Intellinuts

Dazed and Confused - The IGDA ARG SIG White Paper 2006

Reposted from November 30, 2006 - JK

In my day to day work, I read a lot of academic papers, a lot of grants, and a vast array of web publications.  On those rare occasions when a deadline looms over me, I myself am sweating, turning years of scientific work into consolidated, concise, clear English in order to get published, receive funding, and in general, not suck at my job.  Sometimes, I even make big, giant, glossy posters with lovely sparkling images of cells and trot off to exotic locales (Washington D.C.) to show off.  Typos and grammatical errors are not allowed - any manuscript submitted with errors is thrown in the trash and left unread.  Misinterpreted data and incorrect conclusions are pointed out and returned to you to “have a good think on” and remain unpublished.  This is called, quite simply and effectively, “peer review.”  People who are educated and knowledgeable in your subject matter receive your manuscript or grant, read it, and decide and report back to you whether it makes the cut.  It’s a robust system, and though at times faulted by bias and competition, it has generally provided the community with excellent data and information on which to continue pushing the craft of scientific discovery.  Failure to publish, or the publication of incorrect information, does not make you an expert in your field.  Quite the contrary: you either struggle to clearly communicate your data and ideas, or your information and interpretations are incorrect and not worth printing.

With this background in mind, imagine my surprise last night when I finally got my hands on the first International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Alternate Reality Games (ARG) Special Interest Group (SIG) White Paper.  In as few words as I can summarize my feelings towards this 82 page document, I say this: It is riddled with grammatical, typographical, and factual misinformation from page 1.  This one publication has the potential to do more harm to the genre of gaming I adore and have dedicated 5 years of my life to than any combination of ill-conceived, failed, and idiotic games I can imagine.  Sadly, the strongest parts of the paper (Antecedents to ARGs; Types of ARG; Current and Recent Games; Understanding Your Audience; ARGs and Academia) are destined to be the least read sections, and sections that will also be quickly dated as the genre expansion continues.  The most important sections of this publication - Methods and Mechanics and Business Models - are not only unfortunately written in stilted, confusing (and incorrect) English, but biased, incorrect, and misleading to the reader.  These two sections will be the ones people most often turn to, and it is distressing to a reader such as me to see so many inaccuracies and bias threaded through the text.  They are land mines of potential disaster, directing new game developers to muddle through misdirection, ill-fated perspectives, and inaccurate information.  Our goals in these efforts to inform people about the ARG genre are to get more people interested in and producing these games, correct?  If so, why would we (the community in general) put forth how-to guides that are directions to failure?

I imagine this is coming across as a rather haughty statement for a simple player of games, but I don’t consider myself to be “just a player” - I have created and worked on two ARGs, both which completed their runs successfully; I have endeavored to write guides for Last Call Poker and EDOC Laundry; I am, and have been, an administrator on Unfiction since 2004, helping to guide and run the largest congregation of ARG players on the internet; I am an author and an assistant editor for ARGNet, a site dedicated reporting on the genre.  I am no idiot cookie girl scout trooping along on the internet, blogging because I like the sound of my voice.  Those of you who know me are aware that I don’t write all that often, and when I do, it is exceptionally rare that I’m compelled to voice an opinion on the ARG genre.

I am *that* upset.

I would have loved to have the luxury of 8 months to develop my critique of this paper (the amount of time it took to produce this publication), but I have a number of deadlines of my own, so I’ve had to selectively choose parts of this paper to highlight in my review.  I’ve tried to pick out the most egregious errors of what I consider to be a thematic mistreatment of the subject matter.  Inevitably, there have been omissions and bias towards topics I felt comfortable with discussing knowledgeably.

Language Use and Grammar:

I’ll start with one of the easiest errors to fix, and yet, the one that throughout the paper, seems to be the one most ignored: grammar.  On the first page of text we are treated to this delight:

As well as these critical success, there are already several businesses with long-term sustainable revenue streams. (pg 2)

This is the introduction to the entire piece, and the reader is immediately smacked with a glaring misuse of the language.  This trend of error continues through the sections of the paper, and makes the publication read as if it either a) was never read by any single person in its entirety, and if so, certainly not thoroughly or b) was edited by someone with only a passing familiarity with the English language.  For the sake of the authors, I’m putting my hopes on the former.

Beyond these errors in English usage, the editors seem uncomfortable with the spelling of Dave Szulborski’s (one of the larger contributors to ARG history) last name, using “Szulborksi,” as well as the correct spelling, “Szulborski.”  The authors also seem to have a fascination with “Olde English,” using terms rarely seen in academic and business authorship, such as “whilst” and “bespoke.”

The language used in publications such as this White Paper should be clear and unambiguous.  One should not strive to use words one doesn’t often use in conversation.  To overstep your ability to write or to place the interpretation of the language used beyond the grasp of your audience is an exceptional failure to communicate effectively. Similarly, using language specific to one geographic location is a bad policy.  If you don’t know what you’re saying, neither will the people reading.  Grammar and spelling errors are easy to check and correct - these should never make it into a final text if the editorial process is working correctly, especially if the document is reviewed by individuals other than the authors.  Authors and editors who have been producing a document for an extended period of time are the worst polishers of language and typographical error.  They have written and edited sections of text repeatedly and understand, without really reading, what is being said - sadly, this quite often leads to ambiguous and unclear language, evidence of cutting and pasting, and inattention to important details that can be glossed over upon the 10th reading.

These are the highlights of the beginning of a string of unfortunate editorial oversights that should never have occurred and produce a strong odor of unprofessionalism that wafts over this publication.

Mechanics and Methods:

Woefully incomplete and misguided, this section is arguably one of the most important in the entire White Paper, and yet is the one with the least scope and useable advice.  From the beginning, the section relies heavily on the knowledge of only two games - Perplex City (PXC) and The Beast - and ignores a bevy of examples and variant viewpoints in ARG development.  Anyone with a passing familiarity with Perplex City can easily see how the author’s involvement in this game has colored her perspective.

Contrary to the author’s supposition, blogs are not the “bread and butter” of an ARG, nor should they be relied upon to deliver challenges or exposition to the players.  Blogs are a static delivery mechanism that focus entirely on a linear progression of a story - to lean upon a blog (or series of blogs) to deliver information to your player audience assumes that they want to merely read your story, not interact with it.  In this instance, you would be producing interactive fiction, not an ARG.  Blogs do provide an opportunity for your audience to get to know your character, but they can also become a crutch, an easy and quick method for the dull delivery of content.

While the author’s experience with Perplex City has familiarized her with the use of blogs to propel story, other games have utilized in-game forums to achieve similar effects to blogs, such as the multiple-award-winning ReGenesis, Who Is Benjamin Stove, Ocular Effect, and the award-winning Art of the Heist. The producers of these games, GMD/Haxan and Xenophile, have used in-game forums extensively in their ARGs, and have done so effectively and creatively.  An omission of this magnitude is exceptionally unfortunate and displays an ignorant bias - an attentive editor well-versed in the genre should have caught this oversight.

Missing from the discussion of the use of telephones in the storytelling process is a mention of I Love Bees (ILB), the author choosing instead to use The Beast and Perplex City as examples of effective telephone usage.  Apparently, using telephones spread across the United States, UK, and Australia to deliver a full 6-hour radio drama in 40 second increments is not worthy of mention, even though ILB’s use of the payphones is what the numerous news articles regarding the experience focused on.

We then move to a discussion on using emails to send game information to a player, which again uses examples from The Beast and Perplex City to highlight the information given.  Sadly, the PXC example provided isn’t even email related, but discusses how PXC utilized SMS/Text messages to send out updates to its players, and suggests that this mechanism was a fantastic new way to combine “multiple forms of communication.”

For example, Perplex City pushed out urgent SMS messages to players to push them toward breaking newspaper site updates during a real-time live event in which a major character was potentially killed in an explosion. (pg 35)

Luckily, after another paragraph discussing email, the section then jumps to SMS/Text messaging and mentions that few games have used this technique to deliver information.  Fear not, though, because PXC used this effectively at another time in their game, as the author reveals:

Perplex City has used SMS during real-time action in the story in order to drive players to a specific URL in order to take part in a live event that was not pre-announced, and also to send out simultaneous time-limited SMS challenges to all participants during such live events. (pg 35)

Excellent, excellent work, PXC. You’re really pushing that SMS idea well by highlighting your extensive experience.

The “Live Events” discussion also leaves much to be desired:

Dev teams wishing to produce a live event would do well to study the best practices of other kinds of live event planners, such as wedding or party organizers, and the principles and practices of live improvisational theater. (pg 36)

Yes, the wedding planners are a vastly important group to study if you’re interested in catering and having your players walk down the aisle and do the Hokey Pokey, which naturally, would be followed by a massive balloon launch and some rice throwing.  Development teams might also find it pertinent to study and look at the practices of the producers of pervasive and so-called “big games” (e.g. PacManhattan, the Come Out and Play Festival participants, Sf0, and The Go Game) for ideas on how best to run interactive, fun, real-world events and games that will heighten the players’ experiences with your ARG.

Furthermore, this section fails to mention the effects that smaller real-world events can have on an ARG.  The author only mentions large scale, massive player events.  Equally as effective in raising the excitement of an ARG experience are event opportunities for a single player - such as those used by Omnifam and Chasing/Catching the Wish where players met individually with characters to collect information (Omnifam having the infamous “Clown Meet”) the more “cache” gathering events used by Who Is Benjamin Stove (which sent players into public libraries to find books with inserted clues) and Metacortechs (which sent players on hunting expeditions to gather CDs with cryptic information), and the creative and effective use of individual challenge events in Last Call Poker (where players were given missions to perform (”find a lonely gravesite and clean it up”) and cryptic maps to follow (”go to cemetery X and follow these directions…”).

The discussion on “Challenges” can be described as “limited” at best, and “ignorant” if I’m being honest.  In my opinion, what the author refers to as “challenges” are all variations on puzzles, and within that broad category are about five different types that often appear in an ARG:  Meta Puzzles, Story Puzzles, Chapter Puzzles, Awareness Puzzles, and Etc Puzzles.

• Meta puzzles:  A puzzle that builds over the course of a game (e.g. the use of the language in the recent Ny Takma)
• Story puzzles: The efforts of the players to use the information gathered during the game to create and tell the story.
• Chapter puzzles:  Mini-challenges that unlock the advancing storyline.
• Awareness puzzles: These do not always *look* like puzzles, but can act as such.  They are things buried in the game universe that the players have to discover in order to use, such as email addresses, URLs and names of new websites, the names of new characters, employee numbers, etc.
• Etc. Puzzles:  These are what I consider to be the “Yikes! Your PM isn’t ready for you yet! Here, chew on this!” puzzles that never seem to make sense within the story context.  These are overused, signs of a lazy or unprepared PM, and quite often involve some form of cryptography

The author instead chooses to harp on the various *kinds* of puzzles: cryptography! Games! Time wasters! Social Engineering!  The section would have been more thought-provoking and helpful to a developer if it were organized in a more useful fashion, and was followed by a discussion on how to USE these kinds of puzzles to get your players working together and solving your game and having a good time.

My biggest problem with this entire section, however, (I know, how could I have not gotten to the worst part yet?) is how the author chooses to refer to the audience and players of ARGs.  Repeatedly, the focus is placed on how “unhappy” or “combative” the audience of an ARG is, be it with the PM team or the game itself.  This is very rarely the case, and appears that either the author has had some awful experiences, or is keen on using scare tactics to prepare a new development team for those evil audiences that are excited to play their game.  DAMN THOSE CRAFTY KIDS!

For instance:

A problem with the real-time nature of an ARG, though, is the fact that for any given global audience, a large number will be asleep or unavailable any time of day you choose to schedule updates or live events, and will be accordingly unhappy. (pg 38)

How awful to have players wanting to be involved in all aspects of your game.

On the other side of the scale, the author also implies that the audience of an ARG will inevitably be completely stupid and in desperate need of extra PM help in navigating the game structure:

It is very decidedly a best-practice to never rely on your players to solve any specific puzzle, regardless of how simple it may seem to be, if the reward lying on the other side of it is absolutely necessary and not feasibly available through any other means. The specifics of a hinting strategy are something every development team should give time and discussion to as early in the project as possible. If possible, it is wise to cultivate potential channels for providing hints to a stuck playerbase in advance.  (pg 38)

Though at times, the players do get stuck on puzzles, quite often those times are because of flaws in the design of the puzzle itself, and blame for the cause lies squarely on the shoulders of the PM team, as does the correction of that error.  The PMs should never assume that their players are idiots - this goes against the importance of mutual trust and respect that should be present between the PMs and players.  Furthermore, as the game progresses, the players should be getting BETTER at solving challenges if the game is structured correctly - they should not be a static entity that remains at the same skill level they started the experience with:

In order to assess the skill level of the players, it can be helpful to set a number of challenges of widely varying difficulty early on in the game to discover which ones seem the most popular and how quickly they are solved. (pg 39)

And then! To finish it off, the author says that PMs should “love their players” but that they should expect them to be combative and not the group of people the development team wants:

It’s easy to get drawn into a combative relationship with the players, as the players often tend toward an adversarial relationship with the development team. (pg 40)

Also keep in mind that the audience your game attracts may not be the one you had initially wanted or envisioned. Foster affection and especially respect for them regardless; they are the audience you have, and this means they are the people who really enjoy the creative effort you are putting into your game. Your players will probably be able to tell if you think of them unfavorably, and you won’t have them for very long. (pg 40)

It’s unfortunate first, that the author has the impression that all players want to beat up on the PMs, and secondly, that PMs can’t expect to enjoy having an audience that they want and will have to fake their affection for them as they are (as stated previously) combative, in need of constant hints, unskilled, and static.  Respect for the PMs starts with the PMs themselves - I would hope that any creator of a game would be happy to have anyone willing to spend the time to explore the game world they have created, and would be willing to have a fruitful, two-way conversation with their players through the game medium.  This principle is outlined in the later White Paper section entitled “Knowing your Audience” - it’s unfortunate that the sentiment was neither shared with other authors nor consistent through the entirety of the publication.

Business Models:

In the business model section, the authors spend an inordinate amount of time debating the reasons why 2001’s Majestic failed as a pay-to-play model.  (Finally deciding that the game failed because of the 9/11 tragedy, conjecture that has never been proven.  The authors mention a few very valid, more reasonable reasons for failure, such as quality, cost, and audience availability, but decide that reasons are “speculation.”)  Sadly for the creators of the series of pay-to-play ARGs under the title of Studio Cyphers (SC), the authors seem to have completely overlooked SC’s recent 2005-2006 success at revamping the business model.  Instead of pointing out SC in particular, the authors instead choose to use the following sentence to address SC’s efforts:

However, more modest efforts have been springing up in recent months, presumably involving smaller development teams and lower overhead per game.

How sad and oh how demeaning to the excellent work by a group of talented, thoughtful ARG producers to be referred to only as “modest,” left unnamed, and then not even fully researched, the authors choosing only to “presume” how SC is produced.

Also in their consideration of the variety of business models available to designers of ARGs, the authors of this section mention The LOST Experience in a seemingly unrelated subsection entitled “Audience Management and Plot Control”

Games such as The LOST Experience show some of the potentially fatal dangers inherent in this: provided as a link between successive seasons of the TV show LOST, the ARG did not in any way significantly advance the plot and provided only very limited interaction with the few core characters that were even present. The game ended up leaving many people feeling let down, both ARG players and LOST fans alike, probably because it broke a cardinal rule of ARGs: artificially restricting the game within a set of media and a small set of plot directions. The ideal approach from an ARG perspective would have been to allow the story to flow freely through the game, although this would have forced TV viewers to at least read summaries of the game if not actively participate, merely in order to carry on watching the next season.

This suggestion is nowhere near what I would consider to be the “ideal approach from an ARG perspective.”  There is no reason why The LOST Experience could not have been, within the boundaries and storyline it was presented, turned into a better game.  The underlying problem with TLE was not that it didn’t intersect with the television universe; it was that the actual game wasn’t game-y enough - the players were merely directed through the story, reading it as the characters discovered it.  TLE was entirely expository, not interactive, and loaded with glaring advertising content.  It wouldn’t have mattered if it were centered more in the LOST universe if it kept the same principles of design - it would still have suffered from the same design flaws, only this time, forcing LOST watchers to spend their summer watching the internet so that when the new season of the television show started, they weren’t left behind - a much worse flaw in designing extended entertainment experiences than just designing something “un-fun.”  Virgin readers of this analysis and advice would be decidedly misled by the ARG SIG into believing that forced participation and bad game design are “ideal approaches” when designing an ARG.  I cannot stress enough how misguided and wrong this interpretation is. (For an example of a well-done extended-reality of a television property, one could look to the highly-successful ReGenesis, which does not force viewers to participate in the online game.)

Bias:

In addressing the bias threaded through the White Paper, it’s interesting to note that the paper’s senior editor, Adam Martin, fails to disclose his previous business relationship with the ARG production company, Mind Candy Design, the producers of the ARG Perplex City.  I also find it interesting that the two most important sections, in my opinion, in the entire document (Mechanics and Methods and Business Models) were written by Martin and/or Andrea Phillips, another employee of Mind Candy.  Though one would expect that individuals involved in the authorship of such important sections (and sections that also should contain a fair-balanced, diverse look at techniques) would thoroughly research their subject, these areas of the White Paper appear exceptionally biased and unknowledgeable of games outside of Perplex City. There are entirely too many references to Perplex City itself as examples of “how to do things,” oversights of important techniques used effectively (the in-game forums with character interactions used by Art of the Heist and ReGenesis, both award-winning ARGs), and ignorance of exceptional examples of technique. (How can you write a section on “using telephones to communicate story” without mentioning I Love Bees?)

As an example of this bias, I point to the Business Model section of the White Paper.  Here, the authors discuss what they term “merchandising ARGs” - ARGs that sell a product to fund the game.  There are two ARGs currently running that fall under this category, and luckily, the authors do mention both of them, though to variant degrees of quality.

EDOC Laundry is a merchandising effort that is intended to drive the sales of t-shirts and other personal apparel. The items are designed with coded clues in them that direct players to online information telling a story of rock and roll and politics in the America of the 1770s. (pg 52)

Ok, #1: “politics in the America of the 1770s” – this era does have a name. A clear, unambiguous, specific name: The American Revolution.  Why an author would choose - instead of using three, very simple words with clear meaning - to phrase the event as “politics in the America of the 1770s” is beyond my comprehension.  #2: “telling a story of rock and roll and politics in the America of the 1770s.”  Please read that sentence a few more times and think about what that phrasing is suggesting:  Rock ‘n Roll and politics in the 1770s.  Now, this is not what EDOC Laundry’s storyline is about.  I don’t think James Madison was wailing on the electric guitar Benjamin Franklin hooked up to his kite in the lightning storm during the First Continental Congress, but this is what the sentence structure implies.  EDOC Laundry, as was summarized perfectly in the earlier section “Current and Recent Games” starting on pg. 22, is a story about a rock band in the current time frame (2000s), with its members having a historical parallel to the Founding Fathers. (They share names and personalities, and sometimes have similar experiences.)  There is no rock band in 1770 jamming in Philadelphia.  This gross inaccuracy is another example of the painful inconsistencies contained within the publication, editorial faux-pas of both grammar and fact.  There was already a lovely summation of the game provided to the editors/authors - why re-invent the wheel and make it square?  Again, I ask: Did anyone actually read this all the way through? Did anyone writing this section actually do any research beyond what they imagined they already knew?

Glaringly, just above this description of EDOC Laundry is the summary of Perplex City:

Perplex City was the first successful merchandising ARG. Perplex City is the product of Mind Candy, a British company that has tied in the ARG elements of the game to the sales of a physical set of collectible puzzle cards. The game’s content launched in earnest in March of 2005, and the first season is still running as of September of 2006. Mind Candy has publicly acknowledged that a second season of Perplex City is already in its planning stages. (pg 52)

That’s quite a difference in the attention to detail and description - not one error in fact (though “first successful” is debatable - the campaign “Missing: Since January,” formerly released in Europe as “Memoriam,” entered the market in 2004 by selling PC CD-Rom kit “rabbit holes” and was popular enough to spawn a sequel, “Evidence: The Last Ritual.”) or sublimely unfortunate grammar problems. I think there’s a little bit of that bias I was referring to poking through the curtain of unbiased authorship and editing.

General WTF Remainders:

These all come from the charming introduction to the paper, which, were anyone to read it, they’d give up on the genre immediately after reaching page 6.

Alternate Reality Games take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world. The contents of these narratives constantly intersect with actuality, but play fast and loose with fact, sometimes departing entirely from the actual or grossly warping it - yet remain inescapably interwoven. (pg 6)

If you’re using “but” and “sometimes” and “yet” AND “entirely” in one sentence, you’re trying to combine entirely too many ideas into one unit.  Also, you’re probably trying to define something you don’t understand fully.  If it interacts “constantly” with “actuality,” then how can it also sometimes depart “entirely from the actual?”  I think that what this passage is meant to suggest is that ARGs remain separate from our everyday, individual realities (our normal lives) through fantastical settings, but at times, these narratives reach out to touch our lives and interact with us through the web, telephones, SMS, and actual events.

ARGs are something quite different, fusing religion’s TINAG principle with both the active pleasures of gaming and the more passive pleasures of art;… (pg 6)

I don’t know to what this is referring, but I am offended.  In what way does religion incorporate the TINAG principle, TINAG being an acronym for “This is not a game” - are you suggesting that people who believe in religion are playing a game?  Or are you misinterpreting TINAG so that the G stands for God? (Not that it would clarify your meaning at all…)  In what respect are you using this analogy? There has been no reference made to religion (nor should there have been) in regards to their relation to ARGs, and the paper has yet to describe what TINAG means (this occurs initially on pg 9).  This appears to be an unfortunate artifact of a series of editorial cuts in the text and remains vague, ambiguous, and inflammatory.

Conclusion:

This publication by the IGDA ARG SIG is in desperate need of editing and peer review by people outside of the group.  The decision to publish this document in its current form jeopardizes the genre’s image, and threatens the success of those who may follow the advice contained within.  The failure of the editorial process that led to this publication is glaringly obvious - spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, factual and interpretive problems, bias, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies abound throughout the text.  Perfection is not required but in a publication such as this, professionalism and unbiased interpretation are.  Collaboration, interpretation, incorporation of ideas, and debate are tenets of the ARG community, and it is upsetting to see them ignored and deemed unnecessary in something so important to its future.

I hope that the IGDA ARG SIG re-defines its role in the ARG Community and strives to become a more consistent collaborator with the people it is affecting through its actions, both players and producers.  Open dialogue between all groups with interests in the future of the ARG genre is required for our hopes and dreams for this art form to succeed - for developers and designers to ignore the knowledge of players and reporters (and conversely, for players and reporters to ignore the developers) is to willfully remain ignorant of variant perspectives and interpretations.  The IGDA ARG SIG needs to address the needs of the players, and not just their own interests, and by interacting with the expert players and recorders of the genre, the IGDA ARG SIG would be enriched and more able to be a welcomed public face for the ARG community.

In my attempts to familiarize myself with the IGDA “standard” White Paper, I used the 2004 Online Games “Web and Downloadable Games” White Paper as a related, but separate example.  The disclaimer in both publications is the same, but for a few sentences that are removed from the ARG version.  One sentence in particular is glaring in its omission in the ARG version that struck me with some poignancy with respect to errors in the White Paper:

Check out the IGDA website to see how to get involved for next year and help us set the record straight!

I hope the omission is not a stronger statement on the position of ARG SIG in its role than it should be.

I encourage everyone - players, watchers, academics, and developers - to get involved in the ARG community and the ARG SIG and aid in the development of a clear and concise language with which to define and discuss alternate reality gaming so that future publications that aim to speak for the genre are balanced, correct, and professionally produced.

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