[arg_discuss] TINAG and the curtain: necessary?

[Andrea Phillips]

I still think TINAG is necessary, but I've revised my idea of what
"TINAG" means. it doesn't mean that the dev team is hiding behind a
curtain and pretending there's no game. This would have been dead
impossible for us in Perplex City, because of the angle where we had
to be a real company selling cards and offering a prize. We really
played with the in-game/out-of-game border, and the conclusion I
reached is that the *experience* has to believe it's for real.

So TINAG, to me, means that you aren't going to have a character
saying "Hey, there's this new Xbox game coming out, you should go buy
it," or "Hey, there's this awesome movie coming out, go see it." (Even
if that's the basic message of the experience, the game itself
shouldn't be aware of that.)

It means that if there's a phone number on a web site, that phone
number should work. It means that if you're giving somebody a PO Box,
the character should be checking it. It means that things need to
behave like they would if they were really real, as much as you can
possibly manage.

I guess TINAG used to be this idea that even the players should be
unsure whether the experience was real or not; but as Brian says, that
takes you into hoax territory, and worse, isn't necessarily *fun*. And
y'know, fun and interesting and immersive should be our benchmarks
here - there's no point in making a game that fits the ARG definition
of your choice point by point, if it falls down on being fun.

I suppose it's natural for definitions to evolve as the genre evolves... right?