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[Geppetto]

 Players as Individuals or as a Group?

[Tragic Absence]

[Geppetto]

Certainly! Rephrased, we know of some ARGs where a character will meet with a small group of players -- sometimes only one or two players. Our question is this: does this run too great a risk that those two players will keep the information gained (that is, whatever new info the characters reveal at their meeting) to themselves? If you were running an ARG, would you be willing to take that risk?

[Tragic Absence]

oh yes, i would risk that, because it furthers the game slightly, and i doubt the players would keep such information

[Yo-L]

I don't know if you have much experience with ARGs in general, and I don't mean to sound rude, but I get the idea that you didn't dive deep into the ARG world. Yet .

I have to admit I'm not an (experienced) player. But as far as I've read, people almost always work together. It's on a very rare occasion that players play individually. When your game gets a topic on this forum, you can assume that everyone will share the information they get personally in the topic. Most of the times even when the PM instructs them not to share the info.
With Live events it's the same thing.

There are some interesting topics and discussions about collective play VS individual/ team play (where independent teams are formed). I think the general opinion of experienced PMs is that individual play, or teams playing against eachother, is very difficult. Maybe you can search the forums yourself to find out why.

[Geppetto]

Thank you so much! I feel very much reassured after reading your comments. Up until this point in our planning process, my assumption was that the players would in fact work together - however, a debate arose among the other PMs and me, and my confidence in my previous assumption had begun to melt.

To be honest, you called it: while I am the least experienced among the PMs on our team, I've sort of been given the role of team leader -- which has made things interesting, to say the least. This will be my first time as PM.

Again, thank you for all your constructive comments!

[Coal]

You can never rely on players to share information. Always have a plan for when it goes wrong. Most players do not post all email interaction somewhere they can all see it. They normally just relate back things that seem important to them, and this can be a problem when something is important but doesn't seem it to the individual. Always make sure information gets to more than one player. Never rely on one player to communicate back to the others.

[jlr1001]

[Geppetto]

Thank you to everyone who's replied thus far. This gives me a lot to ponder...

It sounds to me that I should probably start thinking of more ways to communicate via either public meetings/events or via some sort of special in-game forum set up by us specifically for this purpose.

We had initially planned some IM/e-mail contacts between characters and players - would you differentiate very much between the two? To my mind, it seems as though e-mail would be slightly safer as a communication format than IM, if only because it's more likely to be kept, revisited, and fwded to other players.

-Geppetto

[kwool]

Here's my view of it:

The game and its information must be personal enough to make each player feel important and immersed in the story; yet broad enough for new players to jump it.

Take that as you wish... each game is different and requires different ideas and ways to make this work.