Giant Mice

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.

Don’t worry, I won’t fill up the blog by announcing every change and update to the site, but as this one may affect urls that you may have bookmarked or linked to (including category RSS feeds), I figured I best mention it. The permalink structure will now include “archives”. While many of the pages (ie the Quickstart Guide) will not change, anything posted to the blog will.

Pages for an individual post will look something like this:
http://www.giantmice.com/archives/2006/10/changes

Categories will also change and will look like this:
http://www.giantmice.com/archives/category/giant-mice

It’s a simple change but something that will help me out a bit in the future. Best to change the url structure now, while there’s so little here, than later.

The other changes around here are a bit more obvious for anyone that’s seen the site in the past week - a number of the pages are now formated correctly and the style has been changed quie a bit. There are still some trouble spots, but it should all be rendering correctly. If you notice any big problems, please let me know.

Obviously, this is very much a work in progress. I know that a bunch of you have gone to my portfolio. I’m flattered and a bit shocked that so many of you have wanted to see what I’ve been working on the past few years. Unfortunately, I’ve been kept busy by work and out of town guests - both of which deserve my attention far more than the portfolio. As things settle down over the week and my routine returns to a state of semi-normalcy, I’ll have the time to put it up as well as write a post a bit more substatial than “changes & status”. Until then, if you’re so interested, you can check out my old portfolio. It’s a bit out of date as it was last updated about 2 years ago, but it’s something.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to fellow ARG freak, Jackie Kerr, about whether or not ARGs were games. It’s an interesting question and I understand why people would doubt that or think that the genre was misnamed. Not only is the genre mantra “This is not a game”, but so many of us talk about the importance of story and how these are great interactive narratives. In fact, the first thing that I say in my Alternate Reality Gaming - A Definition is “Alternate Reality Games are, essentially, a big collaborative story.” If they are just a big collaborative story, are they really a game?

In The Study of Games, Brian Sutton-Smith says, “Each person defines games in his own way - the anthropologists and folklorists in terms of historical origin; the military men, businessmen, and educators in terms of usages; the social scientists in terms of psychological and social functions. There is overwhelming evidence in all this that the meaning of games is, in part, a function of the ideas of those who think about them.” That’s not unreasonable. We all bring our various biases to whatever we are defining. When the word “game” is mentioned, it will have a very different meaning to a football star than a poker player or board game enthusiast or video gamer. Though the difference between football and World of Warcraft may be great, they have some common traits. Traits that are also seen in Alternate Reality Games.

Alexander Galloway provides us with a rather simple definition of a game in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. “A Game,” he starts off the book with, “is an activity defined by rules in which players try to reach some sort of goal.” Where the football player has the ultimate goal of scoring the most points in a specific amount of time, the World of Warcraft player may be attempting to reach level 60. In Alternate Reality Games, the goal is to piece together the collaborative story.

But what about rules? It’s not uncommon to hear ARG players exclaim that there “are no rules.” Frankly, that’s just not true. Beyond the general social rules that preside in any community, the Puppetmasters do provide rules for their players. They aren’t necessarily stated as such, but they do exist. One of the most common rules is “work together”. I Love Bees did this quite blatantly by requiring players from all over the United States to collaborate in answering phones. If nobody answered the phones, the game could not have continued (at least not as it was designed). So, not only did the game have the rule of “work together” it also had the rule of “answer payphones”. When players state that there are no rules, what they really mean is that the rules will likely vary from game to game and make no preconcieved notion on what the rules may be.

For a long time, I had problems with something put forth by Espen Aarseth. In the first issue of Game Studies, he wrote that “[g]ames are both object and process; they can’t be read as texts or listened to as music, they must be played.” Like many of you, I suspect, I wondered what this meant for the majority of ARG players. They are lurkers. They, essentially, do read the games as texts and they do not take an active role in building the collaborative story. I was a lurker during The Beast. While the game was live, I did not make a single post to the community site. I rarely attempted to solve a puzzle. I, essentially, looked at what others did and read the story. Yet, when telling people about the game, I would say that I was playing it. In some way, that was how I initially related to the idea that it was a game that was not a game. But what I misunderstood was that I was not just reading them as a text. While I was not taking an active role in the collaborative work of building the story, I was gathering the pieces of the story in my own way. I was visiting the websites and I was gathering the various story clips. I was taking that information and adding it to the speculations and finds of other, more vocal, players. I was playing. Alternate Reality Games may just be big collaborative stories, but they require action on the part of the reader to do so. That action turns the readers, whether they are actively collaborating or not, into players.

Chris Crawford has been rather vocal on the idea of puzzles versus games. Where puzzles are static - giving players the clues and structure to complete the objective, games are dynamic and change because of player actions. For the sake of argument, let us assume that there’s a great term for the more static narrative forms such as novels and films and throw that in with the puzzle category. Much like puzzles, novels and film are static. They may be a means in which to tell a story but they do not change and adapt to the players. They are not dynamic narrative. Alternate Reality games, on the other hand, do. The stories change and grow because of the player actions and input. Entire subplots have been created because of player input. Characters have lived or died based on player actions. In building the story, it is often integral for players to take information from one website or character and give it to another character in order to receive more story information and/or propel the story forward. They are not just stories and they are not just puzzles, but they are games.

When it comes right down to it, I don’t see that there is much of an argument here. It may be a game unlike any you have ever played, but it is certainly a game.

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