unforum

[TheGamer]

Would-be Puppetmaster seeking answers

[redct]

[Nighthawk]

[labfly]

[AUZ505]

[konamouse]

DO NOT use an existing company. ARG players start digging and pre-existing companies will not stop them from making phone calls or bugging the wrong people looking for intel, characters, or trying to dig deeper into legitimate websites. It could get messy. And if you use an existing company as the bad guy? You could get in trouble for making them look bad.

Use a fictional company! Create a website for it if your players need to find that information online.

[labfly]

i will continue to disagree, AUZ505. having an "understanding" of any art form can produce a product, but being a player is truly the only way to really understand the user experience which i think is essential to making a great ARG.

can you make an arg without playing? of course. these boards are littered with examples. and the large majority have imploded due to this. i encourage new pms to have some respect for the genre. playing some games and immersing yourself into the archives to learn, can only make your first ARG have a better chance of being something great.

i don't know about the project you've tapped, AUZ505. but i would guess it could have been even better, had they taken the time to play some ARGs rather than just understanding them.

[redct]

Awesome point there. I feel kind of stupid that with all the time I've spent around here that I didn't think of that . ARGers dig a lot and they'll probably annoy the hell out of anything they find that seems real. See I Love Bees and some fan's voicemail number that just happened to have a tangentially related message.

[krystyn]

When I started working on my first ARG, the Beast was still running, so it would be disengenuous for me to claim that thou shalt play many ARGs before making one. (but, like, big old disclaimer: I also loved picking through the Blair Witch website a few years previously for pieces of Heather's journal, and have always liked story/real life confluences, so having the Beast define the lines a bit more felt like a natural progression in my work as an actor and writer.)

However, I think the issues becomes broader than this when you consider a few things:

Are you a gamer, a storyteller? Does imagination fire up your soul? Can you believe in a million impossible things before breakfast? Are you doing this for you, or are you hoping your players will feel the spark of this universe you've invited them to?

I mean, ARGs are really huge katamaris of life experience and storytelling mashed into one glorious, mostly real-time thing. If you know what it's like to read a book so intensely the words and the paper disappear and you're suddenly elsewhere, you have an idea of what it's like to play an ARG.

But you gotta wanna do it for the players, and not your personal glory. The world building is up to you, but the re-telling and ownership belongs to the people that fall down the rabbithole, and the gift is that you let them own it and feel that fire, as a community.

However, the archive here of experiences and methods and failures and successes is a treasure trove, and it would be a shame to discount it, so I agree with labfly about doing a bit of research, about looking at the young history of the genre. There are so many things that happen in almost every game - mistakes or serendipitous coolness, that it's good to have the support and wisdom of people who have been through it, on both sides of the curtain.

Having the ARG community find your stuff before Joe Web Surfer is not the end of the world, but it might do you well to make the story the #1 thing, and have 'puzzles' that are more about what pieces you *haven't* given out, so that people who aren't code-crackers will still feel powerful, and have something to talk about. Also, reconsider having a series of codes that become more difficult over time, unless they're an essential part of your plot (conversely, that could be the fun part of the challenge: build a story that *needs* this structure of codes!).

random advice that you didn't really ask for:

- ARG PM'ing will take up more time than you think is possible, even if you've budgeted generously for it in your calendar.

- The things you think are most brilliant might never even strike the fancy of the playerbase. Be prepared for your players to do unexpected things, and to feel much differently about your own material than you do.

- Don't put material out there into the wild until it needs to be live. And if it's gotta be there, for whatever reason, don't name files sequentially, or with dictionary-guessable names.

- Be ready to throw things out - full plots, full beats, thousands of words of writing. You must simultaneously own your work, love your work, and also be ready to trash it if it's not working. The game is not about you, after all.

- Give your characters lots of story, and love them. If you can't love them, it is possible your players will find loving them difficult as well.

- Don't tell everything to your players. Give them feasible and logical pieces that might fall out of your world were it real, and let them re-tell the story. Give your players agency. They are the heroes, after all.