[arg_discuss] Topic of the Week Aug. 31: Umbrella Term + ARG/larp

[Christopher Amherst]

I remarked:

>> Conceptually, we understand that a puzzle hunt is different than a

>> LARP is different than an ARG is different than a "Big" Game.

>> Yet, we still are left with the question:

>> Do they represent forms within that umbrella?  Do they represent styles?

>> What attributes do they all share?


Markus responded:

> Yes, precisely. That's very much what we do with what we call "pervasive

> games" in our book Pervasive Games. We discuss games that defy the usual way

> of games being situated in a discreet spatial, temporal and social context.

> And then we look into that umbrella. And what do we have in there? ARGs,

> treasure hunts, scavenger hunts, assassin games, big games, Come Out and

> Play style games, The Game treasure hunts, street larps... Stuff from The

> Amazing Race to Mystery on the Fifth Avenue and everything in between.

>

> (And on the fringes there's stuff from flash mobs to BASE jumping,

> trainsurfing and urban exploration.)


Perhaps we need a simpler definition of what a game is.

If we include flash mobs and urban exploration, we could go back to
Brian's remark on Nathan Shedroff's work
and what we are really talking about are experiences.  More a
narrative or interactive meme in that case.

I wrote:

>> Is a sufficiently well-designed ARG indistinguishable from a LARP (or

>> a Puzzle Hunt)?

>> (If not, how?)


Markus noted:

> Personally -- having been in Nordic larp scene for 15 years -- I think one

> defining criterion of role-playing and larp is a character that is separate

> from the player. I'm now Conan the Barbarian, not Markus the Researcher.


True, but I believe that part of that is because of the cultural
precedents in the art-form.
To some degree (unlike ARGs typically), there is an implicit agreement
between both the players and the non-player personas
that they are all behind the curtain.

That there is no "wall" between their shared reality.


> However, in our pervasive larp (ARG-Larp hybrids in some sense) experiments

> (Prosopopeia and Momentum), we have experimented on various double life

> strategies and mixing of these personas. One of the phenomena is that even

> if you play Christopher Amherst in a game, the "real" Christopher Amherst

> starts to differ from the "game" version early on -- one of them pretends to

> believe and the other does believe, which makes them very different. Hence,

> your character is a reflection of yourself, but you again role-play a

> character.


Cognitively, if you enter an medieval camp with a hydraulic dragon,
you know explicitly it's not real.

However, I'd be curious whether this divergence is just an artifact of
how the player's mind processes a narrative that happens in real life
/ real time space, so as to maintain some sense of boundaries.

Chris