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[SpaceBass]

 Feature: Undefining ARG - 11/10/06

[Dorkmaster]

I love the "paper". In fact, I'm quite surprised more have not commented on it. (Especially you Meta-Philosophy-Whatever junkies out there!)

Anyway, I really like the idea of the "sphere of chaotic fiction" wherein ARG resides fairly in the center. While I don't think the graphs necessarily will help when explaining the genre (foresees funny looks and more dismissive hand gestures) but for those at least partly hooked, and trying to find out more about the genre, this is an excellent foundation on which to start making good ideas and creating future thought on the genre.

The idea I like most is that it is truly defining, but in a completely non-restrictive way. The "Next Big Game" ^TM could totally do something never before seen in ARG and still hold up somewhere within the "cloud". (Which funnily enough (and yes, funnily is a word, dammit) brings us to cloudmakers, perhaps?)


But again, excellent writing, excellent thought, and excellent conclusions. I love it, and will definitely share it with anyone I see as brave enough to consider the brain-'sploding aftereffects of reading it. Good on you, dude!

[Phaedra]

I like the "chaotic fiction" terminology, but have to disagree with this:

[SpaceBass]

You make an excellent point and it is certainly true that speculation about the deeper meaning or detail of story and character may continue long after an ARG is "over." But remember my original definition of chaotic fiction: "[A] fictional construct that begins with a set of rules, uses those rules to run its scenario through an organic "computer" comprised of audience and author, and ends with a finite body of work that was not predetermined."

It is important to remember that the fictional constructs to which I refer are created by both the authors and audience involved, and this is one of my metrics. So while you can speculate about symbology or action or detail of a traditional book such as a novel, that speculation would not qualify as a small-scale ARG because there was no conversation with the author in the creation of the fictional construct, the embodiment of the history of the fiction that persists. I might have been more clear in the article that the embodiment should be available to third parties for subsequent review and enjoyment.

Anyway my point is that there is a qualitative difference between the speculation that occurs as a part of the process of generation, or chaotic play, and speculation that occurs outside of the sphere of that play.

[Phaedra]

Okay.

I'm just not sure that the difference is as distinct as all that.

Thinking back to my experience playing ILB, during which I had no clue what an ARG was, no conception of how much we players might actually affect the story, and therefore no intention to affect the story, my motives for speculation, for intepretation, for analysis of character voicing, and so on weren't any different from my motives in engaging in the same sorts of activities with "normal" literature: I liked the story and wanted to be closer to it, basically.

After considering it for a while, I've come to the conclusion that speculation and interpretation/analysis/other activities akin to literary criticism might be an attempt on the part of players to interact with a part of the experience that seems non-interactive (I remember suggesting as much to Jane in IRC one day...).

Going at it backwards, I'm not sure that the fact that we usually don't frame our experience of most literature (or movies, or poetry, or whatever) in terms of "interaction" or "gaming" that we're not actually trying at some level to interact with non-interactive fiction, to participate in the creation of meaning even for texts that don't seem particularly open to it, and to in some sense make any story we engage with our own.

It may be that ARGs just respond much more visibly to what we have been trying to do for a long time anyway.

[Lovek]

[SpaceBass]

I did not intend to imply that the quality of any speculation or discussion about a "static" production were inferior (or superior) in any way to that in connection with the "organic" production I am attempting to describe. But I want to make clear that the definition I propose includes an inherent requirement that the static fiction created must be produced while an audience "consumes" (and speculates about or discusses) it, and this is the context in which I wrote above.

The definition of chaotic fiction also requires that there be some quantification on each of the three described metrics to qualify. If a particular production satisfies the original definition, and we can point to a spot or range upon each of the three metrics and say it resides about there, there, and there, then it exists in the "sphere of chaotic fiction."

I don't see that there is any requirement for a particular audience member to be aware of any effect they may have upon the production or even to be aware of the production itself as long as they are participating during the play. However, it does seem fairly accepted that a part of the ruleset of any campaign should include audience awareness that it is indeed a fictional formulation (though this issue has always been up for debate).

This is why I felt it was important to separate out the experience (or process) of production from the fictional construct produced. I am comfortable with the idea that if I write a book review in which I speculate upon the motives of the characters, I am not adding to or revising that book by publishing my review. On the other hand, I may be adding to a greater meta-fiction about the mythos inspired by that book, but the book itself still remains unchanged.

Consider the movie "The Game" (which I finally saw at Giskard's recently). Were that movie to have been a real life documentary (deity forbid), we could consider the time span covered by the movie to be the chaotic play and the documentation of that play (the movie) to be the chaotic fictional construct. We can later speculate about what happened when we watch that movie, but there is no longer any ability to affect its embodiment or the creation thereof.

Similarly, ILoveBees, Last Call Poker, and Urban Hunt are all completed fictional constructs; we can discuss them and dissect them but we no longer affect their production, we only describe it. They may be chaotic fiction forever but they were only chaotic play once. And they are chaotic fiction, where the (real) movie "The Game" isn't, only because they fulfill the given definition.

[FLmutant]

Don't worry, the theory dorks were just sharpening their knives!

Spacebass, really did enjoy the paper. It has been popping around in my head quite a bit, banging up against other ideas. These are the kinds of discussions that are valuable for advancing "the art" IMHO. That said, I come at it from a different viewpoint than your paper, Spacebass. I thought it might be interesting to explore some of those differences -- as an academic debate in taxonomy. I admit I have a vested interest in wanting to see ARG deconstructed, but more importantly I share you desire to provide a framework for non-ARG practitioners to pin this work in the space of overall narrative and experience theory.

Problem is, you put too much good stuff in your piece, it's hard to make a single coherant counter-argument without just creating a competing model, which wouldn't advance debate. So I'm going to be camping this thread for a few weeks and try throwing some of these angles out, see what sticks.

I wanted to start with some assumptions that I wanted to challenge, some of the key differences that I think lead to later differences in perspective.

First off, I drew as a meta-context from your piece that you view "an ARG" as a closely parallel noun to, say, "a film" or "a game" or "a novel" or "a software package". Early in your piece you seperate out "the experience of playing an ARG" from the "fictional construct of an ARG" and then proceed to focus your primary attention to the later rather than the former.

At a retreat with a bunch of interactive and traditional artists I went to a few years back, I always found the performance artists (especially the theorists) to be my bane. For them, "the documentary arts" were always inferior artifacts. "Meer documentation" of a performance, which is the real work of theoretical study. Sure, you can watch a movie of a concert, but that is not the same thing as having attended that concert, it is meer documentation of the art not the art. Oy!

But I could make a convincing argument that ARGs are more of that stripe than anything. The media (that will later become "meer documentation") has become a living part of the experience -- the medium no longer mediates between the storytellers and the audience. That makes the relationship involve far more collaboration between the two.

As a creator (or a performer), I get to know the audience of an ARG, just as I would "get to know" the woman in the fourth row on the Sunday afternoon show with the outrageous laugh. Audience members "joining an ARG late" tend to feel they have missed out on part of the experience, even if they can "read up" on what transpired. Unfiction has to explain to people "how to read a completed ARG" because as documentation, it lacks much of the context of the performance.

Secondly, I think the term "chaotic" might be dangerously perceptual. As an accomplished decepter, things can be made to look very chaotic and still be on rails, where conversely things can look totally scripted and yet really be immensely reactive under the surface. You're looking for something that describes an audience-yielding authorship structure. Such a phrase exists.

There's a scale they already use when they talk about art and performance as systems, and describe them as lying somewhere between being an "open system" (full of audience input and very chaotic by your model) and a "closed system" (with no audience input rather than experience and interpretation). So symphony performances tends to be closed systems, while drum circles tend to be open, to pick one example. These days, because of the technology of interaction, even traditionally "closed" media are getting "open" -- television with an audience cellphone element that really changes the outcome, for example, or a digital painting that can be manipulated by viewers.

One drum circle could look completely chaotic and another seem completely magically self-organizing off of the same ruleset and participants.

Third thing, the taxonomy geek in me has a really hard time with the ruleset and coherance axis ... at leat if you are trying to describe fiction. In a way, "ruleset" is a way of describing how much gameplay there is in a piece ... probably from "very little" (choose your own adventure book) to "elaborate". Similarly, do you really think that something with "no plot" can even be described as "fiction"? At that point, you've probably stumbled into some other territory ... poetry maybe, or perhaps play.

Fourth (and final for this post, I promise) thing is that your taxonomy seems to miss one of the very core elements that separates ARGs from other types of games and fictions. I've turned more and more now to using the phrase "platformless" to describe it. When we talk about a film or television show or a novel, we are talking about an instantized and mediated object. When we talk about an ARG, we're in the abstract like if we were talking about "narrative" -- a narrative ARG structure can be played out on telephones, in videos, in real life, in basically any artifact capable of carrying some small chunk of narrative in a layer.

Don't dismiss the incredible difference of that from other artforms being practiced (and consumed.) In many ways, the ARG audience EXPECTS a certain level of that ... it is intrinsic in the "alternate reality" portion of the name, and in the mantra "this is not a game". Currently, in your scale, a work that happened just in instant message appears no differently in space than something as over-elaborate as Heist ... at some point, doesn't having too little variety of media incarnation diminish the ARGness of something?

[Phaedra]

[Hanna]

I recently came across your article and have been reading along. I want to express my admiration of your writing skill and ability to make readers read from the beginning to the end. I would like to read newer posts and to share my thoughts with you.



Edit: Spam links removed. -SpaceBass

[Dottoe]

Awfully polite bot.