I’ve been pretty into the alternate reality gaming scene for a while now. It’s a very interesting space, both on the developer side and on the player side, and it informs much of what I’m doing these days. I’m not going to espouse their virtues in detail at the moment, in part because there are plenty of people doing that plenty well enough already, and in part because this is just the disclaimer explaining that I’m a fan of the genre that I’m about to constructively criticize.

Even the most fervent of ARG afficianados will agree with me when I say that this is a highly nascent genre; the point we’re at is akin to the development of Donkey Kong in the videogaming world. This is the era of low-hanging fruit, the point at which there’s a plethora of glaring areas of improvement for enterprising developers to capitalize upon. This is the time of great awesomeness.

(On a tangent, this fact is why it frustrates that so many people are trying so hard to nail down a firm taxonomy. ARGs as we know them now are likely to evolve into something(s) dramatically different from what we’re seeing now — consider that Super Mario Bros, World of Warcraft and Katamari Damacy are all “videogames,” and can all be traced straight back to Pong. This, however, is a topic for another post.)

One of the key areas for improvement I see is in the typical ARG’s model of community and collaboration. The tightly integrated cooperation amongst players inherent to most ARGs these days is frequently touted as one of the genre’s main selling points. Playing an ARG is far from a solitary affair; one does so in the company of hundreds or thousands of like-minded cooperants. I say “tightly integrated” because the top developers design with this collaboration in mind — it is generally impossible for an individual, or even a small group of non-geniuses, to solve all the puzzles in most ARGs, or to keep track of everything that’s going on. The collaboration itself tends to play out in an emergent fashion without strict rules or guidelines, save for those of precedent — for instance, if a wiki needs to be set up, it will be set up by whoever has the inclination and the time to do so (probably thebruce, but you never know.) In that sense, collaboration in ARGs is an exemplar of the much-celebrated loose collaboration taking place across the entire social web.

What I want to propose, though, is that this may not be such a good thing. Now, my experiences and impressions may be totally off-base here — I’m very interested in hearing what others in the ARG world have to say about this. But bear with me for the time being. I want to raise three points.

(Additional disclaimer: I’m mainly concerned about the gameplay of ARGs. Another important part of ARGs is their aesthetics, and I’m entirely not going to talk about that. If you want to make an ARG specifically for the purpose of telling a story, my opinions are probably irrelevant to you.)

First, it’s well known that communities do not scale well. The magic number posited by the academic is something like 150 participants, at which point relationships begin to degrade. After a point, you get an audience instead of a community — which is to say you get a lot of people on the outside listening to the people on the inside. Now, Jane McGonigal has suggested that these sorts of limits don’t apply so strictly in the world of spectacular-supergames, and I’m willing to accept that suggestion. But the scaling argument has some definite truths to it, which are borne out by observation. Technically speaking, the player-base for an ARG might be in the thousands, just like the number of registered users on the Unfiction forums might be somewhere in the tens of thousands. But for all intensive purposes, how many of these players are participating on a regular basis? I don’t have any numbers to back this up, but I’d be shocked if it was more than 150. In fact, I suspect it to be far, far fewer; in general I’ve found that you’ve got a few usual suspects doing most of the talking.

It doesn’t help that the “ARG community” is somewhat well entrenched; there are definite “regulars,” people who have been around since the beginning, and who are quite familiar with one another. Certainly, it’s about as welcoming a community as you’re ever going to find on the ol’ interweb. Nevertheless, part of the genre being in its nascency is that the early adopters still have a significant role. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. But it does mean that there’s an entry barrier — just as there’s a barrier to getting involved with any established community.

Second, contributing to a community is hard work. Collaboration can yield phenomenal fruits, but it is also famously difficult — particularly in large groups, and particularly when it takes place over computer-mediated media. Anybody who has ever interacted with groups online, never mind in an ARG, knows how messy things can get, and how much energy it can take just to keep people from getting pissed off. Although these are mainly nice people that are participating, drama certainly happens, and it can be a real pain to navigate through that. And Unfiction forums, like any other mature forums, have well-established rules of conduct. Learning those rules is an overhead for new players; but following those rules, and playing nice with a crowd of a hundred others is an overhead even for existing players. The overhead is not huge; I’m not saying that anyone is seriously stressing out over these interactions. But you can bet that it’s enough to turn some people off; it’s another entry barrier.

Third, the majority of significant contributions come from the minority of participants. It’s true that there’s always a small percentage of players who try much harder than anyone else. But perhaps more importantly, there is generally just not enough content in a game to allow everyone to contribute equally. Significant interaction in an ARG is generally limited to some form of puzzle solving. Unfortunately, (a) most people are not very good at solving puzzles, and (b) you can be fairly sure that there will be a small handful of players in any game that are excellent at it, and will handily take care of the puzzles on their own. Everyone is free to pitch in, and to be sure, the suggestions of the crowd generally facilitate the solving process. But inasmuch as most puzzles are not vast, sweeping affairs with dozens of intricately connected components, many players will go their entire careers without contributing a single helpful insight. The extent to which these players derive satisfaction from the process will depend on how much they value team success over personal success. Even if such a player is fully dedicated to the team, though, they are likely to contribute less once they realize their contributions are simply not helping.

Of course, interacting with characters is another huge part of ARGs, and another chance for individuals to contribute to the collective progression. I think most experienced players will agree, though, that the majority of interactions are either (a) idle chatter with no information that helps to progress the game, or (b) basically replicas of other interactions experienced by other players. In other words, they add flavour, but are basically unrelated to the gameplay on a larger scale.

My point, then, is that the emphasis on community and collaboration actually creates a barrier to play. And I ought also to point out that if a player is turned off by any of the above factors, buying out of the collaborative play is not really an option. The lurker can follow along with the game by monitoring the communications of the community, but meaningful interaction will probably remain out of reach. To be sure, this isn’t always the case — there have been examples of designers altering the trajectory of a game as a result of the actions of an individual. But for obvious reasons, that’s not a pattern that can be frequently replicated. ARGs are currently (and understandably) designed for scale, and the meaningful player-developer communication occurs on the aggregate-level, the group-level.

And beyond that, I personally find lurking to be a rather disempowering, un-fun way to experience an ARG (or any aesthetic/playful experience.) Not only are you a mute at a party full of lively discussion, but you’re encountering everything through 1-degree of separation. You’re always reading about that new website or video before you see it; you’re always playing catch-up, never experiencing that thrill of discovery for yourself. I’d actually say that the community itself is essentially the first-class entity of the ARG, where the fun happens and where the important interaction takes place. In a very real sense, if you’re not playing the community, you’re not really playing the game.

The upshot of all this is that, IMO, developers should be taking a closer, more critical look at the role of community and collaboration in their games. I believe that to a large extent, we are seeing ARGs being developed for a small group of dedicated enthusiasts (in many cases being developed by that same group.) You can see this trend very clearly, for example, in the manner in which many games are launched: through contact with individuals at the center of the ARG community, who can effectively spread it to the rest of the community.

Another informative example is Eldritch Errors, one of the current top-tier ARGs, being run by professional, ambitious puppet masters. The meta site has a “story so far” section, which one assumes is supposed to serve as a logical place for new players to jump in. However, the writing in this section is heavily cryptic, and its clear that readers are meant to fill in the gaps by visiting the links peppered throughout the narrative — almost all of which lead to threads in either the in-game or out-of-game player forums. A player who gets this far, but has never heard of Unfiction, now faces a huge learning curve: not only do they have to get acquainted with the details of the game, but they first have to get acquainted with Unfiction, and the protocols of interaction between Unfiction users. I daresay that what is actually happening here is an implicit assumption that most people trying to join the game are already familiar with Unfiction.

Now I don’t see a single thing wrong with a community developing for its own. I used to write collaborative fiction within a few dozen others, and it was awesome. The only reason I’m writing all of this is because ARGs are a genre on the rise — and if they’re going to grow, they’ve got to find a (much) larger player base to grow into. This is a big problem for all the professional developers (including the makers of Eldritch Errors, which is why I find their behaviour so perplexing). And I know that many amateur developers (and players) are interested in innovating as well, finding ways to bring the genre to a wider world. The ARG community is a community of advocates. However, the community is facing an interesting challenge: it needs to transcend itself.

So what’s the solution? Well, there’s a number of directions that I’d love to see developers explore, behind each of which there’s another lengthy discussion lurking. I don’t think the answer is to move away from social play — I accept and embrace the notion that collaborative play is part of what defines and distinguishes ARGs. However, I would like to see less emphasis on the single, monolithic community. This model doesn’t reflect how people like to play, anyway. People like to play in small groups that have meaning to them; and a network of small, semi-autonomous groups can actually be more effective at large-scale collaboration than single, unified army. Many consider the ARG genre to be, technically speaking, a subset of the MMO genre; and I think “traditional” MMOs like World of Warcraft have a lot to teach us in terms of how they facilitate cooperation. The ability to form adventuring groups and guilds, in particular, is the key to a lot of WOW’s success. What I’m suggesting could also be rephrased as saying that ARG designers ought to take a look at the way people are actually using the web these days. The notion of virtual community as a single space effectively expired at the end of the 90s. Today, communities are fragmented, or operate entirely along the types of networks
manifested on services like Facebook.

I’d also like to see designers explore novel ways to make individual contributions more meaningful to the gameplay. Again, I’m not suggesting that the individuals take the spotlight away from the group. Rather, I’m suggesting that in addition to soliciting group contributions that are synthesized by individual players behind the scenes, games could solicit individual contributions that are then synthesized intra-diagetically. World Without Oil is a great exemplar of taking this approach to the extreme: the game is built entirely upon creative submissions from players, which are organized by in-game characters. Despite the promotion of the “best” submissions of the front page, all submissions are uniformly intrinsic to the success of the game (I’m particularly fond of the weekly summaries written by in-game characters, which take the time to individually acknowledge many of the players.) Like I said, WWO sits at the far end of the continuum between interaction at the community level and interaction at the individual level. But surely there is room for models of interaction that sit somewhere in between. Also note that the individual-centric play in WWO does not mitigate the importance of the community.

Another example I love to reference is the payphone component of I Live Bees. Including substantial meatspace activities can be excellent way to create greater player empowerment. In ILB, players who lived near target payphones were uniquely suited to perform an important task — if they suceeded, they benefited the community in a way that only they could. Even if the event involves a group, physical activity generally produces a greater sense of involvement than online activity, and participation in a smaller group (say of about 100 local players) produces a greater sense of involvement than participation in a larger group (the entire online community/audience of 10,000.)

Finally, the last thing I’d like to see designers start doing is taking more responsiblity for the infrastructure that supports their community of players. Designing a space that can effectively support online collaboration is a complicated art/science, with innovation happening everyday. Unfortunately, fans who operate forums and wikis, even though they are totally awesome, are not a substitute for professional social space designers. Perhaps more importantly, common forum and wiki software is either incredibly inappropriate for complex collaboration (in the case of forums) or incredibly inaccessible to inexperienced users (in the case of wikis.) It is absolute murder to keep track of a 20-page thread on Unfiction that gets 10 posts an hour — this is why god invented RSS. Now, if your game exclusively targets people who are already familiar with the infrastructure provided by fans, it’s not much of a problem. If you only want to attract Unfiction users, there’s no harm in comprehensively linking to Unfiction forum posts. But when I see a company with a budget of millions and a target audience of millions, it frustrates me to see them ignore this issue entirely (full disclosure: I did my MSc on this topic.) Admittedly, it’s important to strike a balance between appealing to the existing community and trying to pull in new ones. But I don’t believe the solution is to hand control entirely over to the existing community.

Whew! I’m done. I think that was the longest blog post, ever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 1:45 am and is filed under Pervasive Gaming, Alternate Reality Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.