to work with the curtain metaphor, the curtain is about protecting humans from characters. It has nothing to do with the PMs. UF is a place that my characters can't see. In the same way, my production environment is a place my characters can't see. All of that is out of game, behind the curtain. It seems a horrible convolution to try to define if the player's OOG space is separate from the PM's OOG space.

So whether or not I exist in an OOG space, for example posting here, even though in the IG space new content actually went up, is really immaterial to the concept of "curtain". Similarly, whether I choose to let you as players peek a little more into my chunk of OOG space (in the same way you hope I peek a little bit here in your OOG space) is a design decision, certainly not any kind of hard fast requirement, and certainly not an intrinsic part of the definition.

My only concern is if my OOG communication has a negative impact on the play experience. As long as it doesn't, it isn't an issue ... it might even be an advantage, say over being viewed as a hoax. Sadly, the guiding rules of a good production are geared only to your expectations, but also to the expectations of people ranging from law enforcement to journalists to people who think your "ARG" is a "hoax site" (like Wired seems to think about Dark Knight.)

All the rest is just semantics and doesn't really make any developer or player have a better experience -- it reduces down to the arguments of one design philosophy over another. Much of which, I think, also produces an oversteerage from the real time feedback of too small a segment of the player base, because you're forced to apply psychotherapy to feedback source you supposedly can't directly query.

Fewer absolute declarations might produce more new insights, instead of (like this thread shows) just more dramatic blow ups. If PMs are told they can't talk to their fans except through the most of subtle of mechanisms, you can expect all but the most subtle of new PMs to screw it up at some point ... and, looking at the genre, the curtain might well add to the spectacular implosions.

The definition curtain is less important than good sense of timing and showmanship. The curtain won't save you from a lack of those things.

[Jas0n]

My logic is somewhat different regarding the absolute need for a curtain, and my answer is much shorter than most of the above responses:

PMs often do their job in the nude or near-nude - the curtain protects our sanity!

[ScarpeGrosse]

[vpisteve]

...or be made to LOOK like they're turned off.

[bagsbee]

Medium to slightly long answer:
I love a good curtain, the iron-ier, the better. My first (and to date, favorite) game was Metacortechs, and a big part of the reason is that I had no freaking clue who was running it - the mysterious-ness of it was so tantalizing, I just couldn't wait to scour the in-game sites and forums every single day. I didn't want play "Hunt the PM", and even though at that point, I was a UF noob and wouldn't have known who they were anyway, just the fact the I knew would've killed it for me.

My brief (and only) foray into PM-dom started with a completely open curtain, which was only later closed and solidified, but it drove me absolutely crazy that by that point, everyone knew who was running the show. I felt the same way as I do as a player - I don't want to communicate with you except through the game, I want the quality of the experience to stand on its' own.

Granted, if [Brand Name PM Team] is running a major campaign for [Deep Pocketed Corporate Sponsor], it may be naive and unrealistic to expect them to maintain an iron curtain - they are, by and large, marketing campaigns, after all.

You know what would be really, really nice? If the other players didn't feel compelled to blurt out "oh yeah, that's a [42|GMD|Dave S.|etc, etc] game" every time a new game is mentioned in chat. Can we at least try to maintain the illusion? Pretty please?

Short answer:
Everything Scrappy said. Except the pee analogy, wtf.

[catherwood]

Everyone is contributing such wonderful stuff in their replies, and i'm agreeing with a lot of it. I just wanted to stir up one little point buried in here:

[vpisteve]

Appending my earlier post, it strikes me that there's nothing to prevent PMs from including a support@ or contact@ email address somewhere that players can use to contact someone behind the curtain. Curtain or no, that's never a bad idea.

Plus, it serves the added bonus of providing a place The Press can contact you.

[ScarpeGrosse]

[krystyn]

[SpaceBass]

A shared experience does not necessarily imply that everyone has the same experience. The totality of the shared experience created is never accessible to any one person.

[Rekidk]

[ScarpeGrosse]

[SpaceBass]

Bumping because I've posted my long answer.

[danteIL]

Nice stuff with lots to digest...

But this:

[FLmutant]

Dante, you said the word that I think is frequently missing from the conversations: trust. On the developer side, when I talk to people who say they want to commission this kind of work, trust is biggest issue of education. As you can probably imagine from looking at the advertising around, trust isn't always in the top-5 list of things that clients are motivated by (the typical list is more like profit, sales, acclaim, profit, promotion.)

In my personal opinion, the curtain as this community likes it only works if (1) they trust the PMs and (2) that trust is important to the PMs. Those who have enjoyed trusting a PM without knowing who they even were ended up finding that trust hadn't been misplaced -- which is a pretty magic experience, and leaves a big mark on people. Those who put their trust in a PM and ended up not finding that trust met sometimes call the experience "implosion".

Brooke and I had a knock-down argument about the "metacommunication" versus "meta communication" issue (with the first being essentially what I would call "the wink" -- a second reading in a character's text that is from the PMs not the character -- and the second one using the same definition you had, communication about the game or about gaming.) Under that kind of definition, what the community is really saying is "if in doubt, metacommunication is a better design choice than meta communication".

Your argument, Dante, comes down to sometimes being dissatisfied with getting metacommunication instead of meta communication ... about something "meta" (as in, about the game). I totally get that, as there are some things I want to communicate that I don't want to do through metacommunication for fear it makes interpretation murky. That means we say in meta communication "this game is not for kids" ... otherwise, if we try to give you meta communication through a character you might take it foreshadowing (people in WV warned about bears thought for sure that meant I had hired some trained bears or something, rather that straight out being an OOG warning about bears and food handling during the camping.)

Specifically, though ... say, if you were a player of one of my games: I'm never categorically opposed to OOG conversations, I am just extremely hesitant to be the one to start them, and I never want them to be used as an IG mechanism replacement (no asking "so how does it end?") So if one of my players ever felt the trust starting to erode, contacting me is always an option. It might be, if that erosion or frustration is visible elsewhere, we already know about it.

Sometimes, though, it helps build trust to just hear that. "Message received and taken seriously" is a powerful trust reinforcer, doesn't necessarily kill immersion and can happen alot quicker than the on-stage adjustments we might have made behind the scenes based upon that same feedback. YMMV.

Edit for Spacebass: Wow, must digest. But on first reading, my initial reaction is that you managed to write seven pages about the nature of the curtain without ever once using the word "trust".