When I was an undergraduate student in a web development class I experimented with an art site, now perhaps-mercifully gone from the internet, that was deliberately difficult to navigate. At one point, a clue on the site pointed surfers to an invisible pixel that they had to click to proceed; at another, knowing how to view the source of the site was a critical step in the navigation puzzle. Everyone who viewed the project was confused, and, it’s safe to say that in a class of twenty-plus students, nobody “got it.” Just as well, I figured – this sort of experiment was a high-concept screwup – and I returned to traditional notions of usability.
Turns out perhaps I was just ahead of my time. I could’ve been designing sites for ARGs, which are often that complicated to navigate, and then some.
What is an ARG Anyway?
The ARG as I know it was introduced to me first by Ofiuco, the first ARG advocate of my acquaintance. I have her to thank for linking me to Cloudmakers which is, at the very least, an interesting read. For those unfamiliar with the medium, ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game. Wikipedia has a big old article, and you know how I love the links, but that article is long so I’ll try to define it in my own words. Basically an ARG is a game that is actively directed in real time across multiple mediums. It usually starts out on the internet but integrates some other aspects such as meeting up in person socially to solve a puzzle, or getting a phone call from the game. An early example was Majestic, which was like an internet game, except it also sometimes called you on the phone, and sometimes was threatening about it. It was clever and ambitious and pretty much a giant failure as well.
Majestic shared a certain aesthetic with many other ARGs, which is that they purport not to be a game, deliberately blurring the division between reality and games by invading your life in ways you might not expect a game to do. They in some ways request that you cast off the notion of a game being a game and instead merge it with your real life in many ways. This division, between what is the game, and what isn’t the game, is referred to in some texts as “The Magic Circle.”
I am making observations about ARGs right now because Jane McGonigal, ARG designer, has a book coming out very soon about this topic: Reality is Broken. No, I haven’t read it yet, though I plan to when it’s officially released. But I have read Ian Bogost’s review of the book, and also this past week, Leigh Alexander’s observations about Foursquare, which intersects with ARGs according to McGonigal’s thesis. Thus another article from me, synthesizing like a trained academic while standing on the shoulders of giants.
The Three Reasons I’m Skeptical
Now here’s one reason I’m skeptical about ARGs having any powerful social influence: Most people, or at least most adults, really like the Magic Circle. They would like for it to stay right where it is. If an adult is playing a game, he or she would like, right now, to be fairly sure of that. They would also not prefer to be playing a game most of their waking time. If they were in fact supposed to be playing a game, because you are doing some behavioral psychology on that adult, you would probably have to do a better job than many designers are doing of hiding the “game” part. Or, you’d have to hide the part where it’s supposed to integrate with their real life in some meaningful way, and let that part take care of itself. Many people integrate playing World of Warcraft or Farmville in to their lives in very powerful ways, but the games do not need that as a stated goal of their design. If WoW deliberately stated at some point “now we need for you to attend Blizzcon in costume to make it to the next level, because it’s time to integrate this game with your real life,” not many people would play WoW past that level.
A huge part of the social function of games is to try out things that would normally be challenging or embarrassing in a “safe” environment. You may not want to become an artist, but you might try playing Pictionary. Improv Night at the local community theater is right-out, but among your friends you might play Charades. The game “made” you exceed your normal social boundaries and thus these things that would be scary are instead fun. Similarly games allow people to act out heroic or villainous fantasies that they would like to explore in a safe way – slaying dragons and punching reporters and so-on without ever having to leave the house. That the Alternate Reality Game seeks to penetrate this circle is actually a big problem with it as a genre. Even avid gamers often return to the Magic Circle for safety. This is why Live-Action Roleplay, where the Magic Circle is blurred more than in traditional roleplaying games, is, while popular enough, still weirder and more niche than its tabletop counterparts. And tabletop roleplay is of course much more niche than standard board games, because it does require more of you as a person than merely rolling some dice.
Another problem with ARGs is the message. A few ARGs are just created for the fun of it, and I guess I would probably say that of the ARGs that exist, the ones created for the love of ARGing seem like the ones I personally would enjoy most. Perplex City, Last Call Poker: these seem to be games to play for the sake of playing games, and generally I am in favor of Games that Are Fun. But I don’t feel that ARGs succeed at the other things they are trying to do, which, generally, are either conveying a serious educational message, or viral advertising. And in both cases they either flop, or suffer from “preaching to the choir.” A game about The Dark Knight might have been lots of fun, and it got people talking, but you were going to see it (or not see it) anyway. And I find it difficult to believe that anyone who didn’t already care about the consequences of a World Without Oil would invest time in the ARG of their own free will. Either you already have an interest in the issue this ARG presents, or, your teacher is making you play it. Why else invest your own time?
Yes, the impact of these advertising campaigns is extremely difficult to measure. But I’ll take a wild stabbing guess and say that it’s much easier to get people to buy a ticket for a superhero movie than it is to convince them in to walking in to a bakery to pick up a cake left there by one of its characters. The world is surely more mysterious and magical for having these things in them. I’m just saying I’m not sure, as an advertisement, or as a way of advertising a social cause, that it works.
Lastly, I’ll talk about the reason I’ve never actually played in an ARG (whether or not you think that makes me qualified to write about them). Like the web site I created years ago that was deliberately a chore to navigate, ARGs are notoriously impenetrable.
And now, I quote.
Before we try the puzzle, if you look at the source code of the page , alongside the option values of the Style and Accessory of the hat are some very unsavoury terms such as ‘plague’, ‘vapid’ and ‘death’. We don’t know what they are for yet. In fact, in the source code of all the pages, in a META tag called ‘earthwatch’, there are different words for weather. All of the tags are available here.
Okay, I’ll ‘fess up here. We [the Cloudmakers] didn’t actually figure out this puzzle properly. There are over 350,000 combinations to the puzzle and someone just went and created a program to try all of them out. I know – we’re pathetic. It turns out that the correct combinations are:
Flying Hornburg, Blue, Orange, White, Feather
At the moment, we’re trying to retroactively work out what this code means.
That’s from the Cloudmakers’ old site, in response to this puzzle in the advertising ARG, The Beast. One thing you’re going to realize about reading about ARGs is that people who play ARGs like to be challenged by difficult puzzles, to the point where it’s almost expected that if one creates a puzzle-based ARG, it is necessary for that ARG to build on the logic established by previous ARGs. Though the Death of Adventure Gaming has been greatly exaggerated (an article for another time), this is precisely the kind of incestuous logic in puzzle design that caused its momentary lapse in to a cat-mustached coma. And Cloudmakers is a very early ARG. If you’re going to get in to ARGs, you need to already understand a lot of tricks of how the internet and cryptography work, or, else, be willing to learn those things by reading all the ARGs that came before.
This is great fun for some. It is not very mainstream.
So Who Needs Mainstream Anyway
Every problem I’ve discussed here is essentially another way of framing the problem that it will be really difficult for ARGs to achieve widespread adult popularity. So I can envision a counter-argument: What exactly is wrong with that?
Nothing, I guess. I myself am a fan of many “niche” game styles – Interactive Fiction, Roguelikes, social MU*s. I think the primary advantage to a niche product is the depth with which your relatively small audience engages with it. People made brand new web sites and brand new friends and poured their hearts into solving or even merely enjoying The Beast. More recently, You Shouldn’t Have Done That became an ARG that captivated an internet population in an exciting and electric way. These things are absolutely having an effect on the individuals that they touch, providing some magic to their lives, and catalyzing friendships.
But I guess I don’t see many essays or books confessing “ARGs are cool and fun, but niche.” Instead people seem eager to wax poetical about the time that will come when an Alternate Reality Game of some stripe will sweep from the heavens and change the world. I feel if something struggles to scale up, and to achieve something like mainstream acceptance, then making sweeping changes to social policy is still out of its reach. Today’s ARG-makers may have to be content with the observation of one other contemporary scholar. “You can change the world… in a tiny way.”
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