[arg_discuss] What *is* an ARG?

[Tony Walsh]

Interesting post, Adam.
I've been a member of Second Life since April, 2004, and I agree that it 
is not an ARG.  It isn't a game at all, in my opinion, as there is no 
"play" structure to speak of and no universally-recognized goals -- 
although many Second Life members ("residents") insist it is a game.  
Second Life is a place where residents make their own experience, but 
not all residents agree on what experience that should be.  When your 
reality conflicts with mine, immersion is broken.

Second Life was actually used as part of an ARG last year, but I recall 
it fizzled out somewhat.
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/a_second_life_arg_under_my_nose/
The ARG won second place in Second Life's 2005 game dev competition.
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/second_life_game_dev_competition_winners_announced/

As to your question "are games designers losing site of the game, in 
their endless pursuit of 'immersion' and 'fidelity'?"
-- I can only speak from a limited, personal perspective on this.  I'd 
rather see more game play and fiction in ARGs at the expense of 
realism.  Good fiction can beat poorly-simulated realism any day of the 
week in terms of immersion.

-=-
Tony Walsh
416.367.3132
tony at secretlair.com
home- http://www.secretlair.com
blog- http://www.clickableculture.com



adam wrote:
> I'd been talking to some people about ARG's, and when someone asked 
> for an example game, someone else suggested Second Life probably was.
>
> This was also a conversation that came up at the london social event: 
> What is an ARG? What is not an ARG?
>
> It's also a question that we could do with answering more helpfully on 
> the igda.org/arg site, rather than the very brief description there 
> already. Incidentally, that description was intentionally vague and 
> brief to try and avoid treading on anyone's toes :).
>
> Anyway, to kick it off, here's the answer I gave:
>
> "Second life is a highly immersive Virtual World, but not an Alternate 
> Reality.
>
> A key differentiation is that the former is very much a 
> computer-generated simulation of a non-existent, fictional world (with 
> generally relaxed laws of physics etc), and the latter is very much a 
> real-life experience with no simulation, which just happens to come 
> together as a complete game, indistinguishable (within legal and 
> ethical bounds) from your own everday life."
>
> One of the Holy Grails of games-developers is "more immersion!", and 
> this they try to achieve by taking a fake, electronic approximation, 
> and endlessly trying to improve it and make it more faithful, a better 
> simulation, a more believable reproduction of reality. We have 3D 
> graphics cards that render beautiful, lush, photo-realistic 
> environments in real-time (I recommend everyone who hasn't yet to have 
> a look at Far Cry's tropical island, and try crawling through the 
> undergrowth). We now even have physics-engines-in-hardware, on a 
> plugin card. All purely for gaming, purely for increasing the fidelity 
> of the simulation.
>
> But that's a losing race: soon it will move to almost weightless 3D 
> goggles, then haptics, and all-over body-suits to provide more, 
> better, more physical feedback and harder-to-ignore immersion. And 
> then it will have to deal with smell, gravity/orientation, etc.
>
> And, in the meantime, the question becomes more and more pertinent 
> each year: are games designers losing site of the game, in their 
> endless pursuit of "immersion" and "fidelity"?
>
> Alternate Reality Games come at things from an orthogonal perspective: 
> they subsume the real world as the "platform" for delivering the 
> content - the game, the challenges, the narrative, the story within 
> which the player explores and has fun. There is no barrier between 
> simulation and reality: you have absolute fidelity "for free". It's 
> relatively effortless to provide enough content at a high enough 
> quality to immerse your players - as anyone who's tried to build a 3D 
> simulation of just a small part of a world can testify (art, sounds, 
> 3D models, physics, rendering, control system ... the list of work 
> needed goes on and on).
>
> ...but I know Andrea disagrees ;), so I'll stop there and let her take 
> over.
>
> Adam
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