[arg_discuss] Re: Talkin' about UF

[Guy Parsons]

Hi all - long time listener, first time caller. I'm Guy, and I'm
(ostensibly) studying Digital Media Production at London College of
Communication. Something of a padawan, then, and needless to say not
someone you're likely to bump into at a conference just yet! :o) It's
great to see the list getting into gear. A few things, then:

I think most of the pertinent observations regarding Unfiction have
already been made. I don't defend UF as the best possible forum for
all possible games, but it strikes me that UF's weaknesses are so
intimately related to its strengths that they're nigh-on unfixable.
It's a readymade audience that can quickly build a buzz, but it
naturally comes with readymade expectations. It's a tight-knit
community, which is great - but only once you're a part of it. The
familiarity that players have with the genre can help newcomers, but
this can also spoil the mystery for fresh eyes. As Wendy aptly puts
it:

>Anytime there's the "us" of a community, there is also the "them" of
>those not in the community.

I think Wendy's assertion that the forumites should "be more friendly
to newbies" is non-controversial, but that's a generalised culture
change difficult to engineer from a top-down perspective. (Despite
much handwringing on the mods' part, I assure you.) I can of course
empathise with PMs who find it frustrating, if only because it's so
out of their control.

Having acknowledged that UF, while valuable, is sometimes sub-ideal, I
think there can be a real value in alternative venues for playing /
discussing ARGs. Creating specific forums for one's own game ("in
game" or not) is the most obvious option, which comes with its own set
of advantages (no pre-existing "politics") and disadvantages (no
pre-existing *anything*) As many of you have commented, though,
per-game communities tend to converge on one specific locale. If you
want that to be *your* forum, then you probably ought to push it early
and prominently. One good thing about this convergence is that, when
communities form elsewhere, players from UF are usually happy to tag
along and can still offer a sage morsel of advice like "you really
shouldn't be brute-forcing that." :o)

Contrary to Andrea's post:

>I'm surprised that each new game doesn't
>spawn at least five or six additional communities every single
>time...

...I don't find convergent communities to be an unexpected phenomenon
- if you're creating a mystery, then you're primarily attracting
curious people looking for answers. This establishes a positive
feedback loop as players gravitate to the largest congregation of
fellow players, who presumably have the most information. This
swarming mechanic which has been wholeheartedly encouraged by the
gameplay of many ARGs to date.

Wendy asks:

>I wonder if the design of ARGs so far has unintentionally promoted this
>collapse of communities down to the one with the most "mass."

Of course, and hardly "unintentionally." Speaking as a hardened UFite
(re: Mike's Beast-centric description) ARGs have been all about
mass-collaboration, astounding feats of phone-answering organisation,
the hive mind, and amassing 10,000 players so you're guaranteed to
have an Ancient Cyrillic expert on board. It's one of the "gimmicks"
that PMs (and players!) have enjoyed playing with because it's made
uniquely possible by this newfangled thing called "internet."
Time-sensitive puzzles, heavy updates and one-on-one communication
also call for players to collapse into a single core forum.

If you cut out these elements, then you'd really open up your game for
discussion in multiple, diverse forums. You might lose some of the ARG
secret sauce, but I suspect that would mainly be in the minds of the
existing UF community, whom I gather aren't quite your target
audience. By creating a more narrative type game, players already have
all the information to hand (although your narrative can be a puzzle
in itself) so there's less of a pull towards places like UF. (Adrian
made a point that guides and other meta-resources help facilitate this
process, while still allowing for a more complicated game design.)

This leaves room for speculation, criticism and discussion, which are
primarily social activities. The criteria for involvement are
different - you socialise with people who you like and respect, and
that doesn't scale in the same way as "group puzzlesolving ability."
This is why TV shows each have several popular forums with differing
tones - nothing is gained from all banding together, apart from noise
drowning out a signal. (And one man's noise *is* another man's signal,
right?)

Extending Mike's jazzpunk analogy, ARGs right now tend to insist upon
arena-sized venues for thousands of lighter-waving players. But they
certainly *could* be touring grimy independent clubs and giving
numerous smaller audiences a more intimate experience. The irony is
that we traditionally consider massively-collaborative tasks to
encourage a sense of community, but by forcing everyone into a
"central hub" (to quote Brooke) we might be letting potential players
fall by the wayside.

(Another observation: there are players who happily collaborate on the
Perplex City ARG, but don't read the puzzlecard sections because they
want to work out the answers for themselves. If you could take the
latter ethos (largely a result of zero time pressure) and apply it to
your ARG, then the heat is off. Players can follow the game solo, or
with friends, or on other forums, or...)

That said, establishing a community expresses a certain confidence
that there are people out there ready to join. ARGs are still
relatively young, and maybe we won't see this kind of thing happen for
a while. Right now, the design suggestions I've made are probably of
less value if your game is a short-run, one-off affair, because
players might not have the time to establish these communities. And
while I doubt a large forum will emerge to rival UF in the near
future, I suspect we'll start to see other boards overlapping in some
areas, as ARGs span so many media and genres.

So I think developers *do* have a degree of control over how they
utilise existing communities, and whether they encourage new ones to
form. A key distinction: do you consider communities to be directly
playing the game (by organising, collaborating, and solving), or
talking *about* the game (speculating, elaborating and piss-taking) -
a modus operandi which is more conducive to multiple groups of
players.

Guy Parsons
guy.lewis.parsons at gmail.com

(And finally, a somewhat relevant UF thread from WIBS newbies:
http://snipurl.com/ox8n )