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July 31, 2007

Jigsaw Made of Fool's Gold?

As a denizen of LiveJournal, I could hardly fail to notice the massive popularity of internet quizzes, so allow me to try to create one of my own, which I feel will be particularly applicable to the wise and wonderful web wanderers who comprise our audience:

In your wanderings, you encounter an example of such breathtakingly futile resistance to the way the internet works (no, I'm not talking about the RIAA) that it is as if you have stumbled upon some rare exotic creature thrown upon an inhospitable foreign shore by an uncaring digital sea. Do you:

A. Pull out your notebook and microscope and study this fascinating specimen. Far be it from you to interfere with nature taking its course, but there may be an opportunity here to reach greater understanding of some sort through observation.

B. Attempt to instruct the alien in the ways of the internet, so it can go on its way more equipped to survive out there in the jungle. The main purpose of the internet is to share knowledge, and to facilitate that, people have to help one another learn how best to navigate it.

C. Compassionately try to either protect it or to return it to more hospitable climes, even if the attempt is futile. Clearly it is not equipped to navigate the wilds of the internet, and the kindest thing to do is to encourage it to go home.

D. Set up a tent around it and charge admission to point and laugh. Maybe make it into a lolcat while you're at it.

E. Stick a pin through that sucker and add it to your collection. PWNED!

F. Try to drive it away from the young/stupid/potentially innocent, in case it's dangerous. It probably only looks helplessly ignorant. After all, Google and Wikipedia are free.

The rare beetle that caught my attention this week was the behavior of the puppetmaster(s) of the Golden Jigsaw puzzle contest. An Unfiction player named IRC1968, as well as Unfiction moderator and ARGNet staffer Michelle Senderhauf, had received notices that their accounts had been deleted. IRC1968 was told he'd been kicked out for posting answers. Upon inquiry, Michelle was told her account was deleted because it "was found to have a positive link with a website or website(s) that are being used, encouraged or moderated to infringe upon player rules and, despite prior warnings, continue to actively release private information concerning The Golden Jigsaw via a public forum on the internet, with the intent to damage the interests of the owners, developers, partners & players of the game."

Upon further inquiry, Michelle got a response from Don Campbell explaining that her account had been deleted because while she hadn't posted any answers, as a moderator at Unfiction, she had failed to censor the information other players posted at UF. (Her account was later reinstated, "with conditions.")

Yes, you read correctly. It's sort of like trying to ban a theater usher from seeing your movie in a different cinema because they didn't stop people in the lobby from criticizing the film. Dude, they don't work for you. In fact, in the case of Unfiction moderators, if as a puppetmaster you're doing something that breaks UF's Terms of Service, their job is to work against you.

(Bonus! They also appear to claim, ungrammatically, that using their domain name constitutes "copyright infringement." Oh, and they changed their notification period for the enforcement of rule changes from 30 days to 30 minutes.)

Sean Stewart summed up the nature of the medium pretty succinctly: "The world of the infosphere—the web and google and email and instant messenger and cell phones—is about two fundamental activities: searching for things, and gossiping."

You don't have to be a genius to understand that if you present the internet with a series of puzzles, people who don't have the answers are going to search for them, and people who do have the answers are going to gossip about them.

You cannot control the behavior of players, and you cannot stop information from spreading. Ask the RIAA. Ask J.K. Rowling.

Farhad Manjoo, a technology writer for Salon, discussed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and all its attendant information restriction issues, on his blog, Machinist. He described HP6's encounter with the Internet as follows: "[W]ithin 24 hours of the release of Book 6, a worldwide coven of IRC-connected fans scanned, proofread, and posted a version of the book that could be read on PDAs and phones. Other fans collaboratively translated the book into German in about two days -- months before the official German translation was to hit shelves."

This will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the collective intelligence characteristic of alternate reality game audiences, and Manjoo highlighted an important point about the way the internet works that makes this sort of thing possible, whether you view it as working for good or for evil:

It took just one of these copies to go astray, and then it was out there to everyone. In this way the security protecting Harry Potter was vulnerable to the same fatal flaw that routinely cripples digital-rights-management code meant to protect music and movies: If it breaks anywhere, it breaks everywhere...

But there's also another, more weighty problem. Rowling intended her story to be released a certain way. She wanted it to come out on July 21, she wanted it to come out on paper (and audiobook), she wanted people to delight, together and simultaneously, to the climax of a tale they've been waiting a decade to read. The artist, in other words, expected a certain fate for her art, and as [Melissa] Anelli [webmaster of a Harry Potter fan site] sees it, going along with that expectation is "a matter of respect."...

So let me try to say this kindly, hopefully without causing any offense: What the author wants is not, anymore, all that will happen. Today, artists -- even those as powerful as J.K. Rowling -- can't reasonably expect such dominion over their art. A well-laid plan is dashed by some guy with a camera and a lot of time on his hands, and that's that. And mostly this loss of control is a good thing, for fans as well as for artists.

But regardless of whether or not you think it's a good thing, it's futile (and self-defeating) to pretend it isn't out there. Regardless of what restrictions you attempt to put into place, the internet is smarter than you are. It never sleeps. It never takes a break for dinner. It never gets up to go to the bathroom. It has infinite resources: time, energy, ingenuity. Keeping a secret is a heck of a lot harder than sharing it, and if the internet is motivated to share your secret, not only to you have a far more difficult job than it does, you're outclassed on every level.

It only takes one leak.

It's possible to design a competitive puzzle contest that understands and works with, rather than against, the anarchic and collaborative nature of the web: in recent memory, Court TV's SaveMyHusband, both of Volvo's Pirates of the Caribbean contests and Microsoft's Vanishing Point all managed to pull it off, as, I'm sure, have many others.

SaveMyHusband, in particular, hit a few snags on its first date with the ARG community. Players discovered all the content (most of which was supposed to be released on a particular schedule) almost immediately. In addition, as with Volvo's games -- and as we're seeing now in the Golden Jigsaw -- players new to the ARG community often aren't prepared for (and are sometimes incredulous at) the community's insistence on collaboration. As Behind the Buzz describes it:

For the sweepstake competitors and non-gamers who are either after the money or just playing for casual fun, the reaction of the ‘professional’ argers has been frustrating. This audience has been trying to win the money and feel strongly that the argers are ‘cheating.'

Newcomers to ARGs often can't understand why ARGers would prefer to collaborate on puzzle solving when there is a prize at stake for which they "should" be competing. What they fail to understand is that for ARG communities, and Unfiction in particular, the community itself is often the greatest attraction to online games. ARGers are used to playing games in which the rewards are intangible, and the community that forms around those games is often the most treasured of those rewards. The (relatively slim) chance of winning a monetary prize is, I believe, less of an incentive for many community members than the enjoyment of working together with other skilled puzzlers to reach a shared goal.

It's all right when newcomers to the Unfiction forums don't understand that (even if one often wishes they'd learn to be a little more polite about their disagreement). But it's problematic when designers don't bother to do enough research to understand that communities like Unfiction are out there, and how they're likely to react to a puzzle contest. As Behind the Buzz observes, regarding SaveMyHusband:

The agency had obviously not predicted the behaviour of ARG players, even though a casual perusal of forums could have told them that that anything on the web, especially when ‘easy’ to find, would be fair game. There was a lack of understanding here of part of the audience – they may not be the target audience of Court TV but they are a segment that play ARGS and you had to understand these people as well as the puzzle and crime game playing people who were the main targets.

However, SaveMyHusband made a good-faith attempt to adapt and work with the community's collaborative ethos rather than against it, asking only that people stop posting the personal information they'd discovered about the company's employees.

As for the Golden Jigsaw, one hopes that its designers will be flexible enough to recognize the inevitable and adapt, rather than deleting player accounts based on membership in other organizations or communities rather than actual behavior and attempting to impose their rules on communities over which they have no authority.

Because I'm sure their players are adapting: choosing to register with names that are different from the ones they use on Unfiction, providing answers anonymously,* creating resources to share answers,** and otherwise engaging in all the freedom to search and to gossip that the internet allows.

*Nope, I was in no way involved with the creation of this player resource. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it.
**Thank you to Unfiction's SpaceBass for providing this resource.

Posted by Jessica Price at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2007

Subject 137 and The Experiments Of Doom

I'm dying. I was falling asleep last night, and I knew. All I had to do was just let go, you know? ...And that would be it. I'd wake up a f*cking corpse, and you'd be in trouble. So why don't you just let me go? Why don't you just let me get out of here before everyone gets in trouble?

The plea is made with weary resignation by Subject 137, a man who appears to be in his twenties and who, the video's poster tells us, has been the subject of mysterious medical testing.

It's an eerie and surprisingly affecting response to the assertion, delivered from offscreen in an electronically disguised voice, that Subject 137 is special, but that he'd get lost "out there" in the real world. Is this the idealism of a fanatic scientist? Propaganda from an organization with sinister plans? Or is Subject 137 actually special? It's impossible to tell from this first video, but Subject 137's bleak response is delivered in a way that makes him seem grounded and easy to identify with.

The viewer allegiances established by the introductory video (Subject 137 sympathetic! Voice-disguised man scary!) are destabilized, however, by the notes attached to it by Maria Ail:

I beg viewers to be careful when watching this clip since it's view out of context of everything that comes before it. Think of this clip as a test.

Many ARGs have a character that functions as a guide, giving players an introduction to the world of the game and usually some sort of call to action as well. Maria seems to be a character of this type. Her site elegantly provides a walkthrough of the game thus far, a library of the videos, a forum for discussion and her blog about the events. In essence, the entire game is contained on a single site.

Maria was working on a book about the lives of medical test subjects when she received a package of tapes containing videos documenting the experiences of Tom, a.k.a. Subject 137. Intrigued and (hopefully) a little disturbed by their content, Maria decided to upload the videos to sites like Veoh and YouTube, hoping to share Tom's story and get some answers. Want to help? Call her at 646.429.0267 or email her at subject137@gmail.com. Right now you'll only get her voicemail, but leave her your number just in case she starts returning calls.

I won't spoil what happens in subsequent videos, because I feel that this might be a good game for newcomers to ARGs (with the caveat that the videos contain somewhat disturbing subject matter and profanity) and the trail is currently short enough that it's easy to follow it for yourself. I was able to go through all the material on the site in under two hours. Part of this was due to the fact that both the Unfiction thread and the onsite message boards are sparsely populated at the moment, but even if they begin buzzing, so long as Maria continues to provide concise summaries of both developments in the plot and outstanding player theories, comments and questions, it should remain easy to join in the game without having to read through everything the community is saying.

The relative simplicity of catching up, however, doesn't indicate a simple story. There's a suggestion of enough depth to the characters to drive continuing player interest even though there's not much for players to do at the moment beyond speculating about the nature of the tests Tom is undergoing. The caliber of the videos, while occasionally a little uneven, hits the right note: it's plausible enough that these are tapes for internal use by researchers. Whether the unstudied quality is due to a low budget or an attempt at realism, I bought it, and I appreciated the occasional flashes of cleverness the writing displayed ("Your bee just grabbed a jackhammer while you weren't looking, Doc!" Tommy exclaims when the intensity of the shocks he receives in a test -- which the doctor has assured him will be no more than a "bee sting" -- suddenly increase in intensity (an allusion to the Just a pinch, honey. You'll barely feel it. Just a little sting... motif that set off the story in I Love Bees, perhaps?), and the confident, understated tenderness between Tom and his girlfriend is sketched with a light touch that nevertheless allows it to shine through while the video quality cuts out and in as if embarrassed to be intruding on the couple's intimacy).

The game uses primarily free sites (YouTube, Proboards) aside from Maria's main site, but it manages to convey a sort of controlled, unobtrusive professionalism without ever seeming slick by turning the very things that might indicate a shoestring budget into markers of authenticity.

Is Maria, our guide-cum-narrator, being upfront with her audience? Hard to say; I can't tell whether the little blips in her story and conduct that are appearing on my Suspicion Radar are intentional or not.

The one area where Subject 137 seems a bit amateurish is in her interactions with players (okay, and in Maria's misspellings and egregious overuse of exclamation points on her forum -- have some self-respect, woman! -- but I'm trying to overcome my Fascist English Major tendencies).

Part of the allure of smaller games is that they usually feature personalized interaction for anyone who attempts to communicate with a character, unlike massive corporate games in which only a small percentage of players are actually able to enjoy that experience. However, it can create difficulties in protecting the game's fiction against direct criticism or attempts to tear it down. Accusations that the entire thing is a hoax happen in any game that refuses to acknowledge that it is fiction. (For a theory on the cause of the phenomenon, see the end of this section of the ARGFest '07 keynote.)

Large-scale ARGs whose vast player bases make direct responses to every player comment impossible -- as well as games that present a universe seemingly less reactive to players than one mediated almost entirely through the eyes of a single responsive character -- have the luxury of simply appearing to ignore hoax accusations (Who is Benjamin Stove? wryly shoved all such comments into a "Complaints Department" thread on its in-game forums, and it's hard to imagine most of the fictional organizations in the less overtly-reactive world of the Beast caring whether players thought they were fake, let alone responding). But once puppetmasters open the door to responding to any player that contacts them, they're faced with the choice of either trying to find an in-game way to address meta-oriented criticisms or concerns, or making their characters suspiciously blind to only that category of comments.

It's not uncommon to see smaller-scale games attempt to preemptively head off this sort of thing, explaining why they can't go to the police with their problems (as Subject 137 does in its FAQ), and having the characters themselves bring up the possibility that this is a hoax and that they themselves are victims (also found on the FAQ).

Subject 137 goes a bit too far in trying to answer potential criticism. Maria puts a player attack on the acting quality front and center in one of her blog entries, although she does try to deflect it into a discussion of why certain things in the videos are bleeped out. That sort of defensiveness changes the tone of the game and makes the puppetmaster(s) seem less confident, which weakens suspension of disbelief and interrupts the flow of the story. While it might not be in keeping with Maria's accessibility to player interaction for the game to behave with the same chilly elegance that a universe like the Beast's is able to flaunt in the face of such doubts, the puppetmasters would do better to remain focused on telling their story and reduce the amount of effort directed at proclaiming its legitimacy. No game makes it through a run without criticism, and player feedback is valuable, but that doesn't mean it should always be addressed overtly.

Similarly, Maria's summaries of the videos attempt to micromanage player interpretation of what they've seen a little too closely. I wish that instead of telling us that Tom's relationship with his girlfriend seems "easy-going" and putting questions still to be answered in bold font, the puppetmasters would allow the viewer to take a little more initiative in deciding what to focus on and how to interpret things.

If it weren't for the seeming lack of confidence displayed in Maria's attempts to deal with criticism, I might assume that she is not being completely upfront with her audience (her assertions that she couldn't possibly know the person who's giving her these videos seem like a case of protesting too much, which fired my curiosity about her) and directing their attention only toward what serves her purposes. If that is what's going on, I like the idea but am not sure whether it's appropriate in what essentially amounts to a walkthrough of the game thus far: it's done an excellent job of keeping the barrier to entry low, and it would be a shame to compromise that.

Whoever is doing the videos has an impressive but never intrusive command over what's revealed in the narrative, and if the interactive portions of the game can achieve an equivalent level of stage presence, this could turn out to be a memorable and engaging experience.

Find everything you need to play at the Subject 137 website, and check out the discussion on Unfiction here.

Posted by Jessica Price at 9:08 AM | Comments (1)

July 25, 2007

Be Good, Tanya, and You Might Just Discover Something Supernatural

Pity Tanya Mitchel: she's just a nice girl with a LiveJournal, a job at a bank, and a wacky sister. The last of these happens to have disappeared, leaving a cipher-strewn trail and mysterious plea for her sister to save her by finding Dean Winchester (who appears to be the same Dean Winchester from CW's Supernatural), and poor Tanya is utterly distraught about the whole thing. So, like any self-respecting character in an alternate reality game, she has turned to the wisdom of the internet to help her out.

A tip sent to Unfiction owner SpaceBass last Friday, containing a link to Tanya's blog (Essentially Invisible), set players on the trail of what is beginning to look like a disjointed indulgence in ARG cliches. Between Tanya claiming that she found her own blog by accident and the appearance of ciphers with no plot-based justification for their placement, this looks likely to be the type of game that makes community veterans roll their eyes.

However, the game's limited scope provides an easy opportunity for overview. During a discussion about the difficulty of finding regular coverage of the ARG world that is geared to people outside the community with game reviewer par excellence Chris Dahlen (one of the few journalists to tackle reviewing an ARG -- Perplex City -- in the context of mainstream gaming), Chris expressed a desire for regular sports-page-like coverage of running ARGs. He wanted to see an account of a game's highs and lows that would be accessible to people who are internet literate but don't regularly play ARGs.

I'm far too lazy to attempt such an ambitious project for a large-scale game, but Essentially Invisible provides an example of limited enough scope that I'm willing to give it a try. Please mentally read the following in your best sportscaster voice.

Essentially Invisible got off to a bit of a rough start in its first engagement with Unfiction, choosing a launch method -- merely sending a link to an Unfiction admin -- likely to evoke ambivalence at best from players due to historically heavy overuse by games that later imploded. However, an unoriginal launch does not necessarily indicate the quality of the game to come, so fans remained hopeful.

The game's strategy seemed simple and familiar, although far from sure-fire: find the missing sister by discovering the story behind her mysterious plea for help and solving the numerous puzzles and ciphers floating around.

A few more early stumbles, including such tired moves as the unexplained use of binary and other simple ciphers, a mysterious plea for help that would be more logically sent to police than to the internet at large, and attempts to lead players by the nose rather than letting them find their own way seemed to confirm that this was a game likely to be forgotten quickly even by fans.

EI handed apathy and annoyance their first loss, however, by bringing in a reference to the popular show Supernatural when missing sister Tricia passed a Leia-like message to Tanya, exclaiming, "Find Dean Winchester! He's my only hope!"

Following up on the momentum generated by that move, EI tossed in a note in WingDings font (and, in a showy display of self-awareness, dubbed the image OBI-WAN). The play was reasonably well-executed, as the note was hand-written and therefore could not simply be converted to readable text by opening the document in word and switching the font.

By the time the dust had cleared from those plays, EI had lined up its next move: an mp3 left on Tricia's cell phone that turned out to be a deployment of a strategy less frequently used but still familiar to genre fans: the Name That Tune For Kloos And Glory opening. It proved successful, as sound and video files are a welcome change from blog entries and visual ciphers, and it prompted deeper engagement (emails and blog comments) from a few players.

Not wanting to limit itself to its star hitter, EI next brought a character who appeared to be Tricia onto the field in an email reply to a player's offer of help. Unfortunately, she failed to perform up to her sister's standards, falling back on a move rarely proven successful even when attempted by characters with a track record of clever plays: the Inexplicably ROT-13ed Email Reply. A few cynical groans echoed from the stands, and mutters of "Why is it always ROT- 13?" and "Get off my lawn!" along with the sounds of walkers and canes banging the bleachers were heard from the press box.

Meanwhile, showing excellent leadership, Tanya was doing her best to distract from her teammate's disappointing showing, throwing out the generally foolproof Could-This-Be-An-Anagram? feint, in which the use of an odd word or phrase (in this case, "En On Tutors") sends players scrambling to toss the letters until they get something that makes more sense.

Tricia made an attempt to recover from her stumble, but repeated many of the same mistakes. It hardly seems worth the effort to encode a two-letter response in binary, and gains from the play, if any, were minimal as players remained confused as to whether they had correctly decoded the Wingding letter. Team members Sam and Dean Winchester unfortunately appeared to be following her lead in sending random codes and ciphers.

Tanya again came to the rescue, broadening the area of the field she was covering as she announced that thanks to players' identification of the mp3 as a country song entitled "You'll never leave Harlan alive," she was heading to Harlan, KY to continue her search for Tricia. Fans who had awoken at the name Harlan, hoping for some trademark Ellison humor and snark, returned to their slumber.

EI's next strategy involved a cat picture, which is usually a safe choice on the internet, and fans set about trying to wrest meaning from the letters and symbols scattered about the image.

In Kentucky, Tanya realized she'd forgotten to bring along a picture of her sister to show to locals, and was saved at the last minute by the intervention of newly-introduced friend and teammate Jane, who had one handy. Unfortunately, what would otherwise have been a well-executed handoff was marred a bit by the fact that the picture was solarized for no apparent reason. (Either that, or Tricia is a drow. +2 Geek Points to anyone who was able to switch gaming genres immediately after the parentheses.)

Perhaps realizing a change of game plans was in order, EI brought Tricia onto the field again, introducing a LiveJournal of her own, and in a bit of unsportsmanlike behavior, ungraciously disclaiming the need for help from her sister or from the players. Playing to her strengths as a folklore student, Tricia claimed that this had all been an attempt to see if legends could be created and that her sister was the one that was insane. Whether this abrupt reversal of the game's previous direction will prove successful remains to be seen.

In what may signal another new direction for the team, Tanya is currently searching for clues at a real-life library, and Tricia's blog contains what may be GPS coordinates. Real-life deaddrops or even meet-ups might pull them out of their slump. The game's run has been a bit of a disappointment so far, but they still have time to rally, clear up the ambiguities and disjointedness, and provide a satisfying conclusion to their fans. Doom Skull proved that a grassroots ARG does not have to be epic in scope or even particularly innovative to provide a quality experience for its participants, especially for new players or those with limited time to participate. Like Doom Skull, this ARG could provide a modest-but-entertaining "ARG with training wheels," but even less ambitious games need to maintain coherent storylines and something distinctive -- even if it's only a quirky sense of fun -- to keep players interested. Let's hope this one rises to that challenge.

Players wishing to join up can read the still-manageable Unfiction thread, and should also be aware that most of the interaction takes place on Tanya's LiveJournal, so a free account at that site might prove useful in participating.

Posted by Jessica Price at 11:33 AM | Comments (2)