[arg_discuss] Whitepaper:What do you want? (call for ideas)

[Adam Martin]

PS: please could people retain the attributions on replies - just the
header (On mm/dd/yy XXXX wrote:) is fine.

On 14/12/06, Alex Fleetwood <alexfleetwood at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of the things that really struck me at COaP was the absence of an

> agreed language to describe these activities. There were as many

> different terminologies as there were games. People's excitement about


This tends to be the case with any discussion of games in general.
"What is a game?" continues to be an active area of debate and ongoing
discussion. The ever-increasing variety and depth of computer games
seems to be complicating the issue by providing more and more strange
examples and personal experiences rather than simplifying it.


> Is there a reductive definition of what an ARG is

> that everyone can agree on? And from that can you start to deduce

> sub-categories of ARG? We, the ARG SIG, hold these truths to be

> self-evident; an ARG is...


In a global sense, no I don't believe there is. But then my experience
is coloured by the MUD/M*/MMO* debates that Brian describes; the
"argument that would not die". In the end, the MUD-DEV group, which
contained at least as many MMOG lead designers and developers as it
did MUD developers, settled on allowing everyone to use whichever term
they personally felt most comfortable with. This also allowed much
greater nuance, as the self-identification of games and speakers via
the terminology they preferred came increasingly to be implicitly
referenced by others to convey shades of meaning by using more than
one term in a given post.

However, for given audiences, I believe there are single (or small
multiples of) definitions that we can agree on. For instance, I think
there would be relatively little disagreement on how to present it to
narrative specialists (authors, scriptwriters, etc) as opposed to
games developers (programmers, designers, producers, etc). Although I
conveniently sidestepped the problem of games developers who are also
narrative specialists (story writers and story-focussed designers), in
practice I've found it not too difficult to amalgamate definitions,
making it clear that I'm briefly referencing two different
perspectives and inviting listeners to look into one or the other or
both as they wish.

I also think that if we could reduce the definition down to one, true,
definition then that would suggest the genre were a lot narrower and
less exciting than it otherwise might be :). Previous attempts to do
that for, for instance, MMOGs has lead to people becoming obsessed
with the common characteristics of the prevalent products of the day
and less open to working with other things that are natural extensions
to the genre - witness the fact that for most people MMO* is
synonymous with
"multiplayer-online-only-RPG-in-a-shared-virtual-landscape-with-persistent-player-characters-and-achievements".


> Also, anyone who is interested in working with me on a London

> COaP-style event next Spring please get in touch.


...sounds like an excellent idea. I hope lots of people get involved.
You might want to talk to people like Blast Theory if you haven't
already (people whose main interest is not in ARGs at all but who have
a lot to offer a COaP)

Adam