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!

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.

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.

This is a small but important change for the premier website on Alternate Reality Gaming. Way back when in 2002, there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the world of ARG. In fact, when ARGN was born, it and unFiction were the only sites dedicated to the genre and you could count the total number of games on one hand. Steve Peters, who started ARGN, knew how important it was to get ARG players and sites to work together. So, he had a grand vision that included linking the various ARG related sites - whether their focus was players or designers and whether they offered news or forums or guides and trails. Now there are dozens of sites and dozens of games. It’s easier than ever to find others playing and talking about ARGs. It’s time to refocus the site on what it does best - offering up news. And Jonathan Waite, current owner and editor of the site has taken the steps to make sure that we, the staff of the site, get focused and do just that.

So, the change is small and one that many of you will never miss the way things were. The strange banner on the top of various ARG sites will be gone, but the news and coverage will be better than ever. And to help celebrate the birth of ARGNet at argn.com, the site launched its inaugural netcast. I’m pleased to be part of it along with Sean Stacey/SpaceBass and Jonathan Waite/jamesi and really excited about the possibilities with the netcast. So head on over to ARGNet, check it out (pretty new logo and all), and download the first netcast.

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