[arg_discuss] Open Source ARGs

[David Fono]

This just brought up a series of reflections that have been floating  
through my head for a number of years now. The relevance to ARGs has  
always been evident, but honestly I'm not sure exactly what I talk  
about when I talk about this. I'm going to put it out there because  
I'm sure someone can draw a clear connection.

About 15 years ago Nintendo's online department started up a series of  
"interactive stories." These were nothing like interactive fiction,  
and Nintendo's nomenclature was grounded in nothing whatsoever, which  
is why I have hard time figuring out the context for this.  
Essentially, these ISes consisted of a bunch of kids and teenagers on  
a forum writing stories that took place within the universe of a  
Nintendo game -- Zelda, Starfox, etc. This sounds like fanfic, and  
technically that's an appropriate label. But the mechanics of the  
community and the nature of the stories written went a lot deeper than  
what I've seen in fanfic (although I'm hardly an expert in the field.)  
First, while the stories borrowed the worlds of the Nintendo games,  
they did so only in the most basic sense. The writers pretty much  
universally ignored the inhabitants of these worlds -- characters,  
institutions, technology, etc. -- and replaced with incredibly  
elaborate societies of their own devising. Take Starfox for example:  
the most narratively complex Starfox game contains perhaps 100 lines  
of dialogue, whereas within the IS writers built entire political  
systems, interracial conflicts, a media ecosystem, etc.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. The writers didn't write their  
stories in isolation. The culture that formed around these ISes was as  
much one of reading as of writing, and it was generally the norm to  
write your own contributions in a manner that reflected other  
contributions. Nor was this a simple matter of collaborating on a  
single, shared story, though. Rather, a definite but unwritten  
protocol sprang up that dictated how the stories of different writer's  
ought to "interact." This was facilitated by a hierarchal board system  
that reflected geographical partitions in the setting -- so, for  
instance, writers who wrote about things happening on Planet Fortuna  
would stick to the Fortuna board, and consequently be exposed to the  
other "events" happening on the planet. A common sort of interaction  
went like this: Alice writes about a restaurant in a chapter of her  
story, and the next day Bob has the characters in his story visit the  
same restaurant. Or, alternatively: Alice writes about her politician  
character giving a speech, and the next day Bob depicts his characters  
watching the scene on TV in one scene. What this sort of exchange did  
was build the community and given the writers a sense of involvement  
with one another (and appreciation), while at the same time allowing  
space for each writer to pursue their distinct, creative vision.  
Occasionally, these exchanges would build a deeper relationship  
between writers who would then pursue an explicit collaboration --  
their stories would directly intersect. Even more rarely, certain  
events -- events of significant impact, gracefully written by a writer  
respected by the community -- would be adopted by all the writers of a  
region or the entire universe. For instance, Alice writes about her  
politician character declaring a state of emergency, and a large  
proportion of the other writers skew their stories accordingly,  
sometimes for the full duration of the IS. All these levels of  
interaction, taking place at different levels, in different group  
sizes, around different topics formed a remarkably complex ecosystem  
of information give-and-take within the fictional universe. And it was  
almost certainly these complex interactions that allowed the writers  
to collaboratively build such intricate and enduring systems within  
their stories.

Now, I know this sounds a lot like plenty of other collaborative  
activities on the net -- I mean, this is just another example of  
chaotic fiction. But, I have yet to see anything quite the same.  
Tragically, any evidence of these ISes seems to have evaporated from  
the aether -- googling for "interactive story" along with one of the  
IS titles brings up no hits whatsoever. To me, that's remarkable  
considering that I'm quite sure that the combined word count for the  
Starfox IS was at least a couple million. I still keep track of some  
of the veterans of these stories at kupopolis.com, where the same  
sorts of mechanics are employed and remain similarly fascinating.

I mention all this of course because I think this is all a pretty  
clear precedent for the sort of thing John is suggesting -- but I'm  
also wondering if anyone else out there knows what I'm talking about  
and can connect the dots for me. I strongly suspect that there are  
entire massive communities dedicated to this sort of thing that  
everyone has known about for a while now, but I'm in the dark.

Cheers,
David

On 30-Jul-08, at 10:00 PM, arg_discuss-request at igda.org wrote:


> And then Dave advanced the idea of "open source ARGs" where other

> creators were free to contribute their own ideas to the "official"

> continuity. I found this very intriguing because the same idea has

> occurred to me. Wouldn't it be interesting if some hints or story

> elements in one ARG led to another? What if there was a sort of

> larger alternate reality that had these elements in common? For

> example, an "in-character" news site where you could have results

> from the Gotham City election alongside bulletins from Perplex

> City? Or, what if a hacked file on a Metacortechs server had the

> random filename "BadWolf"? (That's a Doctor Who reference. ;) )