unforum

[jocke]

Is The Lost Experience really an ARG?

[Phaedra]

Re: Is The Lost Experience really an ARG?

[jocke]

Re: Is The Lost Experience really an ARG?

[colin]

Re: Is The Lost Experience really an ARG?

[jocke]

Re: Is The Lost Experience really an ARG?

[Ehsan]

I say ARG. Not a very good ARG, but interesting nonetheless. They could have done much better with the material they have.

[Puppy_Zwolle]

By definition (and there isn't one everybody agrees on) there need to be 2 ingredients to an ARG.

1. There must be an alternate reality.
2. It must be a game. (And that game must be played/playing.)

Thats it.

Well not really,

but at least thats what makes a ARG basically ARG. ARG is all about capturing an audience. Engaging them in joining in that alternate reality.
Stuff like multi-media-methodes of information gathering and distribution are also a factor, some say a must some don't.
Stuff like a story with a beginning and an end also is a factor, some say a must some don't.
And there is more, like there must be a PM. But without him how would it get started. And an ARG is 'live', meaning events are mainly in the now once you missed them you must rely on the reports and recording of it by fellow players (the linear part of an ARG, see discussion elsewhere ).

(New) ARG's are also notoriously innovative. Some creative PM may put in new elements or leave out 'essential' elements and still have an ARG. Making an ironclad definition is therefore not easy or even doable. But as long as 'a game' can 'hold' an audience in that alternate reality you have an ARG.

Best 'definition' I can give is: Reality is in the eye of the beholder. If it feels like an ARG and plays like an ARG it is an ARG.
oh and,
It is listed on this forum under ARG's, thats also a good kloo.

[catherwood]

I love this thread. I'll have to actually read it some time. Crazy busy weekend. But, my flippant answer is always "how do you define an ARG?" -- remind me to finish that project I started last month.

(returned to add) My answer would be similar to Ehsan's: yes, this is an ARG, but a shallow one. There are many flavors of ARG. This one has made the attempt to convince us that the characters and entities involved are all real people working at real jobs. They have created that "tip of the iceberg" feeling, in that the Hanso Foundation website refers to other projects around the world which *might* exist. Unfortunately, we cannot scour the internet to find any further evidence of those things. That is why I call it "shallow", because we can only see what they want us to see, when they want us to see it.

In a deep, realistic ARG, I would like to think that we could find user email directories and hidden documents at any time, because in a real world these things would already exist. The fanwanking I do for The Lost Experience is that these documents do exist, but Persephone needs to create a hack to let us gain access to them. We're not guessing at the real exective logins, but waiting for more backdoors to open.

Realistic or not, ARG or not, immersive or not, is it fun? We do like our puzzles and webtrails and timewasters around this forum, and they don't all have to be a full-fledged ARG to entertain us. I think that's why some people want to expand the ARG umbrella to include almost any cross-media method of delivering a story, because we want to embrace the fun.

[Rolerbe]

"fanwanking"

Need to go into the glossary

[yanka]

I am reminded of this post. To quote: "No emotional investment in the characters = a game I don't care about." Like omnie, I am not going to debate whether a game is or is not an ARG without well-developed characters, but it certainly seems that every "good" game thus far featured this aspect most prominently. Piecing together a storyline is all nice and fine, but what really seems to get players addicted are the people - what got them to this point in their life? what will happen to them next? what do they do on a daily basis? what makes them tick? what makes them hurt? Take the show itself, for example: there are all of these emotional strings being pulled as we watch people's backstories, and we understand why they do what they do on the island because we glimpsed into their lives - we feel that we know them; we identify with them. We can't wait to see what will happen to them because we got attached. Without all of this emotional attachment to the characters, the general mystery of the island (i.e. the plot) wouldn't hook you on the show [so much], would it? Imho, the game should be doing the same thing. I mean - even years after a game ends, we keep talking about its characters, and we still miss them - much, much more so than the plots.

Now, I am not following TLE very closely, so I may be entirely off-base here, but it seems to me that there aren't really many characters that we can care about, are there? Tough to care for Persephone, for example, when I know nothing about her. Tough to hate that one guy when all we know is that he cheated on his wife. There isn't really anything to stir emotions one way or another - characters have names and bios, but that's not very well going to make me care for them.

So, to address the original question - I think that, when compared to previous games, TLE stands out not necessarily because of lack of interaction (and past games had drastically varying levels of interaction anyway), but because of the lack of personable, possible-to-identify-with, emotion-evoking characters.

[rose]

In my subjective opinion, the Lost Experience is lacking at least one of the essential elements of ARGs. To me, one of the defining characteristics of ARGs is that the audience has an active role in driving the story forward.

My sense of this game, so far, is that it is all laid out and will happen no matter what the audience does, much more like passively watching a television show than actively engaging us in advancing the plot. I think that the podcasts and the website updates, etc. will all occur with or without our involvement as an audience. We learn the story from the updates, but no action is required on our parts to trigger the updates or move the story forward.

That isn't true of games like: I love bees, where we had to answer the phones to unlock the story; Orbital Colony and Who is Benjamin Stove, where we had to solve puzzles and find packages to move the story forward; Art of the Heist and Last Call Poker, where we had to participate in live events for the next chapter to occur; and, PerplexCity, where we have had to do a variety of things to unlock and advance the story.

Those are just a few quick examples. But, I think that you can take my point from comparing the role of the players/ audience in those games versus the role of the players/audience in the Lost Experience.

[konamouse]

Then maybe it is rightfully named "Experience" and we can call it an ARE (Alternate Reality Experience)?

[jocke]

[colin]

Something I forgot to post earlier. As a footnote to this thread: The Lost Experience never marketed its self as an ARG

[Puppy_Zwolle]