Giant Mice

You know, sometimes it’s really hard to keep a secret. I’ve struggling with this one for a while now (though I broke down and told a friend or two, it’s just that good!)

THE PROJECT MU ARCHIVES ARE IN PRINT!

huh?

Well, if you haven’t already seen the online version, I suggest you head over there right quick. One of my favorite websites, it’s all about Metacortechs (code named Project MU) but from the players perspective and written in the weeks and months following the actual run of the game. This allowed them to create a unique walkthru of an Alternate Reality Game with the insights of having gone through it. So, unlike the more comprehensive guides and trails, they were able to reduce some of the confusion and speculation as far as the story was concerned - making it much more readable. So readable, in fact, that it’s the first website that I refer to people interested in ARGs.

I was gushing about the website to Giskard, one of the Metaurchins, while staying at his place at the end of September. We were laughing and reminiscing over the game, in part because that was how we met (me a PM, him an active player) but more because it was the third anniversary of the game. Three years. Wow. So, when he handed me a wrapped present at midnight of October 1st, I was flattered and a bit embarrassed. When I opened it and saw this book, I was rendered near speechless. For a good 15 minutes I was unable to say anything but “wow.” As I flipped through the book, my eyes got a bit watery. It wasn’t just the flood of memories or the shock that the players were so drawn to the world that three years later they put a book into print, it was more about the pride and care in which they took in doing it. It shows on every page.

As the ability to talk returned, I came to learn that the copy in my hand was a prototype - they wanted to make sure that they had our (the PM team) permission to take it to print and to check the fonts, cover, etc. Then they explained that they wanted the proceeds of the sale to go to unfiction (wow!). Of course, the moment each of the team saw it, they gushed and immediately agreed to let it go in print. The next few weeks they spent making the few changes that needed to be made and assuring that the referenced websites were in order. So, for 8 weeks, I’ve been sittin gon this secret, quietly admiring the work that they did. But, now, it’s been announced and I can shout it from the rooftops.

So, right quick like, I want to thank all of the metaurchins for this but there are three that really stand out in this effort - Yanka who tirelessly gathered and formatted the original website, xnbomb who somehow managed to translate all of that work to print, and Giskard who has been a wonderful support to both of them and who placed the first prototype in my hands. Over the last three years, you’ve become friends and that’s really been the greatest part of all of this.

So, now, go and check out the book. It really is gorgeous and your grubby little paws would love to get a hold of it!

Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it. - Jane Wagner

Gupfee mentioned that quote to me earlier and it’s a perfect quote to reflect what happens in games when discussions of what’s in-game and what’s out-of-game pop up. It’s on my mind quite a bit because of the design of Deus City. On the one hand it’s trying to be a cooperative game and, on the other, it’s encouraging competition and segmentation. This, of course, results in confusion and discussion. It can work to an advantage, but unfortunately, unless or until Deus City deals with it in the game itself, I fear that it may become more of a distraction.

I’m far too busy this weekend to write a proper post on the subject - perhaps Sunday night if we get home from dinner and I’ve not had a few glasses of wine (Fogo, oh yeah!), but probably some time next week. Please, brainstorm with me if you’d like. Are there any great examples - both positive and negative? Any personal anecdotes? Any thoughts or tips on just how to harness that stress? I’m really interested in opinions other than my own and they don’t need to be ARG related - other games or media that have dealt with these issues have many lessons to teach. And, I’ll try my best to come up with a good post summarizing the comments and/or emails and/or discussions that come in. Hopefully tying it all together in soemthing coherent. So, poste em if you got em and I’ll do the same.

Patrick Möller of ARG Reporter recently asked various people (PMs, I think), a series of 15 questions. While most all of them got me to thinking and to writing, it was most fun for me to go back down memory lane and think about my favorite puzzle. I figured I’d post my answer here for my own sense of posterity - a little reminder of what I like in a puzzle and why.

11) Which puzzle from past ARGs do you like best/was real fun? Can you tell us why?

My favorite puzzles are those that truly offer a lot to the story, both in their design and in what they reveal. I also like complex puzzles and those that bring the community together, yet could be solved on your own. And, while I create dozens of smaller puzzles, puzzles that do all of that are my goal. And, of those puzzles, the Seven Sins puzzle in Lockjaw was my favorite.

Lockjaw dealt with the questions of immortality and ethics (business, medical, human). We had developed a web browser for the game that, presumably, all of the characters and a number of the players used. The browser had a built in AI named Mephista. She saw every page that everyone who used the browser saw and, within the story, she dumped certain information into a central server. So, clearly, someone or something was aware of nearly everything that was going on (although players weren’t fully aware of this until the end game). Additionally, we had several characters out for revenge and looking at all of the sins, no matter how simple and mundane they might be, that the other characters were committing.

In order to show that in the game and to add to the depth of all of the characters, I created a puzzle deeply rooted in the mythology and symbolism of the Seven Deadly Sins. Each sin is associated with a color, an animal, and a punishment in hell. Additionally, each sin is paired with a corresponding virtue. For example, envy is associated with green and represented by a dog. If you’re guilty of envy, you will be punished in hell by being placed in freezing water. The contrary virtue of envy would be charity - combating the jealousy of others by giving to them. I used the great painting The Seven Deadly Sins and The Four Last Things by Hieronymus Bosch not only because it’s a cool painting but to help clue players in to the idea that the theme of the puzzle was the sins.

So, the puzzle…

It started off rather simply. Players would be taken to a page with a colored background, an image, and a submit box. Every time you returned to the page, the color of the background the image would change. Every time that you made an incorrect guess in the submit box, it would kick you out to various pages online. At first, it seemed very random. But it wasn’t long before players identified the images as being a part of the painting. That gave them the seven sins reference. But they still weren’t sure what to put into the submit boxes. The kickouts offered the clues.

Each of the four images was themed and was paired up with a long list of kickouts. For example, an incorrect guess on the image showing the view of hell led to websites that dealt with punishment as well. Incorrect guesses on the other images led to pictures of animals, punishments, or sins. Once players figured out the symbolism behind the sins, it was a simple matter of pairing up the color (telling them which sin they were looking at ie green background meant they were dealing with envy) with the image and they knew what they had to enter - the name of the sin, the corresponding virtue, punishment, or animal. There were 28 correct answers in total. Each correct answer would send players to page with an image, poem, short story, or statement that fit the sin and which they could later pair up with characters in the game.

It didn’t stop there. The file names for each correct page seemed random at first with names such as 1heaesnu1.htm. It was what’s known in some cipher crowds as a columnar transposition, but that’s just a big fancy term for “line them up and read up & down”. When they were put in order (marked by the numbers on the beginning and end), a phrase which explained the character’s point for the puzzle appeared: Higher than the question of our duration, is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in future, must be a great soul now. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship” The Conduct of Life.

In my mind, it really satisfied everything that I want to achieve in creating a puzzle. It could be solved individually - there was nothing extraordinarily difficult about it and all of the information needed could easily be found on Google. Yet, it was easier to solve as a group. Refreshing the page to get the right combination of color and image could be a bit tedious and so everyone could pitch in. It also had that awe factor - initially looking at it and seeing it change and thinking you could never make sense of it, yet it was relatively easy to do. It had the excitement factor with each little solution taking you a step closer and providing a bit of satisfaction. And, the motivation for the puzzle, the content of the puzzle, and the information that it provided all fit into the story. But it also led to more questions - who was doing this? why? how?

Over the past few years, there have been many discussions on what makes something an Alternate Reality Game. All of them have focused on story and puzzles and interaction and community and play and, yet, none of them was able to accurately define what it is that makes something an Alternate Reality Game. It’s always been the very subjective case of “I’ll know it when I see it.” Each further attempt takes another stab at narrowing us in to this little box without seeming to take a step back to look at the actual box. Sean Stacey did just that over on unfiction in an article titled Undefining ARG.

He proposes that ARGs are a part of the larger Chaotic Fiction and goes on to describe three key elements, or axes, of Chaotic Fiction: Authorship, Ruleset, and Coherence. What we’re left with is a three dimensional space that contains all sorts of creative efforts, including Alternate Reality Games. What’s very nice about this model is that it is not restricted to fiction and, at the end of the article, he points to other examples such as the Chaotic Fact of Wikipedia or the Chaotic Programming seen in the Open Source Software movement.

So, while he did not define Alternate Reality Gaming, he did a wonderful job of defining the box in which it sits. Even if that box isn’t as much a box as it is a big cloudy sphere.

After five years, it finally happened. I got my very first not-so-random IM from a character in an ARG.

I wish that I could say that my blood raced, that I was shocked and excited and, even somewhat scared. A strange person, happening upon me of the millions of other AIM users, asking for help. And me, a person attached to a forum filled with people that could help her! OMG! So exciting!

But, no, it went something like this… ack! what’s this about? Gah! Why do people launch games this way. Oh, she’s dead. That’s original. Hahaha, now she wants my help. Heh. As if I couldn’t see that coming.

Am I jaded? Perhaps.

I was supposed to contact “them” about a person who had been killed and pass along a message. There was no mention of who I was supposed to contact and, in reality, if I just learned that someone was killed, my first instinct would be to tell the police. Yet, something tells me that if I had called the police and said, “Hello, officer? I just got this instant message from a woman named Claire Andersson. Apparently he killed her and I’m supposed to tell you ‘a doc psyche nerve shin’,” they would have thrown me in the loony bin. Well, they probably would have hung up on me, taken my caller id info and marked me on some list of crazies - but still not a list I want to be on.

Am I being ridiculous? Perhaps.

Of course, I knew it was a game. I also knew that I was chosen specifically because I would know that it was a game and that I would know to tell people at unfiction. Yet, I don’t know why I was chosen out of all the people at unfiction. I’m not actively playing any game or, even, registered at any game that has such things. My name is not on a list of people that would like to be contacted in such a way. I have a rather high profile at the site for various reasons and, perhaps, on some level they knew that the magic of falling down a rabbithole was lost on me years ago and they thought they would try to ignite some long lost passion.

Let me let you all in on a little secret - I’ve never had a passion for strange random IMs from fictional people. In fact, I don’t much care for any one on one conversations with characters. It always makes me a little uncomfortable - even in games that I love. There was always this strange fight in my brain during Last Call Poker when characters would appear at the poker tables.

“OMG! Character at the table! Grab a seat! It’s the thing to do!”

“ACK! No! Don’t do that! You’ll have to, like, chat with them!”

There, the secret is out - I hate talking to characters. I never know what to say. I like to sit back and absorb the story - playing through it all at my own pace and on my own terms. That’s not to say that I don’t like it when there is a sense of urgency or a call to action. I do, very much. I especially enjoy it when it is as part of the community of players.

Individual chats with characters over instant messenger take out the sense of community and very rarely provide the urgency or call to action. That’s shocking really, as you would think it would be an ideal medium for that. A character is placing her fate in your hands - you must get this information to the rest of the community or the world will end! Do it! Do it now! Yet, it just begs the question, “what will happen if I don’t?” And, I, like most players, know that nothing will happen. The story must continue. They will find another player who will share the message.

Is there a place for individual chats and random IMs in ARGs? Sure, there are probably dozens of places for them. However, I don’t think that the way in which most small community based games utilize them is one of them.