Alternate Reality Games: Jordan Weisman @ Dorkbot Seattle 2006/12

I went to the gaming session of Seattle dorkbot last night. I went to two of the sessions, and then spent the third in the bar. The third session was a real yawner, correctly identified as such by Ario, that made me sad, as I’m very interested in the topic of “Games for Social Change.” Here’s my notes from the thing, as it might be of interest to readers, I mainly took notes on Jordan Weisman‘s session on Alternate Reality Games.

To some extent, it was a marketingish presentation, although as you can see JW is particularly rife with geek cred.

So, the notes:

ARGs tell stories interactively. The premise began for them, based on the Kubrick/Spielberg movie AI, because they’d been licensed to make a number of games based on the product, but the movie wasn’t particularly given to making games. Instead of making games based on the movie itself, they made it based on the universe that the movie took place in.

Their question was, how to tell that story. But they came up with an idea based on the narrative structure organic to the web.

I’m not sure I didn’t replace Jordan’s point with one of my own here: Different models of disseminating information have different methods of telling stories that are organic to them; bards, epic poetry (e.g. Iliad, Odyssey); books, novels; television, sitcoms; movies, summer blockbusters; What is the native activity of the internet at time circa now? JW says looking through a ton of crap looking for relevant partial pieces of information.

What if one were tell stories through scattered shards of information? Deconstruct a narrative, create all the evidence that the story had taken place, and then hide the evidence and throw away the story.

What is the device on which this story will be told? The ‘media sphere,’ which JW describes as ‘all devices with electricity and some without,’ but I think it’s easier to say all information-bearing objects, here, which is a metaphor from InfoSci that is similar in scope.

This is essentially a community effort, the people who take place in the exploration form a ‘hivemind‘ in response to finding shards, and tell stories to each other. The story goes from being the original narrative to being a consensus narrative that comes from the audience’s experience.

The community effect produced is that the hivemind has every skill on the planet, and it can go everywhere and do everything and anything. It has essentially any skill on the planet. It is also, by that same factor, smarter than the people writing the game.

Sample: Ilovebees

• Use life as a game board — it took place all over the world.
• radio drama told on payphones — fragments of the story were released as people talked
• Name of game… campaign for prerelease of Halo 2

This is, in its essence, pop culture hacking, it’s about about the audience crwating fiction and inseminating your references into their everyday consciousness. However, this is against the everyday experience of marketing staff — they want to put up as much collateral as possible and advertise it’s existence as widely as possible to get as many people to notice as possible. But that turns out to not work well with getting people to want to experience this, what you want to do is draw people down the rabbit hole.

How to get audience in? Spend time creating content, not telling them about it.
Allow communication about shards of content to draw people in… People will start looking with a few small clues.

highlights of their work
All of their big campaigns have led to marriages, because collaborate and share rahter than compete, story drives communities, competition drives individualism. This is, to a large extent, their goal — the building of a temporary community, possibly tied to awareness of some product or service that people make them make the game for. It’s an interesting balance between entertainment, advertising, and ‘using the real world as the gameboard.’

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson

William Gibson’s Pattern recognition was a tip of the hat to I love bees. I’m wondering if WG’s perception of ARG makes this a must-read for anyone interested in ARGs. I’m probably going to pick up the book in the next couple of weeks to find out. If anyone has any opinions on that, please feel free to let me know via email or comment.

One thing that JW mentioned at the end of his talk, and I suspect that this was a deliberate seed effort of his, was to say that if you were in front of the Bellagio during CES on 1/6/2007, you might see something interesting in the fountains. Anyway, in the spirit of thanking him for coming to the event, I thought I’d pass this on.

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