Alternate Currency

Well, well.

I haven’t been back around these parts in quite some time, I see.

Life has been busy.

Life has also had chunks of incredible boredom, but we shall draw a veil over this time. It was an unnatural state for me — and not very interesting, besides.

I don’t often get the chance to play ARGs, anymore. Mostly because I am so busy making (video) games as of late that I don’t even have time to fold my laundry, much less crack codes and crack wise with a community. I dress from the dryer, people. I’m a woman on the edge.

I also don’t get to play ARGs because … there really aren’t that many around, anymore. At least, there aren’t any games that, as Sean Stewart likes to put it, ask me to dance. I stop by Unfiction’s forums when I can, but even with all the activity in the News and Rumors section, I don’t see much that’s new, much that’s been broken out into a meaty, mystery-filled subforum filled with enthusiastic threads and fresh content. I see puzzle trails. I see meandering indie efforts.

It’s strange.

The last real experience I spent any great amount of time on was for A Map of the Floating City, an ARG-like web game that concluded late last summer.

For the most part, I truly enjoyed many aspects of the game, and thought that several elements were innovative, engaging, and immersive. But a year ago, I was also feeling a great deal of conflict within my own heart about this genre and all of its offshoots. My decision to play was reluctant, fueled only by my affection for Thomas Dolby’s music and a gentle nudge from his tour manager, who happens to be an old skool online journaler from back in the day before blogs and tumblrs and flickrs and all that jazz. Personally, I was still coming to terms with the grief of the past couple years – losing my Dad, losing my dream job. I wanted this game to heal some of that for me. ARGs had been life-affirming for me in the past, after all, and I craved that community feeling once more.

Unfortunately, the team-based scoring competition drove a rather jingoistic wedge through most of the community, and my own little Southern tribe was abandoned by its appointed in-game moderator for unknown reasons. And although The Delta had two major story characters on its roster, they were both effectively prevented from assisting us because of the plot.

And while I’ve truly enjoyed heading up to D.C. (twice now) for Dolby concerts and to meet my tribespeople, I have worried that this frustrating experience was going to be it for a while. Judging by my profile creation at the Floating City website, we’re coming up on the game’s one year anniversary. I haven’t found anything like it since.

However, I find that I haven’t given up on a) wanting to play more of these damned things, and b) eventually making experiences like this, again. I love video games, and I love where I work, but I am a storyteller, and I want to be a writer again.

I don’t know what that means for me, but that’s where I’m at.

Hello.

I see you shiver with Intima-

Late last year I developed a wee little crush on the This Is My Milwaukee ARG.

It was never quite clear if the developers behind the narrative knew that what they were creating was something a community would label as an Alternate Reality Game, but the team seemed to take it in stride, answering several phone calls in-character, and even hosting a freezing-cold live event in NYC’s Central Park in the dead of winter.

The narrative ground to a halt, however, causing sincere dismay amongst the small Unfiction group that had been following the story faithfully from the beginning. In fact, it took us all several weeks to stop posting our own little pleas and prayers in the Unfiction forum section for TIMM that the thing would come back alive, that it would sweep us back into its absurd embrace where Milwaukee was being run by a mysterious corporation named Black Star, where Chuck Jagoda was not only a big eater, but had things like museums named after him.

To date, the TIMM website lays dormant, and the playerbase has scattered, for the most part. Occasionally one or two people will ‘check in’ on the ARG by posting in a forum thread at Unfiction, or calling one of the in-game numbers, but the momentum has all but vanished. There is no there there.

And so I feel a little weirded out over my feelings on the Intimation ARG.

Intimation’s narrative started right around Christmastime in 2008, and has been a steady ticking clock of updates and scattershot narrative that requires an avid community to glue it all back together into a cohesive format. Live event geocache trails administered through gpsmission.com seemed like they might have been just the hook to bring in a fresh batch of players, based upon our necessity to collect more fragments by visiting actual geographical waypoints, but sadly, the game stalled when certain locations did not have the player base to support completing those missions. (I was pleased as punch to get to do two of them, though, for both Hollywood and Los Angeles!)

The team adapted successfully, however, bringing those pieces from actual twisty walkable paths to virtual web-related ones: we were now invited to trawl a maze of nodes and letter pairs, all leading to other places that had trivia questions about the Halo universe, audio files from the Lewis and Clark crew, and the fairy-tale story of a little girl scared and lonely inside of a machine.

(If this all sounds a little reminiscent of the previously-produced ARG ilovebees, give yourself a shiny gold star!)

Excitement mounted as a few more avid ARG players joined the audience – the fresh blood gave more urgency and organization to the proceedings. As a group, our collective interpretation of the events was stronger, more intense, more fraught with meaning…

… just in time for ARGfest, where we were surprised by a dead-drop placed in a small park in Portland, just a few blocks from the main hotel where the convention-goers were staying. Four small Braille-inscribed skulls later, and the community grew again: new people who’d helped out on the ground were drawn in to the story, and wanted to know more. The existing players got the thrill of teaching new people about what had transpired before. Player resources were created.

Momentum was reaching a pleasurable high.

And, here we are, dead in the water. After the small skulls were found in the Portland park, after the accompanying data cards were read and analyzed, after the story told us to expect a door to open, after we waited for days for the cue to begin saving the little girl in the machine of whom we’d grown so fond, a curious silence fell over everything.

Meta speculation in the community posed the idea that perhaps whoever was behind the game left directly from ARGfest to Comic-Con, which just concluded this evening in San Diego. But, mostly, there was confusion. All these new players suddenly had nothing to do but wait. All the old players felt a little foolish for getting their hopes up for either a stirring conclusion, or the finish on a satisfying Prologue segment to a larger experience.

Momentum was lost. And I can’t help but feel like it’s My Milwaukee all over again – the narrative ceasing, a normal update completely missed, the new players dropping away from the tempo and music of a story just as we’d begun fine-tuning the harmonies.

It is my hope now that Comic-Con is over that the developers come back to this project and finish it off properly. I believe they missed a great opportunity to carry things forward, to safeguard our collective trust in them to close things off in a satisfying way. (Insert metaphors here about striking hot irons and herding cats, where needed.)

I worry, perhaps a little too late, about the grassroots aspect of Alternate Reality Gaming, about the ability and determination of almost any team nowadays who are attempting a campaign to see it through successfully.

A solid finish has alarmingly become the exception, rather than the rule.

I suspect our little group of players for Intimation will hear from the characters soon enough, but I wanted to mark this intense feeling many of us have been having about the opportunity missed, about the sharp yank I personally felt at being dropped from the story so suddenly, when I’d finally begun to care more than a little about the characters.

Beekeeper in good standing

Dear krystyn h. wells,

This mail is confirmation that you have successfully renewed your subscription to Xbox Live 12 mo. Gold Membership. This renewal goes into effect on Monday, November 10, 2008. Here is a description of the service:

Xbox Live 12 mo. Gold Membership

To view the total charges for this transaction (including any applicable sales tax), please go to https://billing.microsoft.com. If you have any questions, please go to www.xbox.com/support, or call Xbox Customer Support at 1 (800) 4MY-XBOX.

Thank you for using Microsoft Online Services.

The Xbox Live team.

Since 2004 I’ve had the full Gold subscription, thanks to a little game called I Love Bees. Online gaming via console has really blossomed over the last year or two, so I suspect that I would have gotten a full year’s subscription with renewals sooner or later, but at the time I first plunked down cash for a subscription card at the midnight release of Halo 2, there was very little reason for me to invest in such a thing.

The immediacy of the community that I had helped to foster as a player through an Alternate Reality Game was impetus enough: I wanted to continue feeling the camaraderie and amazing potential power of the collective after the ARG itself was over. And even though I miss being a player of ARGs, I still hope and work to make every ARG experience I help design and execute capture some of the potential for this sort of community to flourish again. It’s humbling and awesome when it happens.

My online gaming now mostly consists of Rock Band 2 and Little Big Planet, but I still love to hop onto Halo 3 and see what shenanigans are afoot. It still feels like coming home.

Very Serious Business:

Apparently, I did not disable my plugins before upgrading this blog a few weeks ago. Because of that, my attempts to log in would result in a redirect to the login screen, over and over. My Google-fu searches for a solution to this issue finally led me to this: ftp to the server, re-name the plugins folder for this blog, and then attempt logging in again. Now I could update the database and proceed normally. Whew. I’ve been wanting to write about game stuff, and my nerd apathy and frustration kept me bereft and annoyed. Haha.

But, I have some great news: 42 just won a Gold W3 Award in the Games category for the Why So Serious? ARG. I am just sitting here, grinning. Today is a good day. I’m even wearing my CFB shirt!

(We also got two Silver awards, but it’s not as clear on the site as to what they’re for, etc. I believe they’re both for WSS? as well!)

Where’s Gotham?

Can YOU find all of the hidden clues? Make sure you’ve got the high-quality version playing, as some of the Easter Eggs are very subtle and quick!

Have fun searching!

What is true now, as it has been for ages:

Every art form has its patrons.

Choose Your Own Adventure

I was just talking with another designer here at work, and one thing she said is something that is vital to ARG design:

It is important to let the players have the narrative of the story.

Pushing the narrative, especially through meta-communication (asserting excessive control through the in-game conduits, or through out-of-game methods) can have a pretty distinct chilling effect on the immersive nature of the experience.

(Maaaan, I had several more paragraphs written here, but I just deleted them because I can’t make a succinct enough point, and there are dudes jackhammering and sawing right outside my window here in the office. Anyway, I’ll just leave the basic concept note there, and if I come back to it, I come back to it.)

Don’t like this Venn diagram? Wait five minutes.

It is increasingly apparent to me that it is virtually impossible to legislate trust between players. Trust can be built, however, between the puppetmasters and the players.

The boundaries that exist between these two entities can blur, twist, and change from game to game, but ultimately, the puppetmasters are the arbiters of narrative flow. If they choose not to filter, if they choose to encourage, or to fabricate narrative elements in the game arena, that is certainly a design choice, but it remains theirs. The players are playing. To me, it has always seemed a fruitless exercise to blame players for a game that stumbles and fizzles. If a design choice gives a subset of players the power to move the narrative in ways that prevent play for an even greater subset, that is still a design choice on the part of the puppetmasters.

The players are people living in the real world, with real world rules as their only true guideline (unless they become criminals). The narrative that defines the game is still vetted by the puppetmasters.

Webby Award Nominee: World Without Oil

Ken Eklund’s World Without Oil project has been nominated for a Webby Award. Curiously, it’s under the category “Games,” but congrats to the team (again)!

DIY

Excellent.