[arg_discuss] Penny Arcade and the Ovaltine Disappointment

[Adam Martin]

On 23/06/07, Gupfee <gupfee at gmail.com> wrote:

> As to the second issue, players being turned off by an ARG in general, this

> is where a really good stealthy launch and a pretty thick curtain helps.

> The best way to avoid the ARG label is to pretend it's not an ARG from the

> get-go.  Keep your client's mouth shut, and let the mystery deepen. By the

> time they figure out what's going on (assuming you've entertained them and

> cultivated their respect for your game) most players will be invested in the

> story and stick with it and not care about the ARG or brand association.


At the London Gamer Geeks social the other week, someone was saying
that they thought one of Perplex City's great achievements was to show
that you really didn't have to have a thick curtain to make an ARG
work (and work well), both as a good game and as a commercially
successful enterprise. It certainly went through the spectrum,
starting from paranoia about revealing any chink in the curtain,
through tongue-in-cheek interviews about the game whilst it was
running, and finally to a very unenforced willing suspension of
disbelief, where everyone except the NPC's was quite open about the
curtain's existence. The gradual relaxation of it didn't seem to harm
the game (unless someone else wants to chime in with a different take
on that? :)).

Lots of people do ARG's for different reasons, but most of it goes
around under the umbrella term "ARG", and I think that causes a lot of
confusion. I've heard people say things like "I hate ARG's, they're an
insidious waste of time ... oh, not *those* ARGs, its the other kind
that I hate", and who felt they were making perfect sense :). So ...
I'm not sure there's as much of a reputation issue as it sometimes
appears from looking at the press and commentaries - people tar very
different ARG-esque games (which may or may not call themselves ARG's
or be thought of as such) with the same brush, but seem pretty good at
seeing the actual difference between a 1 week marketing campaign with
only lip-service to ARG concepts and a 6 month epic story. It would be
nice not to see any negative press at all, of course, but  ... then
wouldn't we'd lose some of the inspiration to keep doing it better :)
?

Compared to mainstream games (e.g. the previous "new" genres of Casual
games and MMO games), this is the least constrained genre I've ever
seen in terms of what directions people are successfully pushing it
in. Sure, there was a lot of weird and wacky stuff tried in other
genres, but it was never really successful beyond tiny niches (I can
think of games I saw five or even ten years ago that are ahead of what
people consider the "state of the art" right now - e.g. rich
natural-language MMO's - but this stuff never made it into the more
visible parts of the MMO niche itself, let alone got wider
visibility). That's really exciting, and if getting tarred with overly
simplistic analysis and pigeonholing is the price we pay for having so
many cutting-edge projects going on at once, then I think it's
probably still worth it.

Adam