I’d like to look back a bit and forward a bit in addition to touching briefly on the Thermophiles in Love (TIL) netprov from this week.
One of the more interesting moments of the playtesting we performed on the 27th was the puzzle in which two siblings had locked themselves on bathrooms on different floors and would only communicate through letters slipped under the doors. From what I remember, it was our job to calm them down by carrying communication between them. I barely knew what was going on during this puzzle, nor did I participate in it heavily, yet I felt more involved in it (once I figured out what was going on) than I had in many of the others.
I could compare the feeling to giving advice to a friend who is considering whether they should go out with someone. Assuming they do get together, you as the advice-giver feel almost responsible for how it works out. You’ve become personally entangled in their narrative, and if it doesn’t work out, even if it isn’t related to you at all, you have to wonder for a moment if it was because you gave the wrong advice. If it does work out, you feel a sense of confidence and satisfaction knowing you contributed to your friend’s happiness.
I’m wondering to what extent interpersonal relationships and affect can be built into an ARG. Obviously there are some ethical questions involved in this – many of the same ones we’ve been discussing, regarding whether it’s ok to manipulate people in this way. But giving players the role of mediators in conflicts between characters, or advisers towards certain paths of action, is a way of giving a sense of agency and also a deeper feeling of personal involvement with the characters and the world of the game. I do think this could be negotiated ethically, possibly by abstracting the relationships (as the group in our class did), and I’m sure there are several other ways to do so as well.
To a certain extent, TIL does this by encouraging players to create characters and engage them with others; it especially does this with the meso gender role, in which the mesos put certain individuals into quadruples. I don’t know how effective this was for the mesos in making them feel that they had a stake in the success or failure of the dates – I wasn’t a meso – but it is something to consider going forward, particularly as we near week 8 when we will be discussing affect.
ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES 
Hi Ellis!
I think it’s a really great point about being the most invested in an ARG that most mimics reality, and furthermore, a reality that you get personally emotionally invested in. Actors engaging in social situations face to face with the players, I think, is probably a way for the game to take the most advantage of the “This is not a game” idea– blurring the lines between reality and game more than any other form of trail could, the next most effective form being interaction with the characters through some technology, whether it be through email or phone call or Facebook.
I think in terms of the ethical concerns, I think it depends on how these fictional characters interact with the players and at what point in the game they’re introduced. If they ARE the rabbit hole, players don’t know that they’re fictional yet, so they can be a way to provide information, but it’s important to construct them so players AREN’T emotionally invested in them. Further on in the game, I think a wider range opens up– once the player realizes that they are in fact playing a game and that the character they’re interacting with is definitely fictional, they have a bit more mental distance.
Furthermore, I think the important thing about the interactions is that they don’t become TOO MUCH like real life. In interaction modules, there is literally an infinite number of ways that a player could choose to engage with the character. If a certain interaction is necessary to move forward with the trail, I think that infinity needs to be narrowed down into something more manageable. It’s up to the game designers to make enough clues that the players have maybe some idea of what they’re supposed to do, but not enough clues that it becomes obvious and thereby no longer entertaining.
I think designing a module that is challenging but doesn’t have infinite possibility something I am also extremely interested in. When I took a programming class, the instructions were extremely specific and we were given code to add to. This allowed us to have some entry point– some way of knowing how to approach the problem (how to structure things), but there was definatly quite a challenge left for us. I understand that not everyone is a programmer, however, I’m curious whether applying clues in this way might be an effective design strategy.