ARGs: Bricolage of Space and Time

One of the most interesting things to me about video games is space, and I mean that in the Foucault/de Certeau/Habermas kind of way. Henry Jenkins got at it the best out of everyone whose work we read this quarter: the game designer is a “narrative architect”. Every part of a video game’s environment is more thoroughly and meticulously designed than most players might assume (someone had to program grab-ability into every object in Gone Home, and someone had to make the labels on the pencils, the writing on the business cards), and if you have to design it anyways, you may as well design it in a way that supports the goals and the artistic message of the game.

This is true of the world we live in, too, and there’s something to be said about that (which the authors I cited above all discuss very well). But there’s a sort of pushback that’s possible in the world, which is too complex to ever be fully controlled or even comprehended, and that’s one of the things that really gets me about ARGs. As designers, we have to work with what are basically found materials, modifying them only slightly, if at all, in pursuit of our final product. I feel like a game that takes place in the world can’t help but incorporate the felt pathways and pressures of our lives, physical and mental (or as Upton might put it, internal and external; we are always constrained). And that’s exactly what makes it so potentially productive! It not only moves out of the indexical reproduction of space of the video game, but it moves beyond purely sanctioned space for artistic production and runs headlong into the messy interlocking pathways of urban planning and social codes. We as designers lose our power to create a completely thematically coherent space, but in doing so we’re practically forced to tackle what’s at hand in the spaces at our disposal, the affordances of place and time. That’s nothing that other media haven’t already toyed with (performance art, flash mobs, “social experiments”), but the game framework really makes it feel like something special.

In designing our module, the space is something I’ve been very preoccupied with – how do we say what we want to say in a space that’s much more restrained than we would like? Logan becomes a microcosm, a text, abstracted and symbolized – how do we direct attention to this issue? How do we turn the gaze? In the hyperaware mode of ARG play, what space is most likely to promote certain modes of thought? What atmospheres exist and how can we use them? What is already at play here that we can engage?

It was said early in class and I can’t help but feel it strongly now, as we go into the final stretch. We are all, always, already bricoleurs; ARGs just make it a lot more obvious, and they might even do something with it.

ARGs and the Affective Market

I have a number of not-very-coherent thoughts still buzzing in my head with regards to the Massumi reading and its applicability for game design, but I want to start with something that we haven’t talked about in a while: the fact that ARGs initially became popularized as a form of advertisement.

Massumi spends several pages discussing how capitalism has co-opted affect more and more in marketing and product design. Those things that define affect – collaboration, potentiality, atmosphere, “living in the moment” – become characteristic of marketing and product design. “All products become more intangible, sort of atmospheric, and marketing gets hinged more and more on style and branding,” and “if you think of style or branding, it is an attempt to express what we were talking about before as the sense of vitality or liveliness” (226). Additionally, “the most seductive products produce possibilities of connection” and “What’s being sold more and more is experience, social experience” (emphasis in original) (226, 227). ARGs as marketing devices are completely in line with this mode of affective capitalism, with their transient nature and emphasis on living excitedly in the moment and working with others. But it’s also implied that in some cases, they failed as marketing devices – is this a failure of design, a contradiction to the idea of affective marketing, or a sign that the design is too successful, getting players so involved in the game that they care little about its associated products?

Regardless, it’s interesting to think of this additional consideration tied in with the use of ARGs as marketing tools. While we’ve already been discussing it in class, it also underscores the potential of ARGs as affective media. Additionally, the fact that ARGs take place in part out in the “real world” means the affective forms and controls that Massumi notes as existing in the world also have an effect on the gameplay of the ARGs. Massumi’s discussion of “right of passage” and “your enablement to go places and do things” reminded me a lot of standard video game level design, in which designers control the literal space of possibility (228). As ARG designers, we don’t control that space (although we can influence it) and we must work with the lurking power that’s “woven into the social landscape” (228).

Affect and Investment

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.

Interactivity in ARGs

Interactivity is a word that has, in many people’s views, been overapplied to new media without being given a solid definition. Just from what we read this week I’d say that definition is still in flux, but also perhaps that different conceptions of interactivity bring up some very different ways of thinking about the project on our hands, namely ARGs.

Ian Bogost defines interactivity in video games as a computer-generated “environment that is both procedural and participatory”, “meaningfully responsive” to the player’s actions (42). This is a fairly common sense definition of interactivity; I came to a similar definition of my own from growing up playing games. It’s also easy to see how it could be applicable, and bent to the goals of game design. There are different types and levels of interactivity, mediated by controls and platforms, that can be employed to produce a sensation appropriate to the given game. The horror game Amnesia, for example, requires players to “grab” and then “pull” to manually open doors and move objects, creating a more visceral experience and heightening the sense of tension and anxiety produced by the other design aspects of the game. But this kind of physical presence isn’t necessary in historical sim games like Civilizations or the Anno series, which instead give the player a more all-seeing godlike perspective in which they can place or strike down whole structures instantaneously.

How does this apply to ARGs? A system of interaction is already built into some of our biggest game spaces: the physical world, and the social world. Both of these systems will be responsive in some way to all actions players take in them, so the goal of design for these spaces should be to make that change meaningful. I think we touched on this a bit on Thursday, in discussing how segments should have clear beginnings and ends. If players have completed a puzzle by playing a song, or taping something together, or performing a piece, that will obviously have an effect on the world and on the other players; the challenge is making it feel like it matters.

Upton, in his challenge to the concept of interactivity, chooses to blur the lines between the player and the game, describing a system of internal constraints that exist only in the player’s mind, and that shape the game as much as its external constraints (the possibility space allowed by the game itself) (27). “Encouraging the formation of an interesting set of internal constraints in the mind of the player” is as important or more important than just making mechanics that feel good and a world that responds meaningfully to player actions (Upton 30). Gameplay in this model is centered on the player, who learns how the game world works by experimenting and experiencing safe failure, “internalizing a set of external constraints” that are afterwards rarely required to force a particular kind of (inter)action (Upton 29).

To bring this back once again to ARGs, I think this sort of design goal would be important in creating a sense of deep immersion in the game world of the ARG. For example, one may learn through experimentation and context clues that literal approaches to certain types of puzzles are best; if there is some sort of in-universe reason for why this should be so that supports the overall coherence and depth of the game world, this constraint, once internalized, would help to create a type of common sense or literacy for the ARG. “Well we could interpret it that way, but this puzzle was written in red, and it came to us from this character, so it just makes sense that we should solve it this way.” Use of or subversion of “real world” common sense can also play into this, as can literacies associated with other media. This internalized approach also contributes to a sense of growing mastery in the game that would help keep players engaged in future challenges by making those challenges feel less daunting than they might have otherwise. One challenge I can foresee is that, with large numbers of players, designing in this way might make it hard for players to change focus to different types of puzzles or to participate successfully if they have missed bits of key information. Regardless, there is a lot that can be learned from the different ways interactivity has been thought about; these two authors are just scratching the surface.

-Ellis

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. “Procedural Rhetoric.” Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. 1-64. Print.

Upton, Brian. “Interactivity.” The Aesthetic of Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2015. 23-38. Print.

 

Sketching and Composition: A Preliminary Post

I’m going to admit right off the bat that I haven’t finished this week’s reading yet, but I was immediately struck, as I’m sure I was meant to be, by the similarity between Bogart and Landau’s “Composition work” and elements of ARGs (137). Composition is defined as “the act of writing as a group, in time and space, using the language of the theater”, creating something that is “repeat-able, theatrical, communicative and dramatic” (Bogart and Landau 137). Most strikingly for me was the comparison that “Composition work functions the way sketching does for a painter” (Bogart and Landau 137). I think this is an interesting angle of approach for considering the potential change- and learning-oriented benefits of ARG participation, which we have read about in the essays on The Source and Speculation.

As Sean Stacy points out in “Undefining ARG”, the process of creating and playing an ARG is that of a sort of chaotic, collaborative theater into which both audience and creators are drawn, “produced in tandem between the authors or performers and the audience or players”. Bogart and Landau take a somewhat more top-down approach (more towards the “Architectural” side of Stacy’s “Authorship” spectrum), but while they mostly focus on the collaborative effort between the creators of the Composition, they also consider the audience an important factor in the performance of the play, shaping it with their expectations and state of mind: “Take care of the audience”, “It is vital for a director to develop a feel for the audience’s experience of time”, “The journey pulls an audience like a magnet” (145, 148). The full experience of this Composition – creating it, staging it, expressing it, receiving feedback from the attempts to draw the audience in – can then become a basis, a preparatory sketch, for a larger creative work.

Similarly, as we have seen, the full experience of an ARG can be designed to be the basis of or introduction to new skills and modes of thinking that will themselves generate new ideas and structures. This is rooted strongly in the ludic elements of ARGs: “We observed ‘flexible optimism’…and ‘safe failure’ (approaching failure as a learning opportunity rather than a negative consequence) enabled by a multiweek ARG”; “[Games] also garner player curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism about completing a challenge” (Jagoda et al. 489, 488). These aspects, combined with the ability of ARGs to project problem solving into a physical world made playful (“worlding through play”), can transform the ARG into a massive preparatory exercise, a sketched outline of ways that one could approach a situation, solve a problem, or think about the world in the future (Jagoda et al. 483).

Ellis Powell

Works Cited

Bogart, Anne, and Tina Landau. The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005. Print.

Jagoda, Patrick, Melissa Gilliam, Peter McDonald, and Christopher Russell. “Worlding Through Play: Alternate Reality Games, Large-scale Learning, and the Source.” American Journal of Play 8.1 (2015): 478-504. Web.

Stacy, Sean. “Undefining ARG.” Web log post. Unfiction.com. N.p., 10 Nov. 2006. Web. 9 Oct. 2016.