Alternate Reality Games SIG/Whitepaper/Introduction
International Game Developers Association
Contents |
Introduction
Originally written by: Adam Martin, Tom Chatfield
From reading this paper, we hope you'll see that Alternate Reality Games (ARG) are many things to many people, from the latest innovation in interactive storytelling to a new form of ultra-realistic video game. The common ground shared by each of these is that they are some form of game, in that they are not an entirely passive experience (although many people enjoy them passively, there always has to be at least one active player, usually thousands), and that they use the world around you – advertising hoardings, telephone lines, websites, fake companies, actors and actresses you can meet in real life – to deliver the game experience.
Background and Purpose
Audience and Scope
Definitions
Wiki
What is an ARG?
What if reality were different? What if you suddenly discovered not just different customs but different rules, different rewards, wholly different aspirations – a reality in which everyday occurences were not exactly what you thought, in which certain activities suddenly took on a rich and newly meaningful sense of possibility?
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. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, everyone in the country can access these narratives through every available medium – at home, in the office, on the phones; in words, in images, in sound. Modern society contains many managed narratives relating to everything from celebrity marriages to brands to political parties, which are constantly disseminated through all media for our perusal, but ARGs turn these into interactive games. Generally, the enabling condition to is technology, with the internet and modern cheap communication making such interactivity affordable for the game developers. It’s the kind of thing that societies have been doing for thousands of years, but more so. Much more so.
We take the start of the ARG genre as known today to be the release in 2001 of The Beast, the unofficial title for the game interwoven with Steven Spielberg's film AI, and of Majestic,a commercial game from EA. That summer saw the identification by players of this whole new genre, and the coining of terms for it. It saw the formation of large communities of players 1,2 dedicated to the discussion, dissection, creation, and above all the playing of these new games.
The genre is not just a new direction in gaming but part of the more general evolution of media and creative narrative, and a reaction to our increasing ability and willingness as consumers to accept and explore many media in parallel, simultaneously.
ARGs and MMOGs
Technically speaking, ARGs are a form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), with individual games attracting playerbases numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and with a heavy slant towards online media. However, ARGs use “online” merely as a convenient, cheap, mass-communication medium, rather than as a narrow straightjacket to deliver a tightly defined gaming experience. Where the typical MMOG uses a custom client, an application running on the player's home computer, which delivers and controls all content and interaction, ARGs use any -and every -application available on the internet, and potentially every single website, as just small parts of the wider game.
Looking at the games themselves, ARG and MMOG/MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games) also tend to diverge wildly in core gameplay. On 5 September 2006, the New York Times announced that World of Warcraft was on track to bring in more than one billion dollars of revenue in the year 2006 from its approximately seven million players, making it ‘one of the most lucrative entertainment properties of any kind’ in the world. It is an income and a participation that most games would kill for, and it has been won through a number of well-established gaming virtues: good marketing and company reputation, well-established player community, good design, good attention to detail, and perhaps above all, exhaustive testing, which in practice has meant literally millions of hours logged within the evolving game world. Oh yes, and you can play with lots of other people.
But WoW doesn’t claim to be real. You sign in, and there your avatar is, safely locked up inside the server. He, or she, is the ultimate object of your game – your mission is to make this creature as potent as possible. There’s plenty to enjoy along the way, and you won’t get far without co-operating, but it is this essentially solitary triumph that will keep you coming back.
Most of the shortcomings of MMORPGs are well-documented. Leaving aside the huge demands their upkeep can put on servers and customer service, perhaps the greatest gripe among players tends to be the difficulty of releasing new material and patches at anything like the rate the community would like (Smugglers in Star Wars Galaxies are a classic example – the implementation of an in-game smuggling system has now been promised by developers for over two years, with the overwhelming backing of the player community, but has yet to be achieved). Inevitably, also, the fine balance necessary for long-term playability becomes exponentially harder to maintain as more content is added; and new content has the disconcerting ability to make yesterday’s amazing equipment, won at the cost of a thousand hours’ play, into today’s vender trash. But there is also a more structural, and related, problem with all conventional MMORPGs, and one that even the mighty WoW isn’t immune to. Eventually, casual gaming ceases to be an option. You’ve hit top level on one or two characters, you’ve played around with all the classes – now you’d better either clear your diary three evenings a week for the next month to try and make an elite guild’s raid calendar, or you can sell (sorry, discontinue) your account and move on to a new product.
ARGs do not require there be an avatar to build up, grow bored of and cast aside, or that there be a sandbox world for this creature to inhabit. There is, rather, the insertion of additional slices of reality into our own, and the only demand is that you interact with these as yourself. Moreover, the satisfactions of ARGs are as much aesthetic as they are egotistical, in that the pleasures they offer are as much those of contemplating characters, situations and narratives as of acting within these narratives. This has been true of aspects of many games before, but never to such a degree, or with such potential for mass involvement. The truly immersive narrative games of the past were largely limited experiences designed for single players (the old LucasArts point-and-clicks), or cases of a ‘mythos’ grafted onto essentially stationary game worlds (Ultima Online). ARGs are something quite different, fusing religion’s TINAG principle with both the active pleasures of gaming and the more passive pleasures of art; a combination which potentially calibrates them for pleasure, participation, and thus for profits, at a level even WoW might envy.
For these reasons, for the purposes of this paper we consider ARGs and MMOGs to be distinct genres -in practice, there is only superficial similarity between the current MMOG market and the ARG market.
References
[1]Cloudmakers, http://cloudmakers.org/
[2]Unforums, http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/
