Affective Protest and Leaps of Faith

So I know we read Massumi last week, but I’ve found myself continuously revisiting his ideas on affect and the metamorphoses of the mechanisms of control and power, and I feel that it is especially timely now to take up and think more deeply about various people’s comments on the possibility and potentials of affective protest. Although definitely more conciliatory than that of the Disgust Rally I saw circulating around on Facebook a few weeks ago, the very name of a protest like “Love Trumps Hate” still implies a sharp moral divide between Trump supporters and detractors which to me seems exclusive, despite being celebratory of love. Which leads me in turn to think about other instances of protest, such as the Tiananmen movement and the movement in Tahrir Square in 2011, which I view (although maybe romanticize) as approaching the ideal of an accepting, all-inclusive, and truly hopeful protest. In Tiananmen, you had taxi drivers giving free rides to students heading to the square from the train stations, and students, professors, workers, and even some Party officials and army personnel mingled together in a buoyant atmosphere of hope; in Tahrir Square, you had protestors making music and food together, and the heart-swelling sense of a beautiful and palpable future close at hand was tangible even across the screen of the documentary I was watching. In the few protests I have witnessed in the States, I have not felt anything quite so encompassing and that made me feel as though a new age was somehow embodied in me and in the people around me, which I think is the affect that made the aforementioned movements feel so beautiful to me. Of course, the movements themselves did not fulfill the hope they created, which in turn makes me wonder about how one can pin down the power of hope into concrete action – I know that the Tiananmen protests, at least, failed in part because of the inability of the students to come to conclusions on concrete steps (although the government didn’t seem to plan on giving the students any chance in the first place – but that’s another story). Perhaps hope must eventually be transmuted into optimism to achieve practical effect.

Note: Babble to follow – A related concern I have is with the relationship between affect, hope, and leaps of faith – I feel that the hope of affect relies on a belief that all the potentials of a current situation cannot be consciously understood, and the jubilance partially arises out of this sense of a shimmering unknown. Yet this placement of faith reminds me of the sort of faith placed in deities, ideologies, and idols – although more personal and of-the-moment, since the object of faith is embodied to some extent in the believer and not located in supposedly timeless concepts – which makes me nervous. Or is it a placement of trust in the shifting relationships weaved into the situation? Does that assume something fundamental (and perhaps optimistic) about human nature?

 

Marc Riboud, “The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet”

 

More Massumi

I was really inspired by the Massumi reading and today’s discussion, so I just wanted to lay out and try to work through some of the additional questions and concerns that occurred to me during today’s class.

First, I’d like to quickly comment on what I read as Massumi’s belief in the idea that living life more intensely makes you freer (214):  I agree with this in the sense that by experiencing a situation more profoundly and with more awareness (not necessarily processed by thought, which is an issue I’m going to raise later), one becomes both more deeply embedded into one’s environment (thereby by some definitions more “unfree”) but also freed from the immediate, narrow demands of and possibilities given by articulated ideologies (that is, when there is no ideology on-hand to narrow down and thereby distort the affect of the given situation). I really appreciated the way in which Massumi spoke about freedom as in fact a recognition of constraints, because from conversations I’ve had with certain people (*cough* libertarian anarchists), it seems to me that there is a (perhaps growing) strain of philosophy that advocates a complete overcoming of interpersonal relationships and obligations to other people in pursuit of an almost socially immaculate and therefore “free” individual. (I’m also not sure if this is implied in Nietzschean philosophy? From the little that I’ve read, it didn’t feel that way, but if somebody well-versed in his works could respond, I’d be all ears!) I’m actually also not sure what a development of affect would mean in terms of coming to a sense of social obligations – does more deeply feeling a situation necessitate deeper, more empathetic bonds with other human beings? What obligations arise from that? If living more intensely and thereby more freely means also a deeper involvement in relations between people (bodies, of course, included), what does that say about the social nature of freedom? Basically, how would affect link freedom back to people and obligations to them? Is it that a rejection of the responsibilities of social relationships is only another way of actually limiting affect by resembling a sort of ideology in itself? (Actually, thinking about this has made me also realize how Massumi’s ideas on affect tie back to our other reading on acceptance and change by Earl Vickers – affect can, I think, be experienced as simultaneously both an acceptance of the here and now and also an unlocking of immediate action and change.)

[A semi-related note on ethics: He seems to speak of ethics as a sort of framework/guide to unlocking and directing the affect of a given situation: “Basically the ‘good’ is affectively defined as what brings maximum potential and connection to the situation. It is defined in terms of becoming” (218), and I find his emphasis on a balance between bringing out “maximum potential” and deeper “connection to the situation” important, since the former unleashes while the latter grounds, and an imbalance could result in such dangerous outbreaks of affect (in this situation, I guess they would be irruptions into emotion and actual violence?) as in the Cultural Revolution and other authoritarian/fascist movements. How exactly, concretely, would we relate ethics back to interpersonal relationships and action (from the very abstract notions of recognizing maximum potential and connections to situations)?]

Another question I have that I feel our conversation today partially answered but then raised more questions on (as most good conversations do) is the relationship between what we seemed to describe as a more unconscious affect and a more “conscious” freedom based on deliberate choices. Although Massumi stated that affect involved both mind and body (a dynamism, rather than division, between the two) and thus overcomes “the old Cartesian duality” (215), in the end I feel like it at least doesn’t overcome a gulf between un/sub-conscious and conscious. He specifically says that the sensation, which is a more aware registering of affect, “is not yet a thought” (217) – so it would seem then that affect is even further away from thought than sensation, and even more from emotion. My question, then, is: is it desirable(?)/good(in the ethical sense?) to try to bring affect more to the level of consciousness, so one can more clearly see all the sources of one’s sensations and the possibilities to take? Because if a person is wrapped in and buffeted by the tides of affect, that vulnerability and involvement can easily be manipulated to specific (usually political, I feel) ends. Then, would that consciousness necessitate thought? I, for one, cannot really imagine how it could go without it. Certainly, affect cannot be entirely translated into thought or language or really any medium, I think, but is that something we should strive for nonetheless?

Another point: We briefly commented in class on how literature can describe and explore the affect of the relevant(?) situation or state without ever capturing it in its entirety, which spurred me to think more about literature and other art forms as re-embodying/re-embedding ideas and emotions (which are often abstracted from specific contexts), and raising to awareness by highlight specific aspects of their affect. How do Massumi’s ideas of capture – both the way emotions like anger capture affect and the way art forms capture it – relate to each other?

And a final appeal/question(?): Towards the end of the interview, Massumi seemed to be saying that we now live in an age and space increasingly defined by affect, and the Left’s failure to appeal to and expand affect is a key factor in its failure to gain more popular support. The next course of action, then, seems to be utilizing affect to turn, or at least even out, the tides somehow: as he expressed it, to “meet affective modulation with affective modulation” (234). But such an approach feels oddly like “capitalizing” on affect in the same way such faces of popular affect as Trump have – so is affective appeal really the best way to try to influence political belief and action? How do you make that not manipulative and limiting but still connect it to some sort of concrete political platform?  And how do you do that also without falling back on the moralizing logical arguments that he thinks the Left relies on? (Although, to be honest, I do not feel like the Left has been as slow on the affective uptake as he believes.) Basically, I’m re-posing the question he also leaves unanswered: what exactly would “an aesthetic politics” that aims “to expand the range of affective potential” (235) look like and entail?

 

 

And some more, very rough ideas I’d like to continue thinking about but don’t have time to write out right now:

The relationship between affective modulation and embedded game design (as in persuasive games)

The relationship between identity politics and aesthetic/affective (though I don’t feel like the two terms can really be used interchangeably?) politics, and how at times (often, I feel, at the same time) you can have use for the solidifying but potentially divisive effect of the former and at others the more open-ended but less concrete(?) quality of the latter (related to how we were saying that emotions like anger can also be necessary to a given situation, if we can still acknowledge its broader affect)

Dread as a very neat example of affect

How some words seem (I’m sure it’s different for each person/community) to produce an immediate affect: Blitzkrieg, for example. Affect is completely context-dependent and relational: Susan Sontag also addressed this, I think, when she wrote that “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain” (On Regarding the Pain of Others, 7). Affect differs from population to population, and is in the case she’s examining, is closely tied with politics (for better or worse).

The relation between affect and spectacle – a spectacle may very well produce affect more immediately, but does it last as long as affect created through other means? Is it as profound? I’m thinking about the spectacle of mass rituals, tv recordings, etc., as opposed to the more – is atmospheric or subtle the right word? – affect I experienced in Dread or Gone Home, for example.

This may come completely out of left-field, but the relationship between intense affect and “the zone” that so many artists and sportspeople describe

How does affect relate to memory and remembrance (which I think are distinct – the former more thought-based, the latter also bodily): If affect is less conscious and also more context-dependent and therefore perpetually shifting (compared to, say, beliefs or emotions), would it not therefore be harder to keep in mind through time the motivations towards specific action provoked by a given affect?

The gulf between emotion and affect, which, though bodily, isn’t as often physically expressed (although physically felt), especially as seen in their separation across screens when people are texting, watching videos, etc. Is this a “good” thing? It feels reminiscent of the mind/body split, but it obviously isn’t that. I personally am always fond of the moments when people explode into visible emotion after a period of seemingly imperturbable detachment from the screens their fingers (but not facial muscles, or seemingly any other muscles for that matter) are vigorously interacting with….

The distinctions between emotion, sensation, and affect

The seeming preference for words to channel affect: For example, although advertisements often immediately produce some sort of desire or at least mood in the viewer (harder to say so nowadays though, since we’ve become so inured to ads that – can we call this phenomenon a numbing of affect by its omnipresence, commercialization, and mass distribution?), they often always still rely on words to deliver the punchline of their message. The power of war photographs and other political photographs was also often channeled and narrowed by captions (for example, the following photo, although now seen as evidence of the unfair horrors suffered by intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, could easily have been described and seen as proof of the righteous vengeance against “counterrevolutionaries” during the late 1960s and early 1970s:

)

On a related note on the application of this theory of affect to actual objects: Affect in photographs and other visual art (Goya’s “The Disasters of War,” 9/11 photos, photos of the Vietnam War, Claude Cahun’s self-portraits) – How is affect produced in/by such products, and do they raise it to the level of consciousness?

 

Siri

Dread

One thing I’ve been wondering about this week was the decision to have us play Gone Home and Dread in the same week, one right after the other. Although perhaps just the result of practical scheduling, their temporal togetherness(? if someone has a less pretentious way of putting this, please let me know) made me try to think of what united the two, given that their differences are apparently obvious: one involves the actual participation of bodies, the other of eyes (though both the pulling of a Jenga block and moving of the mouse are symbolic and do not directly express the actions of their characters); one an improvised narrative, the other structured exploration of a predetermined space; one a multiplayer game, the other singleplayer; and one tabletop, the other video.

However, the first commonality that struck me when I was thinking about how to join the two games was not any game mechanic but rather their shared use of horror, or, well, dread. Gone Home created an atmosphere of trepidation with its hard-to-find lights, general darkness, and reliance on hidden, empty, and silent spaces. (To be honest, I have very ambivalent feelings about this designer/artistic(?) choice, since I felt the sense of horror was disproportionate to, or not of the same emotional tone as, the feeling of discovering a family member’s sexuality and a family’s instability, but that’s a separate issue.)  Dread created a similar atmosphere with dark lighting, the threat of the collapsing Jenga tower, and the tone of voice of the narrator player. I actually don’t know how to address this common mood – why did such different games both decide to rely on a non-empowering anxiety to drive their unfoldings? Maybe the obvious answer is just that the combination of suspense and curiosity make for a gripping game, but both games utilized a specific type of suspense, one of horror and unease – not the suspense of broad-daylight first-person shooters, for example, which is driven more by an adrenaline-inducing thirst to survive and kill.

On a not-so-related note, I’ve also started thinking about the similarity between Dread and the awkward first meetings between strangers at parties and other social events. It’s interesting to think about Dread as a sort of simulation of an ice-breaker situation, where each player meets the others for the first time, except these first encounters and interactions are mediated through their player avatars. Could we think of Dread as a sort of gamified rehearsal for socialization?

 

Siri

Manipulation in Embedded Games and Games for the Elderly

My initial response to Kaufman’s and Flanagan’s explanation of embedded game design quickly turned from intrigued to impressed to perturbed. At first, the idea that games could more effectively encourage ecological awareness or cultural sensitivity through more subtle modes/currents of gameplay seemed promising, but such an appeal to sub/un-conscious psychology disturbingly echoes more sinister methods of swaying public attitudes, such as propaganda and advertisements. I may have misread some aspects of their article, but their praise of intermixing and obfuscation gives me the impression of an approach to games that could potentially verge on subtle brainwashing. In a sense it hinges on what the game designers define to be “key societal issues,” and how they want players to engage with them. For me their claims can be seen as both contrasting against and perhaps building upon Bogost’s. From what I understood, he argues that games can effectively employ persuasive argument through procedurality, yet my impression was that such arguments could be somehow also argued against using the same rhetorical framework (procedures) as the game – e.g., a player could rebel against a game system by using its controls in unpredicted ways, or make choices that obviously go against the intended flow of the game.

Kaufman and Flanagan’s points about embedded game design may be seen as building off of this idea of games’ procedurality, if one were to view procedures as being “interpreted” or digested by the player on a mostly sub/un-conscious level. Regardless, there is something about Bogost’s piece that led me to believe that the procedurality of games still allowed for a certain dialectical interaction of thoughts between the game and the player (as demonstrated in the above example of player rebellion), which Flanagan and Kaufman do not seem to wish to promote at all. (Though, arguably, one could say that since visual images can often insidiously sway/distort viewer attitudes towards the concrete subjects portrayed therein by means of color and stroke in a way that the viewer who does not have the same level of understanding of artistic techniques cannot adequately argue with, procedures could also constitute a rhetoric of their own that cannot be argued against in like terms – at least, not by a novice to such language. In a sense, any sort of rhetoric, be it spoken, written, visual, or procedural, encounters such a problem of unequal playing fields, so this problem of embedded ideology is not limited to just games.) Such an approach to influencing minds is to me eerily reminiscent of contemporary ad campaigns that aim to seduce and induce viewers into buying either unnecessary or potentially damaging products – as a not-so-subtle example, the intermixing approach could also apply to coca cola ads, where bottles of coke just happen to make an appearance at some seemingly offhand moments in an otherwise “innocuously” feel-good montage of celebratory and social experiences. In sum, I feel that an embedded approach to game design, although more effective, does not give players fair warning for what they are about to absorb from it. One can easily imagine how such games could be used by, say, the government, to insidiously instill not-so-innocuous and -progressive attitudes (e.g. nationalist and xenophobic) in player minds.

On another note, I was wondering: Why are so many of the games we see and talk about (both in and out of class) geared towards children, adolescents, and young adults? At first glance, the question may seem baseless, but I find the fact that we seem to take games for granted as best-suited for younger audiences mildly concerning, if not disturbing. Is it because we view the elderly as no longer such fertile ground for the development encouraged by games, be it social, political, or educational? Or that we stereotype them (to what I would argue is everyone’s detriment) as not being interested in “infantile” or “trivial” games? Do we feel that it is somehow either too late or unnecessary for adults and the elderly to experience the mind-altering benefits of gaming? Perhaps such a phenomenon of youth-centric games is just due to the fact(possibility?) that the game industry only took off beginning in the 1970s, so the people currently most involved in and being addressed by gaming would be conceivably under 40, and in the future more senior citizens will be heavily involved in gaming?

Game Rules

10 students circle around 1 teacher, or “worm,” at the center, chanting, “Ring around the Rosie.” Meanwhile, they throw a ball to each other, like in Monkey-in-the-Middle. If the person at center catches the ball, the person who threw it must trade places with them (becomes the worm).

 

ARGs and Art Camp

 

After reading Viewpoints, I soon realized that Exquisite Pressure was not limited to just theatre and ARGs – I have experienced it on a number of occasions in highly intensive art camps. For example, this summer I participated in an illustration bootcamp that lasted for 3 weeks, in which we met monday-friday from 9AM to 4PM and received daily assignments, as well as work over the weekend. In many ways this experience is reminiscent of an ARG, especially when examined broadly – we received a seemingly overwhelming number of assignments (a counterpart to game puzzles) to be completed in a compressed amount of time and spent all of our time working to achieve such objectives, our “success” being measured by the critique and, ultimately, grades our teacher would give us. I would often end up thinking of my projects outside of the classroom and outside of home – I would look at the objects that I encountered in the street, about which I normally would not think twice, and relate them to ideas I wanted to incorporate into my illustrations. For example (this is taken actually from the experience of a fashion workshop), I once looked at the metal corrugated sheets set up in street construction and immediately thought of the folds I wanted my clothing design to incorporate. Can this not be said to be a type of alternate reality, a looking at the world through a layered lens, a perception of extra-ordinary meanings and potentials in one’s surroundings? Yet I would by no means qualify such experiences as games, even though they sometimes did have clearly defined rules (use such-and-such a medium, and concern yourself with such-and-such a topic), result in quantifiable outcomes (grades), and involve a certain level of conflict (how do I illustrate my idea clearly but also novelly?). There were also definitely moments of play and experimentation throughout the brainstorming and creative processes, and at times we would collaborate in groups to complete projects – thus fulfilling the social requirement of ARGs. Yet I still would not call such an experience an ARG. Is it because it lacked a narrative or role-playing aspect? (For, when we viewpointed the other day in class, we were role-playing as these on-stage personas, as undefined as they were – and I did find the experience game-ier than any art intensive I’ve been in.) Or is it because somehow, despite the moments of play and the obvious investment I had in the experience, it still felt more serious, on a personal level, than any game I’ve ever played? I honestly cannot say.

Siri

Inclusivity and Affordability of ARGs and a Classroom Example

This blurb is a patchwork of two matters concerning ARGs: their inclusivity and the live unfolding of an ARG close to home, right here in the University of Chicago. By inclusivity I do not just mean monetary affordability (cost) and cultural comprehensibility (language of communication and other behavior-governing rules), but I’m also thinking of the sheer amount of time ARGs demand players to dedicate. Many potential players, be they students coming from low-income backgrounds or adults working full-time jobs, simply cannot afford the time necessary to invest in ARGs to reap their benefits of the immersion and Exquisite Pressure. For example, in the case of one ARG (I think it may have been S.E.E.D.?), many of the students had to choose to give up summer work opportunities in order to participate – I would not doubt that there were many others who simply decided not to participate because they did not have the luxury of playful time and instead had to earn money by taking on a summer job. For adults, this pressure to work and lack of free time is even greater. So how would we be able to get such people, who cannot afford to dedicate entire days or weeks to playing an ARG (or can do so only with difficulty or negative consequences), to participate? Would an ARG tailored to such needs and time constraints be divided up into fragments or storylines that begin in intervals, with pauses in between (e.g., with new pieces of information released only every day after work hours, or every weekend)?

Yet even now, as I play the PS ARG, I find myself struggling to stay invested and up-to-date between my schoolwork, work, and other campus activities. My attention simply cannot stay with the game. In addition, because my playtime is fragmented between the game and all these other activities and demands, I do not feel the breathtaking effects of Exquisite Pressure – although sometimes fun, this ARG is just as often stressful and a bit reminiscent of grinding in games (I also do not feel particularly creative participating in it, due to its overwhelmingly puzzle-like nature, but that’s a critique for another time). Yet I find games such as The Beast and I Love Bees, which enveloped workers and students alike, also often detrimental in their addictiveness, pulling players from their practical obligations, causing them to lose jobs and friendships. Players savored Exquisite Pressure at the expense of their non-game livelihoods. So how would we be able to create games that are fun, de-stressing, capable of engendering Exquisite Pressure, and also available to those without the temporal privilege of spending vast amounts of uninterrupted time playing it – those who, perhaps would benefit the most from such an opportunity?

On a related note: I recently found out that there is an ARG unfolding right now on campus – a history class is playing a LARP revolving around the papal elections of Renaissance-era Italy, and my flatmate happens to be Cesare Borgias, decadent son of the papal candidate, Rodrigo Borgias. There are upwards of 40 students in the class, and each player has a different objective depending on the role they are assigned – hers is to get her father elected as pope, and to perhaps assassinate a few enemies along the way. The game officially begins next week, yet each person has already received around 20+ pages of wonderfully- and whimsically-written background for their character, in addition to 20+ pages of rules for the game. My flatmate is unable to contain her excitement – she has become intensely immersed in this alternate world, already exchanging emails (standing in for letters) with her renaissance friends and planning the murder of her worst nemesis. The game, according to her, has 10+ NPCs, one based as far away as Texas to represent the Roman authorities presiding over the elections (if I remember correctly), and will involve substituting real spaces for the fictional realm of an Italian city, in addition to utilizing emails. Thus this game is transmedia and incorporates alternate world-building to a tantalizing degree.

This, perhaps, is another way of going about making ARGs temporally affordable to those with limited time: by having the students role-play and interact organically with each other as their characters instead of solving puzzles together, the game makes the entire experience less time-based and also more individually creative, as players get to further craft their characters in their mutual interactions. The lack of an unceasing deluge of puzzles also makes it less time-demanding, so that players can more easily adjust their level of involvement without necessarily being left in the dark of world-building; they can also choose to dedicate more or less time to the game completely voluntarily, based on their investment in their characters and the world, and in a way that is not so easily quantifiable (and perhaps therefore not as stress-inducing) as in the case of a puzzle-based game, where your involvement can be measured by whether or not you manage to solve the puzzles. Thus my flatmate enthuses about the game without feeling pressured by it. Moreover, the more fantastical(also read as: scandalous and titillating) aspect of the narrative definitely contributes to the players’ interest in the ARG. An objection to such intense role-playing, or “make-believe,” may be that such far-removed characters make the game into more of an escape from “reality” and less of a productive learning experience. Yet my flatmate has told me that because of the wonderfully described characters, she now knows by heart the names and details of all the personages involved in the papal elections, as well as the sociopolitical situation of Italy at the time. Perhaps such a LARP would indeed not teach its players STEM or new media literacies, but it certainly has induced them to learn well the history it intended to teach, and will also encourage them to exercise their imagination, narrative capacities, and general improvisational abilities. (I would argue that precisely because it is not puzzle-based, like so many of the P-sets and homework we receive to mandatorily complete for university, playing and fantasizing about this game is much more relaxing than a puzzle-heavy one would be, even while the students develop other faculties.)

On a final note, I must remark that a great factor in this game’s captivation of the students is simply how well-written the character descriptions are – they were personally penned by the teacher, with evident enthusiasm and accomplished literary sleights of hand. Having read a few, even I have become infected with excitement for the world and characters of this game. Consequently I would emphasize the importance of the framing, narrative, and wording in the design of any ARG that aims to get its players truly invested and engaged.

Siri

 

Rough Thoughts on ARGs in Light of Different Art Forms

I found the readings by Bogart and Landau particularly fascinating – I had unformulated thoughts on the similarity between ARGs and theatre, but Viewpoints really put fine points onto the connection, while also transitively tying ARGs to music, film, painting, and architecture via the first connection. This juxtaposition of ARGs with other artistic modes makes me very curious about the direction of ARGs, especially in connection to one question posed in the text: “At what moment does the language of the stage become poetic?” This is an experience I feel has not been yet created or addressed in our discussion of ARGs as of yet – so far (though to be fair, we have only been going at this for 2 weeks, and even more, I find it difficult to clarify/pinpoint what is meant by “poetic” – I would honestly love to hear what other people have to say on this!), we have concentrated mostly on ARGs that reconfigurate the players’ experience of their world, that enable/make them perceive and live through an alternate reality. Games such as World Without Oil and Superstruct reorient players in their thinking of practical world problems, and games like Killer reorient them in their approach to and experience of their physical environments. However, there has been little mention of ARGs that make the players experience themselves differently – an inner alteration, not just in thoughts and feelings, but of the experience of being in one’s own body – if that makes sense. Are there ARGs that encourage the players to reconsider the way in which they move, for example, by repetition? (Also, are there ARGs that encourage the players to describe objects, people, or their surroundings in a different light/aura that is not just associating an unusual, playful memory with it?) A different, not-quite-the-same-meaning way of phrasing the question would be: most ARGs seem to encourage action, be it on the part of players or designers. What is the potential for meditative ARGs? ARGs also tend towards a sort of point-collecting, objective-completing mentality. What about ARGs that are more meandering, exploratory, and without clearly defined endgoals or endings?

On a different note, I also found Bogart and Landau’s comparison of theatre with music, film, and architecture especially inspiring. I feel that it would be very useful to think of creating ARGs with the idea of different film “tracks” in mind, with the tracks in an ARG being the different media platforms through which the game operates. One could create multiple levels of storyline, each using a different medium, and then further complicate the players’ experience by creating dissonances between the narratives and structures of each such track. Then, in terms of the architecture analogy, I found the questions surrounding “flow” particularly engaging, given the fact that ARGs place so much emphasis on the players’ navigation of and interaction with space(s). The idea of pacing the players’ experience not just through the timing of clue-dropping (as in the case of The Beast, where the designers released new puzzles every week), but through the physical environs/settings of the game feels like it could make an ARG feel more organic and immersive – it would further remove the presence of the PM.

(On a side note, what would it mean if we constructed spaces specifically for an ARG? Would that be breaking the ARG’s link to the “real” world by making it more “alternate” – manmade, constructed solely for the “fiction” of the game?)

Siri

Works Cited:

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