Alternate Currency

Every art form has its patrons.

I was just talking with another designer here at work, and one thing she said is something that is vital to ARG design:

It is important to let the players have the narrative of the story.

Pushing the narrative, especially through meta-communication (asserting excessive control through the in-game conduits, or through out-of-game methods) can have a pretty distinct chilling effect on the immersive nature of the experience.

(Maaaan, I had several more paragraphs written here, but I just deleted them because I can’t make a succinct enough point, and there are dudes jackhammering and sawing right outside my window here in the office. Anyway, I’ll just leave the basic concept note there, and if I come back to it, I come back to it.)

It is increasingly apparent to me that it is virtually impossible to legislate trust between players. Trust can be built, however, between the puppetmasters and the players.

The boundaries that exist between these two entities can blur, twist, and change from game to game, but ultimately, the puppetmasters are the arbiters of narrative flow. If they choose not to filter, if they choose to encourage, or to fabricate narrative elements in the game arena, that is certainly a design choice, but it remains theirs. The players are playing. To me, it has always seemed a fruitless exercise to blame players for a game that stumbles and fizzles. If a design choice gives a subset of players the power to move the narrative in ways that prevent play for an even greater subset, that is still a design choice on the part of the puppetmasters.

The players are people living in the real world, with real world rules as their only true guideline (unless they become criminals). The narrative that defines the game is still vetted by the puppetmasters.

Ken Eklund’s World Without Oil project has been nominated for a Webby Award. Curiously, it’s under the category “Games,” but congrats to the team (again)!

Excellent.

World Without Oil is taking home the Activism award at this years SXSW Interactive Festival!

Congrats to the team, and most especially to the players, without whom the game would have been a mere shadow of activism and awareness against the backdrop of reality.

Thanks again to Ken Eklund, creator and driving force behind the design and aesthetic of the project. I am very proud to have worked with you, and I am excited to see what you come up with next!

Thanks to Jane and Ken for alerting me to the news that the World Without Oil ARG is one of the top five finalists in the Activism category for the SXSW Web Awards this year!

Woooooo!

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/cloudmakers/message/45943

imbri posted this link in an IRC channel, and now I know why I kept thinking, all day Friday, why I should maybe try to remember why February 8th felt like a day I should remember why it felt important and significant and stuff. It bugged me, but I was also way tired and eventually gave up. I can’t even remember simple words and names, lately, so.

But, anyway. Happy 6th birthday, Lockjaw.

Alternate Reality Games, I think, were bolstered by that little grassroots project helping to fill the quiet that followed the end of the Beast. I am still very proud of being part of that amazing little team. What’s even more amazing to me personally is how every single person on that team was dealing with a significant amount of life crap during the campaign, stuff that would normally smush your average modern human, but somehow we all soldiered on and completed the game. A few of us have kept on with the genre in the years since, creating cross-media narrative projects as our actual day (and night and weekend) jobs.

Thank you, Lockjaw players, for giving me a reason to look forward to the next day. It was hard work, but I love that collaboration we shared very much. It meant the world to me, and that’s no lie.

The 42nd ARG Netcast was posted yesterday!

It sounds great - it was really quite a group of people gathered together at the 42 offices, sitting on the floor and on comfy couches, chatting about games and trust and the importance of a good narrative. I am honored, once again, to be a guest on the ‘cast, the first time being back in the sunny days of June of this year for World Without Oil. I feel quite grateful to be a part of something that is developing and growing more substantial by the day — the process of such things fascinates me, even when I am not always eloquent nor knowledgeable about how such things come about. Sometimes I really enjoy hearing people talk about this stuff.

I feel like there were some great things said about trust, and about puppetmasters not trying to be more clever than their players (especially in the sense of causing a feeling of competition between the PMs and the player community). In a slightly doofy way, I also enjoy that this group of people with a fairly complex set of histories was able to come together and speak so passionately and intricately about what is truly a burgeoning art form.

I especially liked that I was coming into the ‘cast a few seconds after actually working on some things. Those tasks were then resumed once we finished recording. Making the ARG is really the most important thing, for me. There’s a time for meta, naturally, but the sheer pleasure of game theory, to me, has always been a visceral one. Digging in the dirt. First-hand eyewitness reporting.

Ain’t no time like the present, after all.

The PM team behind World Without Oil was graciously asked to appear in Episode 27 of ARGNet’s Netcast, and it’s up now!

Find the netcast here!

If you’re hip to the ARG community, there’s a buncha familiar voices, including my own. :) I even come up with a new band name in this episode!

It was surprisingly fun to do the ‘cast, and it was nice to get the gang together again to talk about the project. We met up on our sekrit PM conferencing line later to have drinky things and sort of put the whole project to rest (the team is still working on the archive, of course), which I think brought a satisfying sense of closure to things, at least for me.

It was a great experience, and I am still so utterly impressed with the player base. Our hopes and dreams can be so dazzling and rosy-colored, but as Jane discussed here, it was fascinating and heartening to see the darker side, too. It might even be because we were all playing inside an alternate reality that the players had the freedom to really play with unhappy circumstances, or the boundaries of their comfort zones. Good stuff. Could talk about it for hours.

But hey, at least you can go listen to an hour of it.