[arg_discuss] ARGs & relational aesthetics

[Adam Martin]

On 29/03/07, despain at quantumcontent.com <despain at quantumcontent.com> wrote:

> DB: by visiting the Lost Experience series of websites, you

>       don't change the entertainment experience of other players

>       but something like... sorry to keep going back to it...

>       genomecities every player's contributions affects other

>       player's experience within the entertainment being consumed

>       that's the attraction of myspace, or second life, or a wiki,

>       or digg... or... pick any web 2.0 site


Isn't that a part of why the Lost Experience did poorly as an ARG,
though - i.e. a specific complaint against that game rather than an
example of a general issue?

The interactions with other players are a fundamental part of an ARG -
without that, the ARG collapses into being an essentially offline
game. The internet itself is fundamentally about connecting freely and
frequently to "other people or content created by other people", so
any game that plays out on the web is effectively trying to hide the
real nature of the web if it doesn't play up to the interaction with
other people.

Interestingly, in MMOG dev, there are really only two core problems:
one is that you can't stop running a game once it's started (it's a
potentially infinitely long commitment), and the other is that every
player is constantly able to (and trying to) affect every other
player.


>From that (especially the second one, which AIUI is the same issue as

DB referred to?) comes all the other problems: content generation
costs, griefing, all the technical problems,  the extreme sensitivity
to flaws in game-balance and to bugs generally (e.g. duping), etc.


> Wendy: how do you think MMO's fit into this? a player playing

>        Oblivion can't change the game for someone half way

>        around the world, but someone playing WoW can.

>        to an extent.


When you decide to base your game in a world you created yourself, you
commit to providing *every part* of that world, ultimately down to the
simulation of sub-atomic physics, because you are the creator, and
that means no-one/nothing else is going to provide it for you. Of
course you only provide what you need, but every time you want to add
a new feature, you have to not only implement the feature, but also
implement any world-simulation rules necessary as background to
support that feature (which, sadly, happens most of the time).

The recent trends towards less world-like MMOG's come at least in part
from that - it's much easier (in terms of lower financial cost and
also lower risk) to provide unique / new entertainment (that will make
you a profitable game) through less world-y mechanisms.

Or ... you make a massively singleplayer game: Oblivion. And because
your world no longer has to cope with all the simultaion horrors of
supporting thousands of real people, you get to spend your budget
simulating more of the environment itself (and produce a much more
immersive game as a result). IMHO there's no particular reason that
online games are less immersive than offline ones other than that
no-one can afford the budget to get an online game up to the same
level of immersion because of all the extra things they're  having to
spend money on just to get the game completed.

That's the core of my professional attraction to ARG's: don't create
the world, take someone else's and build on top of it. Let's you spend
ten times as much on the game/story/etc given the same total project
budget. Of course, since no-one has yet been able to afford to build a
non-trivial world, the only world available to build on is the real
one.

Adam