unforum

[redct]

Everything you know about ARGs is WRONG

[Silent|away]

1) Always call your ARG an MMORPG. It is massive, it is mulitplayer, the ARG is played online, and you are roleplaying a character (yourself). Hence, an MMORPG. This will lessen the stigma of ARGs, since few people may know what an ARG is, but most people will understand what online games are. And people love online games.

2) If you like interaction in an ARG story, then just have no puzzles whatsoever. Talking with the characters can be a 'puzzle' in and of itself, and it would be very similar to playing a "game". Then again though, I wrote before in this forum that without any "puzzles", including ROT-12s, the game would become very boring indeed.

You might argue that what he's really ranting about is the need for creative puzzles. I am trying out VERY CREATIVE PUZZLES in an ARG I am doing right now, and it turns out it's become a complete and utter failure. However, I'm willing to blame myself for the failure of this ARG and not the very creative puzzles.

3) Video games have cliches, such as evil conspiracies. Cliches are sometimes good, sometimes bad. The most important thing to realize that cliches are overused because they are effective. There needs to be a a reason to play the game.

If we cannot save the kidnap victim from Evil Corporation #596...then what do we have to do? Interfere inside office politics to ensure the UltraMan project gets the necessary funding? How about "No way". We prefer to save the world, thank you very much.

4) The stories in ARGs are actually pretty okay. They may be mediocre, true, and just tired repetition of cliches, but everything is merely a repeat of certain motifs, there are nothing "original" anymore. As long as you combine certain story elements together into a good story, that's fine by me.

[Euchre]

Puzzles are to ARGs what dice and roll charts were to D&D - pure death.

What happened to D&D? (Dungeons and Dragons for those thankfully unfamiliar.) A very narrow group of people play it, and very seriously most I've seen in the last 10 years are the type that live with their parents and don't know personal hygiene too well. It was neat when it started, but the world moved on and the game design did not. All official attempts to translate D&D to modern media failed because they were stuck on the 'dice' mentality.

Oh, there is a success story in the world of D&D. It's called World of Warcraft. The whole statistical obsession was pushed down in favor of some real excitement in a newer medium (two really) that allowed it. That's getting bogged down too though, which is beautifully illustrated in the "Leroy Jenkins" video I'm sure most of you have seen at least once. (Some people think it's making fun of this 'Leroy' person, but in truth it's showing what real idiots most of the players involved are.)

And now, for something completely different...
(Oh crap, I included way too much esoteric knowledge in this post. I've gotta stop that!)

[imbri]

A story game?

Is that like World of Warcraft? Katamari Damaci? Monopoly? Blackjack? The stock market? War? Life?

All of those are games. All of them are stories. And, all of them have stories within the game and stories written outside of it.

How are Alternate Reality Games Story Games different? What distinguishes them from the hundreds of thousands of other story games out there?

While I agree that Alternate Reality Gaming is a bit of clumsy phrasing, it's the accepted term and is, increasingly, understood (if misunderstood) by a more mainstream portion of society. Sure, I still have to define it for most people, but I also have to define MMO or RPG or FPS or any number of other terms for genres of gaming.

And, while I appreciate a good rant as much as anyone, I can't be the only one that finds the rant against the moniker a bit tired. I mean, it's been going on for over five years now.

"Story Game"? I've gotta hope that came out better during the presentation than it did online.

[Euchre]

Methinks the point of the 'rant' is that the fabulously dynamic (which is supposed to be THE heart of the genre) is becoming hideously static.

Maybe I should just ROT13 all my posts in this thread from now on, might get the point across better. Nah, only the busload of people that actually would be interested in a meta-discussion of ARGs would actually bother to decode it.

[rose]

[notgordian]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I think another disingenuous aspect of Dan's talk is the fact that at least a few of the cards he was/is selling were created by denizens of these very forums.

[Silent|away]

If there is a demographic, there is a chance to make money off the whole deal. However, as long as there are many grassroots ARGs out there, the market is saturated. Why pay real money to play an ARG, when you can pay $0 for an ARG?

Is Dan Hon the guy behind Perplex City? If so, I can understand why he would complain, since the ARG did 'fall apart' and not enough profit is made. And it is still important to generate revenue. But it is far better to insult the people running the business for not understanding the customer than blaming the customer for not paying.

I think that, in the end, the Ransom Model is the best way to commericalize ARGs, going foward. However, the Ransom Model would likely only work with PMs who have a good reputation.
***
Imbri: I worship player interaction and control over the direction of a story, even though I admit that, in reality, the Puppet Masters manlipuate the players. Therefore, I think a "Story Game" is a game where the players decide the direction of the story. WoW and Katamari Damaci both have a lineral story, you have to go and follow the path, but in a Story Game, you can actually decide what to say to the NPCs, decide how best to insult the NPCs, tell the NPC that you don't care about saving the Princess and that you're going to fishing, actually go out and fish, finally get tired of fishing, return back to the NPC, promise to help the NPC find the princess, find the evil lair of the Bad Guy, talk with the Princess to find out her side of the story, and then preside over a marriage the Bad Guy and the Princess.

You can't do that in a regular game.

[Euchre]

If you think player authorship is the Holy Grail of defining an ARG, you might want to read this, especially the top 3rd of it. Notice that what most people would call ARGs are way over on the PM side of authorship. Players have more control of sequence, and variable control of outcome. It's not always a matter of what's at the end, but often who gets there first and how.

Guess what? An ARG, or CF in general, is not something elegantly defined by it's elements - it's a process. (Consider "Alternate Reality Gaming", which is a gerund form. It's not static, it's dynamic.)

[redct]

I wouldn't really say that there's a preferred method or any right way - PM authorship or player authorship included. If you think about PM authorship (being roughly defined by me as having a set story that the players influence , affect, interact with, and are immersed in) it's basically just a logical extension of one of those choose your own adventure novels. You have a set story, you have a lot of things that could happen - but you're kind of still on a bit of a set path, no matter where you go.

If you look at player authorship (where PMs have some sort of idea of what they want to happen but they mainly let the players create the story), you could say that it's like some forms of RPGing or many other things, but it's still pretty limited. Unless you've got an extremely obliging PM, you can't make things stray too far from the rough idea that the PMs have for the story. (note, in both cases, your mileage may wildly vary)

So, I wouldn't say that there is a holy grail for the definition of an ARG. Within our current definition of an ARG, things can vary wildly and different stories have different optimal methods of telling them.

(sorry if I'm a bit incoherent, it's late)

[Nighthawk]

[krystyn]

[labfly]

[catherwood]

I am a bit puzzled by some of the reactions to Dan's slide presentation. He was not personally insulting to me. Some of what he did have to say perhaps was insulting to grassroots ARG designers, but his talk wasn't aimed at them. And the things that were insulting to the designers of large for-profit ARGs comes more from the prospective clients than from him personally. Let's see if I'm reading this wrong...

The talk is meant to highlight the obstacles he has faced in using ARGs in a business model. Business, profit, marketing, etc., not the genre. He admits that he is not being objective here, and has not researched beyond his own experience.

His prospective clients tell him that they don't want what they think of as ARG because of preconceptions and erroneous expectations. He then parrots some of what he hears from them.

The message he gets from the business world is that his games (whether or not they are labeled as ARG):
- don't pull in a mass market of average buyers (gamers being neither average nor marketable in the eyes of the client), and thus are not appropriate for mainstream advertising purposes;
- and as a niche market it has little measureable return-on-investment, or a too large cost-to-benefit ratio to be profitable for its own sake.
- These are business decisions that need to be responded to with numbers and statistics; this talk does not do that. It is also not the purpose of his talk to denounce the world's misconception of the gamer population; he and we already know it isn't true.

Those are the reasons he has come up against "no matter whether they're actually true or not." He's reporting from the field, so to speak, with attitudes and not with numbers. Dan himself doesn't say ARGs don't get enough players, but that it is "frequently something that's brought up by broadcasters or advertisers." [italics are his words, bolding is mine]

Dan doesn't say ARGs should be inexpensive, he says that he has been rebuffed by clients who laugh at his "minimum six figure budget" because they think ARGs are "just a bunch of websites". Dan's link to cloudmakers is his sarcastic dig demonstrating how shallow their thinking is.

Dan's rant about fiction begins around the point of his talk where he confronts the TINAG misunderstanding. I think his point is being made to the audience of commercial ARG developers: Just sell your services as fiction writers and game constructors, avoid the ARG label, and business will be ready to put aside their objections.

As for the final third of the talk, where the rant devolves into listing (on multiple slides) a lot of the hallmarks of a lame ARG, it really boils down to things we've said ourselves: have puzzles that make sense in the context of your world, and have an in-story reason for the players to be jumping thru your hoops.

And he concludes by returning to the issue of business clients, and whether or not they even want an ARG, whatever that may be a label for, as opposed to a story-game or puzzle-contest or multimedia experience. The single ARG label makes it difficult to design a marketing campaign when the client really needs to choose a focus.

That's how I read the talk. Obviously people's mileage has varied.