March 3rd, 2008
A couple of posts got me thinking about the issue of player generated content recently. Tony Walsh writes generally about players as storytellers as a trend in multiplayer games. Meanwhile (well, a few months ago), Brian Clark writes about his plans for Eldritch Errors, which include a panoply of media products (book, comics, films, etc.) based on the events which are currently unfolding in the immersive narrative. Brian talks about the players of the game as effectively “starring” in the retellings, or at least being largely responsible for their eventual content. Of course, that’s a bit of an overstatement. Most of the creative sweat is being put in by the professional writers, designers, etc. behind the property. But it does represent a significant shift from the way games and entertainment generally is developed — it’s becoming a collaborative process, and the lines between the producer and the consumer are being blurred.
I’m pretty much a fan of this. And superficially, it’s all well and good. But there are some quandaries you get into when a significant portion of your content is materially attributable to an unpaid, uncredited player base. Specifically: Why aren’t they being paid? Why aren’t they being credited? Are the players being taken advantage of? If so, why do they let it happen? And if not, what safeguards can we put in place to avoid declining the slippery slope into outright exploitation?
Of course, player generated content is nothing new. But in most cases, this content is mainly incidental, and not comparable to the larger body of work. Generally, we’re talking about the output from a fairly limited functionality that allows self-expression. In any MMO, you can create and operate a character/guild/organization/etc, and this certainly goes a long way to building the experience for other players. An MMO would simply not exist without a wide range of player generated entities to interact with. But it would be tough (albeit possible) to argue that these entities represent significant content on their own, because (a) they are generally irrelevant outside of the game, (b) each one is generally only experienced by a tiny percentage of the player base, and (c) the capacity for truly creative expression is severely limited.
There are also games that are built specifically to be tools for storytelling or content development, like Neverwinter Nights and RPG Maker. But these are largely the same as other development tools, an essential property of which is the fact that what you create with them becomes your property. There’s a crucial point here: creating the expression engine is important work, and the expression itself is equally important work; both are valid and rewardable forms of labour.
Looking elsewhere, user-generated content is the talk of the town in the whole web 2.0, social web thing. The “next great revolution” is the “cult of amateur”, etc. And it’s quite obvious that Youtube wouldn’t be worth much without the videos, and Facebook wouldn’t be worth much without your annoying high school friends. Unlike the case of the MMO, there would be no content left whatsoever. However, it’s worth noting that (a) at least the content is explicitly attributed to the creators, who can use their page/profile/etc. to further their own ends, and (b) we are beginning to witness a backlash against terms of service which grant highly liberal licenses over user contributed media. In my opinion, this issue, and the broader issue of the commodification of individuals to make billions for investors, are issues ripe for some scrutiny. Luckily, some people are taking the task to hand.
Although these sorts of sites represent the clearest appropriation of user-generated content, they are a lot closer in this respect to MMOs then the sorts of situations that I envision when I read Tony’s and Brian’s comments; content-generation on these sites is usually either incidental or highly disparate. For me, Tony and Brian are predicting a future of games that looks a lot more like Second Life, where highly creative expression and consumption of that expression is at the heart of the experience, and where that products of that expression are recognized as goods that ought to confer the same benefits they would if created outside of the game.
Will the games that arise from Tony’s and Brian’s visions follow the example set by Second Life? Although SL represents the closest parallel for me, they’re still quite different things. Media in SL is still quite disparate, while ARGs/chaotic fiction/whatever tries to present a cohesive experience. I can imagine that it would be quite problematic if a player decided to try and sell some part of the story that they were highly involved with at some point — or simply deny the producers they ability to use what they had contributed.
It’s important to note that these guys are in a whole different class from the people behind Youtube and Facebook. The latter are merely [gross generalization] cynical capitalists [/gross generalization], while the former are well-intentioned designers exploring the frontiers of collaborative storytelling. In general, people in this community are super nice and frequently idealistic (I’d like to think I’m a super nice idealist myself!) What I fear though, is that this niceness and idealism will perpetuate an already nascent assumption that the relationship between producers and players will forever be blanketed by a layer of happy warmness that precludes exploitation. In fact, this is not terribly unreasonable. We are talking about very nice people, in most cases, here. But the reality exists that you can be the nicest developers in the world, yet still end up screwing over your players quite unintentionally. Business tends to have that effect. (Much respect for EE, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.)
My hope is that game developers who take up this vision, and turn it into reality, will take this issue to heart. And I hope that players will realize what they’re contributions are worth, and take developers to task when they don’t show the proper respect. I am consistently amazed by the amount of creativity, resourcefulness, and plain old tenacity that exists amongst the player-base for these games. Games frequently succeed because these qualities. But I’m also consistently amazed that these same players spend most of their time working despised day jobs, without really thinking about they could do with these skills. They’re having fun, of course, and that’s important; not all unpaid labour is “unpaid labour”; that is, not all of it is bad. But we are talking about a completely new dynamic here, and that comes with the need to ask some hard questions.
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October 1st, 2007
There’s this blog roundtable, right, and the topic du jour is chaotic fiction. Here’s the other post in the roundtable (we’re part of an exclusive club, I guess.) Also note that the somewhat mundane post title is not meant to imply that I am unenthusiastic about the topic — I just couldn’t think of a clever wordplay on “chaotic fiction,” and got frustrated. Chaotic diction? Erotic friction? No.
For the uninitiated, chaotic fiction is a term coined by Sean Stacey to define a space of participatory creative works. I guess if you were so inclined, you could call it Fiction 2.0 (except you would probably get punched.) Although Sean came up with the term in an attempt to contextualize the ARG-definition controversy (and get everyone to shut up about it I suppose), the idea is that it describes a space that contains a wide variety of genres, so it’s not strictly necessary to even bring up ARGs in this discussion… except I just did, so never mind.
Chaotic fiction is a nice framework, because it situates a number of hitherto discrete genres within a single conceptual space. Moreover, it recognizes the fluidity of that space. Second Life may be superficially distinct in nature from SFZero, but there is certainly something similar going on there — a truth that is manifested in the way that virtual games and live games are bleeding into one another. Cross-media entertainment is the big thing these days, and I would argue that it’s not because of interesting synergies between unique platforms, but because they’re all part of the same delicious pie. I expect the media theorists have known this for a long time.
While I like the idea of chaotic fiction, it’s really the aforementioned theorists I’m waiting to hear from. The idea is inherently academic, but I haven’t seen it appear on any academic radars. This is unfortunate because (a) there’s little doubt that Stacey’s thinking overlaps with a significant corpus of previous literature, so discussing chaotic fiction without the benefit of those insights is at best arrogant and at worst profoundly misguided, and (b) there’s not been a useful conceptual framework that entered the world fully formed; there need to be iterations, there needs to be a synthesis of viewpoints.
A brief synopsis: chaotic fiction inhabits a 3-dimensional space where the three axes represent authorship (centralized or distributed), ruleset (loose or strict), and coherence (less plot or more plot.)
Those are some good axes, but they don’t really represent the full space of possible variations between projects. Of course, the set of possible axes is infinite: How much of a project takes place online? How many participants does it scale to? How many cats were tangentially involved in the creation process? Etc. The question is, how do you choose which axes are salient enough to include in this sort of framework? Stacey might have had certain criteria in mind, but unfortunately, he didn’t explicitly share them. He sort of implies that he’s looking at properties that exist independently of specific media, and focusing mainly on abstracted patterns of behaviour rather than material details. That strategy makes sense, but it doesn’t exclude seemingly relevant properties like scale. Is a project geared to handle millions not fundamentally different from one geared to handle dozens? If someone were to really build on Stacey’s ideas, I’d say this is the way to do it: refine and justify the choice of axes.
One of the other interesting things about Stacey’s analysis is the way he situates the space of chaotic fiction as being connected to the larger trend of participatory online culture in general. This is certainly an apt observation. My question is, what exactly is the relationship between these spaces? Do they exist alongside each other, or is one within the other? How much overlap is there? Tellingly, if you treat “coherence” simply as a measure of structure, rather than a measure of plot, you get a space which very clearly includes projects like Wikipedia and GNU. Stacey has constructed a very thin barrier between what he calls chaotic fiction and virtually the entire sphere of participatory projects. In this model, all that distinguishes an ARG from a collaborative encyclopedia is the presence of narrative — and narrative being a fairly subjective concept, that’s not much of a distinction. Far from being a bad thing, all this means is that the ARG-definition controversy is inherently very silly, something which Stacey himself implied very strongly in his essay.
Enough theory. A framework isn’t very interesting unless you actually try to frame things within it, something that only Stacey has actually done so far (to my knowledge.) Stacey framed various projects within each individual axis, but when you’re in a multidimensional space what’s really neat is the interaction between axes. With 3 axes, you’ve got 8 sectors, each of which can be construed as a distinct category. Looking at each of these categories ought to be an interesting thought experiment. Of course, this is a ruthlessly mathematical way of looking at things, but I’ll save that critique for a later post wherein I refute everything I’m currently saying on the basis of postmodernity.
So, just for fun, let’s take a look at a few sectors in this space of chaotic fiction. In particular, those where distributed authorship lives, because that’s all that’s worth talking about anyway these days, right?*
- Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, low coherence. People sort of just do whatever they want. Absolute anarchy is (arguably) not particularly worth exploring, but finding a magic balance with just enough rules and just enough coherence can lead to some highly empowering and compelling experiences. I’d argue that Second Life inhabits this space — it’s really quite chaotic, and despite the presence of a shared world, there is very little about the world itself that actually encourages any sort of normalized behaviour. There aren’t many examples of other scaled environments that allow users to do almost anything, probably because it’s hugely risky and challenging to give so many people so much freedom. On the other hand, there’s a plethora of small groups who create their own personalized spaces for these sorts of activities. Kupopolis, for example, is used by about 20 writers to write stories within a shared universe — there aren’t many rules because there aren’t many people. Unbounded freedom on a large scale is a tough thing to harness, but I’d wager that there’s a lot of room for Big Ideas that could pull it off.
- Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, high coherence. It’s somewhat difficult to think of a system for distributed authorship that could facilitate high coherence without a significant set of rules. About the closest I can get are the “interactive story” communities like Kupopolis — a small group of authors trying to create something reasonably coherent, where strict rules are unnecessary because of participants’ like-mindedness. It’s an interesting concept, though: let users run free while somehow compiling their output into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. ARGs get rather close. They tend rather closely to centralized authorship and a strict ruleset, but one can certainly imagine an ARG with less of each. The trick, I expect, is finding a minimal but effective management/planning strategy that’s capable of coordinating emergent, unstructured behaviour without getting in its way. Well, duh, that sounds like a cinch. Arguably, something like Wikipedia does this well — but the extent to which that sort of output is coherent is debatable. Still, an ARG that borrowed patterns from Wikipedia would be rather intriguing.
- Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, low coherence. This is pretty much the baseline for Webs Two Point Oh, and is consequently a space littered with the detritus of a million mediocre startups. Consider your standard YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service): it’s built entirely on the users’ backs, you’re pretty limited in what you can do on it, and ultimately there’s not really much to it. The idea is to reach some sort of level of coherence — a point at which the swamp of unassociated data comes together into something magical, like when you look at clusters in Flickr. Most don’t succeed…
- Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, high coherence. …but when they do succeed, it’s something to get excited about. Of course, the kinds of projects I’m talking about don’t strictly fit into the realm of chaotic fiction. But, as I argued in my previous overlong essay, there’s a lot to be learned from the internet at large.
*My other reason for not probing the entire space in detail is the fact that I wrote most of this post about a month ago, and only came back to it now. You ever try starting a lengthy blog post and coming back to it after several significant life events? It doesn’t work. No thanks.
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August 4th, 2007
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.
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