unforum

[FLmutant]

[Silent|away]

Uh...er...

I haven't seen numbers, no will I ever. I dislike television. But I think I might want to come to the defense of the television producers.

People are afraid of game addicition. People are afraid of MMO addiction. They are afraid of it, because it is in some cases, a withdrawal from real life into a 'fake life'. Like alternate reality is not the 'true' reality, it's a fake reality. And if the fake reality is more enjoyable than the 'true' reality, then it can lead to problems. Real problems.

Not problems such as you pushing off Directors from large buildings...but problems like getting fat, having no friends, overexhaustion, and all the other pitfalls of addiction. Add in violence alleged to be cataylsted by games, such as D&D and Doom...and wow. You got tension.

It is this fear of addiction and violence that causes designers of television shows to exploit it and us eit. People are already afraid of ARGs and games, the designers are just taking advantage of it. And, I say, why not? Many ARGs take advantage of our fear of mega-corporations. You don't see mega-corproations posting messages on their secret Mega-Corporation BB upset about the fact that people are afraid of them and that they are being protrayed in a negative light.

And I don't want people to trivilaize addiction to gaming. It is powerful, it is dangerous, and it can ruin your First Life. It may be rare, but just because it's rare doesn't mean it's not that terrible...It can be seen to be just like addiction to books, with people barricading themselves into ivory towers, just reading and having no social connections.

And I think people will never get used to ARGs and games. Oh, sure, you'll get more people casually playing them, and they may be at least somewhat accepted, assuming the whole ARG gerne isn't a fad or going to self-implode, but you will still see negative sterotypes...because of this fear of addiction and violence. It will always remain.

[imbri]

[Shutaro]

[rose]

Real shows.

[NettleMouth]

First time I have ever heard of ARG

[notgordian]

Welcome, NettleMouth! You came to the right place! Just a disclaimer, ARGs haven't merged with MMORPGs yet (as was depicted in the episode). Depending on your tastes, you'll be interested in different games going on right now. Information on the bigger games are organized on wiki pages, so catching up on something already running isn't inordinately difficult.

General explanation/history of ARGs: Wikipedia entry on ARGs

GMD Studios is currently putting on Eldritch Errors (cthulhu mythos)...the game is on a brief hiatus as they just finished the second episode, which ended with a horror-themed camping trip for a few players that was supposedly mindblowingly awesome.

As a promotion for the upcoming "The Dark Knight" movie, groups of players are gathering together in various cities to take pictures dressed in Joker getups as part of WhySoSerious. The campaign has made numerous references to "See You in December", so there's a distinct possibility something big is going to happen in a month or so.

The video game "Uncharted" is putting on Sullivan's Stories...supposedly there are posters up in major cities and some form of treasure hunt going on.

Silver Ladder seems to be fairly popular now, although I have no idea what's been going on with it recently...something to do with the deck of cards...? Zetria Atrian has also been getting some good reviews from experienced players. There's a whole lot more you can find in the News&Rumors section.

As for resources, there's an IRC channel you can access here (there's usually people online more than willing to help), and ARGNet, a news site on ARGs with a (mostly) weekly netcast.

Also check out the QuickStart Guide and advice for finding the right game for you, stickied on top of the Player Help page (Link)

[mexicocity]

dont quite get it but hunh

[catherwood]

man, that episode sure had a lot of clunker lines. My favorite from memory is "a misaligned arrow is a classic A.R.G. clue", heh. (For people new to this forum, you'll have to excuse me, but I laughed at the idea of *anything* being called "classic" when it comes to ARGs.) I taped the show, so i can rewind tomorrow and transcribe a bit more, maybe. I definitely need to capture Amita's definition of an ARG being a treasure hunt (which is far too narrow and simplistic and misses the point of the games as we play them).

I'd call what they were doing a Pervasive Game. There are prototypes for the kind of hardware which overlays a map or game data onto a realtime image of your surroundings. [must find the video demo of this] At least they made the distinction between the MMORPG virtual reality and the ARG being a separate realtime quest tacked onto it.

edit to add some links:

the device that the geeky kid made for scanning the roof top reminded me of this kind of Augmented Reality game

ZouMa 101 Pervasive Game demo video

a film clip describing the Pervasive Game called Momentum as a technologically-enhanced LARP

Project Drake was a Pervasive ARG and interactive fiction and scavenger hunt and...

and none of the ARGs i've played here for the past # of years have been anything like the above links :D

[vpisteve]

 I thought they did right by ARG

[thebruce]

yeah I really liked this episode. I too chuckled at the 'classic ARG clue' comment I choose to believe they meant it in spirit - something out of the ordinary in real life that only someone following an ARG might clue in on... that might be 'classic' for the portion of an arg that deals with finding something at a specific location, or a deaddrop..
Props to the next PM who uses a misaligned arrow as a clue in their ARG

I think connecting the ARG vaguely with an MMO was good for the layperson who never heard of ARGs before. IMO they did make sure to keep a clear distinction between the two game type, but connecting them that way gave the characters a 'reason', or a foundation from which they wanted to play the ARG. I think it was rowan, or a couple in chat who likened that game to DMI and The Office, or the Heroes extended reality, or Lost... it's not specifically a part of the original entity, but an extended, self-contained thing. In this case, it was a real-life treasure hunt,with the only connection being that the players were working in teams based on their MMO alliances. That's the impression I got.

I think without that connection, it might have seemed much more, I dunno, underground, inaccessible, since they were doing some pretty techie stuff in that hunt.

I could see though, that kind of equipment being made in an ARG. If a PM builds a working one, they could include the blueprints in the game, where a few technically-savvy players could be delegated to build their own and go out and do the treasure hunt. That kind of looks like what happened; the 'geek's (I forget his name) gizmo looked pretty homemade.

Anyway, I think the only thing that could have made this episode better would have been to include more mysterious riddles or puzzles. I had high hopes when I first saw the GPS cache with strange items in it but the rest was pretty much a standard murder mystery in the way of puzzles.

Two thumbs up though, for "Primacy"

[drizjr]

Numb3rs website description of alternate reality games

[krystyn]

I really enjoyed that episode, even though I've never watched that show before. The misaligned arrow thing totally made me laugh, but I mean, technically, as a metaphor, it IS pretty classic. It's the classic kloo.

It's interesting that the question of ARGs being painted as "dangerous" or "deadly" is completely defused by the fact that in the episode, it's the gamejacker that's causing trouble, not the actual game designers.

thumbs up

[vpisteve]

[enaxor]