[arg_discuss] Open Source ARGs

[Mark Heggen]

Brian, thanks so much for your responses. To your points;

"I'd argue the "classical ARG" design limitation is the same as the
"classical MMPORG" design limitation: How do you provide the constant
stimulation that the "heavy user" population wants without closing the door
of progress on the more "casual user" population?"

"I'd argue instead that the large majority of people who have any
initial contact with an ARG never start "playing" it. There is a role of
spectators among the audience of the genre."


It is common, and often helpful, to split ARG audience members into two
groups; hardcore players and causal lurkers. It is clear from any
investigation into an ARG that this split does in fact exist. For creators
of - and champions for - ARGs it is obviously exciting for us to imagine
that the thousands and thousands of people who aren't actively posting on
forums or solving puzzles, but have visited our sites, are actively lurking
and therefore taking part in the experience in a concrete and important way.
Be they fanatic participants or simply captivated audience members, we are
glad to have them take part in our work.

The problem with this optimistic interpretation of our Google Analytics
numbers is that it largely ignores the third type of person who visit our
websites; people who show up, get confused, and never come back. As creators
of this relatively new form of mediated content, we need to be more honest
moving forward about how many people really are involved in these things we
make. We, in general, consistently assume and put forward the notion that
our projects are populated by giant herds of silent lurkers, when in fact
this is quite often not the case.

I'm not saying that everyone exaggerates their participants, and there are
of course cases when big numbers of lurkers have followed a game with great
involvement, but in general I would argue that an aura of overzealous
optimism clouds an honest evaluation of the effectiveness of ARGs to capture
and then hold the attention of people in large numbers. Clearly ARGs make
for great buzz and nice blog posts, but we still have not decisively proven
to ourselves, advertisers, or academics that we can maintain attention on a
large scale, and I believe that our eagerness to assume that people who have
seen our sites but aren't visibly playing are probably actively lurking is a
key ingredient to this problem.

I'll wrap this up with an experiment. Here we are, a group of people
interested in and/or dedicated to ARGs; we took the time to sign up for this
list, and many of us do this for a living. Let's consider two titans in
recent ARG history: World Without Oil and the Dark Knight ARG. These
projects came from some of the biggest names in the ARG world (McGonigal and
42) and were high profile in execution.

So, to a room of people who are dedicated to ARGs and in reference to two of
the more visible ARGs of recent memory, let me ask three questions:

1) Did you check out WWO and DK? Did you see the image of the Joker being
unlocked by page views? Did you see the WWO homepage? Did you see
photographs of the Harvey Dent street team handing out campaign stickers?

2) Did you actively play WWO and/or DK? Were you pulling phones out of
cakes? Were you putting in real dedicate hours blogging about your
post-petroleum life?

3) Did you really honestly lurk on either of these projects? I'm not talking
about following a link or two, but did you seriously lurk. Did you read the
forums with regularity, energy, and dedication? Did you make these games a
part of your life in a serious way, regardless of the casual or hands-off
nature of your participation?

I presume a lot of us would have to answer yes to question 1 and no to 2 and
3. This is a rhetorical experiment only, so we don't actually have to all
submit our answers, but I would encourage everyone to repeat the experiment
with other groups, particularly those who are "deeply" involved with ARGs.
It is a troublesome fact that most of the people who will MAKE an ARG in the
next year never really played OR lurked on any numbers of seminal ARGs, or
possibly any at all.

The fact is, some people lurk on ARGs, some people actively play ARGs, and
many many people think they sound interesting but don't really pay them much
attention after their first exposure. This isn't a disaster, this isn't
reason not to make them, but it is something that we need to come to terms
with.

_Mark










>

>

> I'm not trying to diminish your point, though: I think many ARGs suffer

> that

> overcomplexity, or an inability to layer that back out into

> understandability.

>

> >A large majority of people who have any initial contact with an ARG

> >stop "playing" before long because they are unable to grasp what is

> >going on, what they should pay attention to, what is a good use of

> >their time, and so on.

>

> I'd argue instead that the large majority of people who have any initial

> contact with an ARG never start "playing" it. There is a role of spectators

> among the audience of the genre.

>

> >The once-popular notion that ARGs are popular BECAUSE they are so hard

> >to follow has by now surely been set aside as untrue, and yet still

> >most ARGs today are in need or more clarity and less confusion.

>

> I'm not sure that was ever a popular notion: I've never for a second

> believed that "hard to follow" was what made ARGs popular. Or is your test

> for player that they understand every wrinkle?

>

>

>

> Brian

>

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