unforum

[yanka]

[buff]

I think that people should starting thinking about how they actually view the TINAG-principle (which always was, is, and hopefully always will be a DESIGN-principle).

Some of the absolutely best experiences I've ever had has been with games not even remotely realistic, yet extremely coherent and well-thought through inside the magic circle[1].

Yet, I think we tend to loose historical perspective on these forums a bit too often. Had The Beast been released today, it would have sucked immensely. The websites are awful (perhaps except for Belladerma), the puzzles were in some cases not even remotely connected to the storyline - and real? Please. (I still think it's the best one I've ever played!)

Things has has flown don't do so anymore, and this is true for storylines, plots and puzzles as well. How many times has the friend of a missing person reached out for help? Perhaps one too many. Would I rather see a kick-ass game, where I'll help out to find a missing person - then a mediocre one with an original storyline - hell yeah!

Would I prefer them both together? (kickass and original that is, not the other way around)

Of course.

However, a games doesn't HAVE to be realistic all the way through, and blend absolutely seamless into real life. It just has to provide me with enough internal credibility and sensibility to bridge my gap of disbelief, and thereby allowing me to enjoy myself.

The short version:

Give me more futuristic robot-args* if that means I'll get better games which rock.
Give me fewer "Lost Person Mysteriously Missing"**-args, if that means I'll have play basically the same game over and over again.



* Substitute this for whatever weird, futuristic, "unreal" plot you fancy.
** Same, but reversed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_%28synthetic_worlds%29

[krystyn]

For what it's worth, Mike Royal was still in the future, influencing events in that alternate reality. In a way, as soon as any of us Cloudmakers were touching any part of that world, we were also in the future. Since the game itself was about the nature of robot sentience and humanity's ability to cope with it, it was still an alternate reality very much tied to present times and concerns.

The game itself acted as a portal to a future reality. Sure, we as players had to suspend some disbelief in order to play the game with any intensity, but for me, that was a lot of the fun of it. It was a most excellent thought experiment.

[pancito]

I'm not sure we're (I'm) still on topic, but one of the things I've been thinking about in terms of ARGS is how they relate to other story forms. In a book or movie or play all I need is the willing suspension of disbelief. As long as the story is 1. internally consistent, 2. reasonably consistent with the prevailing meme and 3. reasonably well written, I can get on board. What I mean by (two) is that it has to match up with what I know about the mythos. Vampires can't stand sunlight. I know because Stoker told me so, and you're going to have a tough sell trying to tell me otherwise.

Basically this is all true for ARGs as well, but there is an additional problem. That problem is the way I interact with ARGs -- primarily through my computer. This weds it to an approximately contemporary setting. There are ways around this, but it is the fundamental problem of how to break out of the here and now. How easy it is to suspend disbelief in that context, and thus how immersive a game can be, varies from player to player.

I loved Looking Glass Labs even though we've been ten years away from AI for about 50 years now. Kinda like fusion. Somebody may have bought into Nighthawk's premise enough to seriously want to know more, but they didn't know squat. Didn't matter, the game succeeded at the three criteria above, and I found it plausible to interact with the game via the interface I have.

I'd like to see more sci-fi stuff, because that's what I read for pleasure, but I was reading Charles Stross' Accelerando at the time LGL was going and thinking there was no way you could do something like that in an ARG. Murder mysteries (and Missing Person) are timeless, which is why they work. I just wish there was a story half as interesting as those by Chandler or John D. MacDonald or even Dorothy L. Sayers driving the games. The best detective story ever was probably The Maltese Falcon, but people have been writing good ones for the last 80 years anyway despite the fact that it's been done before and better. It's not that the plot is old with the games, it's that they're not very well written. Of course if you read 18th century novels, a lot of them were crap too, but they too were inventing a genre...

Last thing. Flashy presentation doesn't matter to me nearly as much as the above. Which is why I like Philip K. Dick and didn't like The Matrix. A friend said to me at the time, "They spent eleventy-seven million on the special effects!!" To which I could only reply, "They should have hired a writer."