ARGs and the Changing Face of Fiction Online

A fascinating pair of posts ran recently on two separate websites about the ARG (alternate reality game) marketing techniques around The Dark Knight (which, as it just came out in the UK, I have not yet seen.) The first post on Movie Marketing Madness describes in excruciating detail every piece of 'alternate reality' created by the Dark Knight’s agency. It is an amazing and exhaustive list: I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that this is probably the most complex and involved ARG to date.

The second was a post labelled [RANT] on sci-fi blog io9 called The Argument Against ARGs. I wouldn't even call it a rant: the author does a good job summarizing the basic history of ARGs (although the excellent ARG for Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero album isn't included, and it beats the socks off iheatbees) but outlines a very real problem with ARGs. Money quote(s):

I see nothing wrong with making advertising more fun, and there's no doubt that a lot of people enjoy playing ARGs. What I do have a problem with is the way ARGs seem to have no lives of their own – they feel like they exist solely to advertise another story. At least videogame tie-ins to movies are marketed as their own, standalone items.

With a few notable exceptions, ARGs are basically treated like walk-in commercials a lot of the time. But commercials can't really masquerade as games: It's foolish for entertainment companies to assume that they can get audiences to forget that they're being virally marketed to. And yet I think ARGs are temping as advertising campaigns because their structures inspire so many of the fan behaviors that media companies translate into instant dollar signs. But getting people to run around and do things is not the same as inviting an audience to enjoy a compelling narrative with a bunch of pals. So with an ARG I get a crappy cell phone instead of a cool fan community? ...

… [w]hat I'd like to see are ARGs for their own sakes — ARGs that involve fans not because they give away posters or free showings, but because they are genuinely compelling tales that you actually want to interact with. A best-case scenario for ARGs might be that they ditch parent stories altogether, becoming their own entities.

Emphasis mine.

This is exactly my problem with ARGs and why they may very well be the next great form of entertainment.

Allow me a digression for a moment. One of the best books I've read in the last five years is Mark Z. Danielewski's stunning House of Leaves, which is many things to many people: a very unique horror novel, a satire of literary criticism, and potentially 'just plain fucking weird.' The book itself is a labyrinth of footnotes that lead to more footnotes, different colors of text that may or may not have meaning, size and positioning of text, stories within stories and stories within footnotes. There's even a 'soundtrack' of sorts – the author's sister is indie music artist Poe whose album 'Haunted' is essentially a soundtrack for the book. Many of the track names mirror chapter titles in House and the title track specifically mentions 'this house of leaves' in the lyrics, and has other references to the book as well.

As I read House I began to wonder: how would this book work as a movie? Is there any way to translate these disparate elements, many of which are intended to be clues to discover the underlying plot, to an entertainment medium? My answer at the time (keep in mind, this was 2002 or so) was to release it as a DVD and include the footnotes / secondary stories as extra features accessible during the movie, or as a commentary track.

Which really isn't a bad idea, but doesn't really account for the full breadth of the book's rich puzzle and mystery. House of Leaves is essentially a mini-ARG in that it combines several elements to form a mystery with various clues. It follows a tradition of literary 'puzzles,' most notably modernist works like Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's poems, and takes it a step further by introducing a different world of magical realism and strange happenings, where houses can be bigger on the inside than the outside. A mini-ARG.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cathy’s Book, an actual ARG and bestselling book by Jordan Weisman and others (full disclosure: I worked for Jordan's old game company, WizKids, and many of my friends for his new company, Smith and Tinker.) In fact Cathy's Book is exactly what the io9 writer was talking about: an ARG for its own sake, not selling a product. But even Cathy's Book just scratches the surface of what's possible with the myriad variety of content deployment mechanisms the Internet provides.

My job forces me to think about how to bring those mechanisms together to 'tell a client's story.' Storytelling is what PR really is, when you get down to it. Except online those stories are less about shouting at people or performing a play for them and more about involving them in writing the story yourself. Kind of like (nerd alert) running a roleplaying game. Although you have a goal in mind, the way in which you get there is based as much on player input (community input) as it is your own 'story.' The nonflexible gamemaster sucks, as does the nonflexible PR storyteller.

But it also affords massive opportunities to do exactly what Jordan did and what the io9 writer proposes to do. If 'all media is multimedia,' surely we gamemasters and storytellers should discover new ways to tell our tales online? And surely, purely from a storytelling standpoint, we can do that with ARGs for their own sake?

I pose this not as a marketer but as a writer: if literature is already becoming more gamelike and games are becoming more literary, doesn't it make sense for us to be thinking of this space not as a way to sell tickets to movies or things only tangentially-related to the ARGs that marketers create but as a new and unlimited canvas for us to start telling engaging tales to audiences who clearly want this sort of thing?

The ARG's future and its literary possibilites and implications are something to watch indeed.

Photo "Art Is Resistance - London" (from the Year Zero ARG) from Jennaphoenix' Flickr stream.

Allow Myself To, Uh, Play With Myself

So one of the things I've been doing in my free time lately is playing through old Sierra games - specifically, Quest for Glory games. I got the idea to try a 'Let's Play' for these games on the good old SA forums. I realized after investing quite a few hours into this that I should probably make a more permanent record than SA for these things - so I started another blog. Classic Let's Play. For playing classic games.

If you're so inclined, check it out. It's not up to date with the actual LP thread yet, but I'll keep updating it when I have a free second here and there.

Also if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about as far as Let's Play goes - it's a subculture of gamers and people who watch other people play video games and attempt to make humorous comments along the way. Yes, it's geeky. It's really geeky. But at least it's not fan fiction.

Prepare to Waste Some Time

Seth sent me Desktop Tower Defense, a free, Flash game that's surprisingly addictive. And by "surprisingly addictive," I mean "oh shit, I just spent 45 minutes at work playing this awesome game."

Jacking Off

You Don't Know Jack is categorically one of my favorite trivia games. Best played with a group of friends (and some booze), it's full of dry humor and in-jokes that make smart geeks feel in the know. And, it looks like it's moving online. You can play a daily Dis or Dat at the You Don't Know Jack website. Today's topic: kinky sex act or torture not endorsed by the US military. Enjoy!

Games: My Answers

So how did I learn to play games?

I was thinking about this on my long drive home (OK, so this now counts as my Obligatory Seattle Blogger Snow Post as well, thank God.) It might be better for me if I were to break down a few games I've spent some time playing and act as a relatively representative sample - not necessarily my favorite games, mind you - into three categories. Let's call them Board Games (in which I will put tabletop miniatures games, like HeroClix), Card Games, and Video Games.

Since I consider many RPGs to be the same, just with different systems, I'll put those at the end in a kind of catch-all category.

Board Games
Monopoly: Aside from Chutes and Ladders and Candyland, Monopoly is one of the first board games I have a memory of playing. I'm reasonably certain I was about six or so when my dad taught me how to play. I was lucky in that I came from a family that valued "game nights," so we played a lot of Clue, Euchre, Pinocle, and other games. For a while, we did it once a week. Kind of like I do now with my D&D game, come to think of it.

Chess: I think my grandfather might have taught me the rules to chess. At the very least, he had a crazy chess computer circa 1980 that always played the same opening every time. I learned its opening, and finally started to mirror everything it did. I think I played that stupid computer to a draw more times than I can count, and neither of us never learned from it. I'm guessing I was about 7 or 8.

HeroClix: OK, here's a biggie. I learned HeroClix by myself, but I did so at a friend's recommendation. People who know me, know that I tried Mage Knight before I tried HeroClix and I hated it. Absolutely, no-holds-barred hated it. I thought the IP was just generic fantasy with nothing unique to recommend it, I thought the gameplay was far too imbalanced and rewarded first strike (actually, first dice roll), and it did nothing for my imagation. I discovered HeroClix on the day Infinity Challenge (the first release) hit the stores; my buddy and I were there to get comics, and he showed me the game because he knew I liked comic book statues. And the sculpts were what drew me to the game first, before the game itself. I learned the game by trudging through the manual and forcing my wife to play playing with my wife. But it was my comic shop guy's recommendation that brought me into the fold in the first place.

Fury of Dracula: I like this game, but not many of my friends do. I was introduced to this game at GenCon 2005 by Angus, who told me he'd played the original version and that I should check out a demo in the Fantasy Flight booth. So I did, and while the game is complicated (not as complicated as Arkham Horror, which I will not include in this list because I've never actually managed to play it), I had a good time and grabbed a copy when it came out later that year. I then tried to teach my wife, roommate, and friends, who didn't like it; then I tried to teach the WizKids crew, who also really didn't like it all that much. Fury of Dracula has its flaws, but what's interesting is that both my personal buddies and the WizKids crew wanted to quit playing after trying it for a certain amount of time. It just wasn't fun for them, and I can't imagine what they would have done if they'd tried to learn it by reading the instructions having purchased the game blind.

Go: First, my confession - I wanted to play Go after I watched the movie Pi because it was "cool." At least in the movie. So I bought a cheap Go set and a book to teach myself Go. I didn't really understand it. Then I journeyed onto Yahoo Games and played Go online. I didn't really understand it then, either. Then I tried to have Crabby teach me how to play Go. And to this day, I still don't understand the rules. Supposedly, the rules are simple, but so far no one has adequately explained the game's mechanics to me in such a way that I've seen the underlying strategic structure (or, for that matter, what the hell I'm supposed to be doing!) I'd still like to play Go someday.

Card Games
Poker: Texas Hold 'Em. Here's another game I didn't understand, even after watching it on television and reading a book about it. It took someone explaining to me how it worked before I "got it." Since that time, I've read all kinds of books, played all kinds of poker both in "real life" and online, listened to poker podcasts, read poker magazines, and so forth, but the game mechanics and my opinions of the game were formed when someone took the time to explain the game to me.

Pinocle: As I mentioned before, Pinocle was a game that we played on family game nights. My family, both sides, and my in-laws all play Pinocle, so it's a good game to know in my situation. I learned Pinocle as kind of an extension to Euchre (the first trick-taking game I learned). It's not really one of my favorite games, because I think it relies a little too much on luck, but it's a fun diversion.

Magic: The route by which I learned Magic is a strange one indeed. The owner of the game store in Bloomington came to give a talk about games to my mom's elementary school class. While there, he talked about this new gaming sensation called Magic. My mom was intrigued, so she bought me a deck (of unlimted) and a booster (of Arabian Nights.) I tried it out and was hooked. I showed it to my friends, who soon bought decks, even the chubby Mormon girl (yes, Mormons play Magic.) We organized a little Magic league at school. We played in Boy Scouts. And here's the funny part: none of us really knew the right rules. We finally read the rulebook enough to figure it out, but there must have been a half-dozen variants flying around at one point. We didn't realize you could play without using all of your cards - I won a tournament because I figured out that there was no rule that didn't let me play with only green cards, so I played with only my green cards. Oh, and we anted. I lost a Time Walk in an Ante. A buddy lost a Black Lotus. We didn't care, because the "collectable" aspect to the game just wasn't there for us yet.

Munchkin: I was introduced to Munchkin by, well, a munchkin (the gaming type, not the cure little kid type) at a coworker's house. Munchkin is right up there with Chez Geek and pretty much every other Steve Jackson game: if you can keep your head down and not piss anyone off, you can win about two-thirds of the time. These games are really just excuses to be social (which is fine), and are fun because the mechanics are simple to teach and you can still play the game after a drink or three.

OK, that's a really long post. Next time, I'll do video games, RPGs, and the Lone Wolf books. 'Cuz I can.

Gamers Who Complain

Saying "gamers are a complainy bunch" is kind of like saying that outer space is pretty big. So here's a recent Wired article on complainy gamers and what should be done with them that others in the industry out to get a kick out of.

How Do You Find What You Like?

Since I read The Long Tail, I've been reflecting slowly on some of the things that Chris Anderson discussed. This last trip home, I introduced my nephew to Settlers of Catan, one of my favorite board games. Liz and I were talking about something unrelated the other night (video games, probably), and somehow gaming habits come up - for example, examining twenty casual games in the course of GenCon rather than three very deep games. And that got me thinking about just how we are introduced to the games we like. How do we learn the games we like?

How many games did you learn by buying something based on the box's marketing copy, reading the rules, and sitting down to tear through a game without knowing anything else about it?

Then, think about how many games you've learned because someone said "hey, let me show you this cool game!"

Of course, that second option is kind of esoteric; it could be as simple as "hey, let me show you this cool game!" or as complex as you researching a game online that you think you might enjoy, or visiting an influencer (a blogger, for example) whose opinion you value. But no matter how you think of the second option, I'd be willing to be that most of the games you know and like - Monopoly, chess, checkers, Medieval 2: Total War, Dice Wars, or even Dungeons & Dragons - you learned because someone suggested them to you, or even showed you how to play. In fact, every example above, including probably a hundred others, I found based on suggestion.

Games, of course, are a little different than movies and music, but not much different. How much of your music do you listen to because someone suggested it, and how much did you simply pick up blind in the store? How many movies have you seen because someone said "hey, you really should see this movie, you'd love it."

The challenge for marketing people like myself is finding out how to tap this phenomenon without destroying it. This kind of word-of-mouth marketing, especially for games, is a self-cleaning organism, and I suspect that tampering with it too much would simply create a barrier through which we can never again pass.

It's something interesting to consider as I move forward in my career.

Grand Theft Mario

This is making the rounds, but worth watching: a Robot Chicken bit where Mario and Luigi end up in Vice City.

Charity Poker

Lots of games industry types will likely be at the Comic Stop's charity poker tournament on October 21. I'll probably be there. The creators of Penny Arcade and PVP will be there. Will you?

My Next Custom Playlist

Ladies and Gentlement, now that the entire Guitar Hero 2 tracklist has been released, I can start assembling the next custom playlist for my iPod.

Almost forgot: my old iPod has finally withered and died. It gave me a three-year run. Not too shabby for something I probably used 30 hours a week.

AI vs. Graphics

Ars Technica has an interesting post speculating that certain versions of upcoming games may make sacrifices in graphical quality in favor of improved enemy AI and game interaction. While this is all speculative at this point, it certainly raises an interesting question: with all that supercomputer processing power in modern gaming consoles, is it better to use it for "more immersive" (read: high definition) graphics, or for a more interesting game experience? I'd certainly favor the later, although not to the point where you sacrificed quality and playability for it. In other words, I don't want a game so fuzzy I can't see or tell what I'm doing - GTA: Libery City Stories, I'm looking in your direction!

A Visual Horror Movie Puzzle Game

This awesome game reminds me of the holiday covers of GAMES magazine my mom and I used to do when I was younger: a dark, renaissance-style painting that doubles as a visual puzzle where you try to guess the titles of 50 dark/horror movies.

So why don't you drop what you're doing and play? I'm up to 20 already.

Edit: Finished in 47 minutes and some change game time. I had to look up hints on the last 3, so I'm counting myself at 47/50. Not too shabby.

Dead Rising Revisited

Looks like Clive Thompson at Wired News agrees with my conclusions about Dead Rising and its save system. Money quote:

"Save mechanisms are key to the emotional stakes in a game. Personally, I tend to prefer titles like Half-Life, where you can save anywhere you want, instantly -- and save as many different copies of your life as you want. (A sentence of utterly Philip K. Dickian weirdness, if you think about it.)

For me, constant saving makes me feel more free: I can take more chances, go down risky alleyways, and explore the game more boldly -- because death holds no sting. I get whacked? No problem; I just restore to a moment a few seconds before my death...

In contrast, a rare-saving game like Dead Rising forces me to be ultra cautious. I don't dillydally, explore needlessly, or take any big chances. When I creep across the mall's open lawn at midnight, when the zombies are more aggressive, my heart is in my throat -- not just because the scenario is inherently scary, but because if I die I'm gonna lose another half hour of the most nonrenewable resource in existence: my time...

Yet here's the thing: One could just as easily argue that infrequent saving is a much more intense and authentic experience. It forces you to put some skin in the game. That's why people seek out life-threatening sports like sheer-face mountain climbing and skydiving. In situations of genuine danger, your senses snap open and you experience things more fully -- or, as any extreme athlete would boast, you live more fully.

It's certainly true that in Dead Rising I was focused with cheetah's intensity on my enemies. I pretty quickly learned to give a wide berth to even a seemingly slow-moving, harmless zombie -- because if one grabs you, it'll hold you still long enough for the others to stagger over and pile on. I can't say I ever studied the enemies so closely in an easy-saving game like Doom III."

He articulated that point far better than I did in my short(er) review of the game. In fact, the "no save" system that I grew up with on the NES forced the same kind of emotional response, even on games like The Legend of Zelda, where you could only save when you died. I remember trying to tell my parents why I couldn't come to dinner right now, on the count of three because I had to actually get to a point where my pixelly little in-game avatar met his demise. In retrospect, it seems pretty absurd, but it certainly heightened the overall emotional investment in the game and Zelda still stands as one of my favorite console experiences because of it.

Of course, you could save any time you wanted on (most) PC games - Bard's Tale being a notable exception - and aside from doing dunder-headed things on games where part of the design was a Skinnerbox-like trial-and-error system - Sierra's graphic adventures, for example - it was never an issue. You expected to die, and die a lot. You could always restore to the last screen. But Mario wasn't like that. You had exactly three chances (plus any green mushrooms you might find) to take a lava bath before you started over at the very beginning.

I'm unconvinced it was more satisfying overall in that context, but I will argue that it is in Dead Rising. But it certainly heighened the emotional involvement in the game. It was more of an investment, in emotion and time.

Wired article via Joystiq.

Adventure Game Studio

I was very excited about today's release of XNA, the (free) utility that lets little garagehacks write games that can be played immediately on a PC and eventually on the Xbox 360. Of course, the game I want to write is an homage to the games I grew up with - the old Sierra and LucasArts games like King's Quest and Monkey Island. Someone on the XNA forums instead recommended Adventure Game Studio, an equally-free (but not Xbox 360 compatible) utility that will allow me to create my own adventure game. It also doesn't require knowledge of C# (which XNA does), and handles everything from scripting. Considering I aced PASCAL and C in high school, I should be able to figure out the scripts.

I'm going to give it a spin shortly after I publish this post.

Game: Dead Rising

So you like zombie games, kid?

Actually, I don't typically like zombie games. The genre isn't exactly bursting at the seams, though - we've got Resident Evil, the big old franchise that coined the term "survival horror" and features zombies as an afterthought. There was a zombie marketing tie-in first-person shooter that released with Land of the Dead. And the old SNES game Zombies Ate My Neighbors. But as far as a game that accurately mimics the feel of a zombie movie like Dawn of the Dead. Negative. That was, until Dead Rising.

Dead Rising is as much a love letter to Romero's zombie movies as it is an incredible stand-alone game. You play Frank West, a photojournalist on a hot scoop: something's going down in the Colorado town of Willamette. Frank gets dropped on the roof of the mall, and has 72 hours to uncover what's going on - and survive the hordes of zombies that have taken over!

Gameplay is open-ended. There are two types of missions: Cases (which advance the plot) and Scoops (which don't, but will level you up quickly and basically act as "extra credit.") You can do as much or a little of either as you want - but if you stop doing the Cases, you lose your chance to solve the mystery for that playthrough. But fear not - when you restart the game, you keep your experience and skills from the last game (basically, your XP and character level.) You can pick up pretty much any item, whether it's the rack of toys at the toy store, the wine bottle in the restaurant, all kinds of guns and knives, or trash cans and cardboard boxes. You can play dress-up with all kinds of outfits, hair dyes, and so forth. And you can kick a lot of zombie ass, or not kill a single one (although I imagine that might be a very difficult proposition.)

As with any good zombie story, the really dangerous parts aren't the zombies themselves but the other humans. The "bosses" are various types of psychopaths - escaped convicts, Vietnam vets who snapped, killer clowns with chainsaws, and "normal" people whose reaction to the apocalyse has become so extreme that they're a danger to others and themselves.

The save system takes a little getting used to; you can only save in certain locations (on couches and in bathrooms.) Because of the time limit and the vast numbers of zombies, this means you have to very carefully plan your saves, just as you carefully plan how long to ration out your ammo and food so you can replenish your supplies of those as well. At first, I found it annoying, but now I can't imagine the game without it - it adds greatly to the "survival" flavor. Just wandering around and screwing off is very likely to get you killed, not unlike a real apocalyptic scenario. Careful planning and strategic use of resources is the #1 key to survival.

Zombie fans, start your chainsaws. Dead Rising is our game.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Free Software!

Now here's a way to land a job: program a quick Flash game that transforms Google Earth into a flight sim.

In a Minute I'll Be Just Another Zombie!

Dead Rising came out on Wednesday and it's everything I hoped it would be. The game is tense, and you never feel safe, even in the so-called "safe" areas. I must look pretty goofy playing it, since I tend to violently shake the controller around when I'm trying to get out of a zombie's grasp. It might not help, but it sure makes me feel better. Now that's immersive!

I took time from killing zombies to do some long-needed cleanup this morning, and took time off this week for a little personal R&R (which was really me working on the Fallout d20 stuff and playing Dead Rising.)

And that's my exciting life update.

Defend Dicistan!

Seth turned me on to Dice Wars, a really awesome (and simple) Flash strategy game. Give it a go, it's surprisingly addictive.