[arg_discuss] [players] Communities and resources

[Andrea Phillips]

Well, *I'm* sure regretting going to bed early for once last  
night. :) I have a couple of responses to the thread that's going on,  
and some of 'em I'm going to be splitting off into another thread  
shortly. First, some quick answers to Colin's questions directly:

On Mar 30, 2006, at 4:59 PM, Colin Gehrig wrote:

> Are places like Unfiction.com considered critical to the success of  
> your
> games?

Very, very important, though not necessarily essential -- see below. :)

> Do you plan to target these audiences?

For those of us in the commercial ARG arena, I think we all hope to  
get an audience quite a bit wider than Unfiction; ideally, we'd like  
to have an audience a large as your average blockbuster film. UF and  
ARGN are opinion-makers, though, and if they talk smack about your  
game, you're probably dead in the water. You might be able to pull it  
out anyway, if it's a fantastic game, but... UF is usually the first  
to notice an ARG. Word-of-mouth is the currency of our trade, and if  
that first word-of-mouth is "This sucks, don't bother," it's a real  
killer.

> Do you think they help or hinder the genre?

This depends on when you ask me. :) I think it's a little of both. As  
a PM, it's really wonderful to have a fairly simple place to get a  
quick read on what your audience might be thinking and doing. I wish  
to high heaven there were more such ways. It can be frustrating,  
though, to see little diversity of thought in speculation, in solve  
strategy, and so forth. In a way, the degree to which everyone plays  
nice on UF can discourage someone -- especially someone new -- from  
piping up and saying "You know, I really disagree and think X about  
Y." Especially if there's already even a small amount of consensus  
that Z about Y is correct.

And there are other problems, too. An example: It's also possible and  
even easy to follow some games entirely from within UF, which as a  
player at Cloudmakers was wonderful. It meant I didn't have to go  
hunting for updates myself. But as a PM looking at webstats, it might  
be nice to know if Site A is getting lower hits because nobody cares  
about it and that angle of the story, or because the full body of its  
text was posted on the Unforums and so nobody needs to bother  
visiting no matter how compelling an update it is... you lose some  
measures of interest and activity.

But don't get me wrong -- I don't wish UF would go away. I just wish  
there were more groups a lot like it. And we have to recognise that  
without our players, we've got nothing. :)

> Are player created guides helping your ARG, or are they just confusing
> new-comers? Do you depend on them, or make your own in-game guide?

I think this depends on what you mean by 'guide.' Perplex City has a  
wiki, which I consider a very useful resource for the players and  
even for us (if nothing else, it's useful to do a quick check and  
make sure if our audience knows that, say, Donnie works on the  
docks). That's not to say we don't have our own internal resources,  
as well, about which I should decline to speak. :)

I know Elan told us that during the Beast, they relied heavily on the  
Trail we made. I suspect PM use of player resources for their own  
nefarious ends is pretty common, but I also suspect it's something  
you'll find it difficult to get anyone to really solidly admit to doing.

> Is there something you would like to see the players do that they  
> don't
> do currently?

Well, I'd like to see multiple communities, personally. It would show  
me that the genre is growing beyond the particular kind of person who  
feels comfortable hanging around at Unfiction, which as I will say  
below is NOT everybody, no matter how great a job the people at  
Unfiction are doing.

-----

So, in response to the way this thread has been going as a whole,  
here are some of my overall thoughts on the relationship between  
players and the established UF community, the role of UF, etc., etc.

If I'm reading the conversation correctly, Wendy's suggesting that UF  
and similar groups can be cliquey and elitist; Krystyn is pointing to  
a cultural imperative at UF to be kind to newbies. I think both of  
these arguments have merit. I think no matter how inclusive and  
fabulous UF may be, though, there will be a (potentially large) group  
of players or would-be players who don't feel comfortable joining UF.  
Maybe because they don't have any friends there already, maybe  
because they feel they don't know the ropes, maybe the culture isn't  
one they mesh with very well. Maybe they make one post and nobody  
really responds, so they feel unwelcome and don't come back. Maybe  
they get trouted and take it the wrong way. Maybe they wanted a place  
where they can feel comfortable using less-than-grammatically-correct  
language.

So regardless of the actual qualities of the group you talk about,  
there will be people for whom it simply *doesn't work.* And as a  
designer, this is one of the things that can keep me up at night, so  
to speak -- what happens to those players that find UF and reject it,  
for whatever reason? Do they still play? Do they abandon the whole  
game? I would expect them to go off and seed their own communities,  
and it is perpetually surprising to me that we primarily only have  
Unfiction. Given my experience of the internet and digital  
communities in general, I'm surprised that each new game doesn't  
spawn at least five or six additional communities every single  
time... but it doesn't seem to work like that, and that question of  
'why not?' is one that I'd love to have an answer for.

Here's the illustrative anecdote from my own personal history: I  
didn't actually join the Cloudmakers community as soon as I found it.  
I didn't want to join at all, but one day there was a file I wanted  
to see that I couldn't access without joining the group, so I only  
joined to get access to it. The friend who had been pulling me into  
the game gradually egged me into posting some spec, and later into  
joining the chat (though she subsequently become less involved). If  
it weren't for this friend, though, I wouldn't have joined at all,  
wouldn't have hopped on IRC, and certainly never would have become a  
moderator!

Even later, I never joined Unfiction as a player, because (and those  
of you who know me personally, don't laugh) my natural reticence  
makes joining a new community really uncomfortable to me. I burned  
out on ARGs pretty hard at the end of the Beast, and then later, when  
I was recovered, I felt  a little bit unwelcome by virtue of the fact  
that I hadn't been involved from the very beginning (and so never  
even *tried* to become a part of the community). I guess I needed  
that somebody to invite me in, and that never happened. (And really,  
why should anyone have done that? :) But it does demonstrate why UF  
just doesn't work for everybody. I'm sure I'm not the only person  
like this out in the great wide internet.

I admit to following UF (badly) now, as a designer, because I  
consider keeping track of that particular pool of players a pretty  
crucial piece of feedback. In fact, in the absence of multiple  
communities and above-and-beyond bloggers taking up your torch, it  
can be the only vivid source of feedback you've got.

--
Andrea Phillips
http://www.perplexcity.com
http://www.deusexmachinatio.com