Six panelists at ARGFest 2007 discuss the definition of an 'ARG', followed by a short clip from the live recording of the ARGFest netcast, followed by the ensuing nuttiness of late night geekdom.
(transcript: How would you describe an ARG?)
* Brian Clark, GMD Studios: If I had to describe it to people, I'd describe it as platformless gaming. Sort of accepting the idea that gaming and play can happen anywhere, in any context, with any device. Once you sort of embrace that idea, it adjusts the way you see playfulness as your social role. So gaming doesn't have any 'this is the acceptable place to have gaming and this is the unacceptable place'.
* Brooke Thompson, Giant Mice: I actually tend to focus on the story, and talk about how it's a story that's broken up into pieces that you can find anywhere, and that it's your story. Even if you're not the person that put it out there, it's the story that you are discovering and that you are a part of and that you are building, so that's the focus that I tend to take with it.
* Sean C. Stacey, Unfiction Inc.: That's actually the focus that I take too. It's a collaborative story-telling process. The players in the gaming community are putting the story together for the puppetmasters - putting it back together. The puppetmasters know what was there in the first place, but what comes together from the players is coloured by their experiences and their knowledge, and it becomes a different thing at that point, than what was visualized at the start when developers started putting pieces out there. And I'd describe it as platformless, or anything could be your platform, anything and nothing; then I'd start talking about examples at that point, because it doesn't make any sense to anybody.
* Jane McGonigal, Institute for the Future: You always say it plays out in the real world, it uses every day technologies rather than gaming specific technologies. I focus on massively scaled collaboration- the puzzles and missions you design that you can't possibly solve alone, as a staple of the genre. I also emphasize a lot, the role of the real time game designer. I talk about how this is the first genre of digital gaming that has real time design; and the responsiveness, and what Sean Stewart calls the jazz of doing an alternate reality game, is really important. And Brian, you were talking about sustainability, and Adrian, you were talking in terms of replayability - I think one of the great challenges and opportunities in alternate reality gaming is to figure out how to keep the jazz in, replayable and stable. Obviously that's a challenge people know about, but I actually think given the number of amazing grassroots moderators and the community's ability to reform itself around problems, that it is a solvable problem, and to lose that sense of 'a game is different every time it's played', depending on the community, would be to abuse the real heart of the genre. Otherwise it just becomes interactive media.
* Adrian Hon, Mind Candy: Over the 2 or 3 years I've been at Mind Candy, I used to have this decision tree about how to explain ARGs. Start at the top: Is this person over 40 years old? Well, if he is, talk about Masquerade [a game from the UK]. If he's under 40, talk about The Game [UK]. Has the person watched The Game? Yes or no. Yes? Well it's a bit like The Game but without cheating. No? Well... I don't know. And it had to do with all these different things. But now the main way I do it is actually talking about the fact that ARGs don't really have controls, and it sort of touches basically on what Jane said about real life. In the sense of using these interfaces that we already now use, and when I talk to [video game designers about it, why some game is a lot of fun and why a lot of people play it] is because you already know how to sing, you already know how you're supposed to play guitar - you don't have to be taught how to do that. Whereas if you look at a Playstation 2 controller, they have 15 buttons and 2 joysticks, and even I have problems working out how to play [the game] or something like that. Whereas with ARGs, everyone knows how to use Google pretty much, everyone knows how to send an email. That's the interesting thing that I normally concentrate on.
* Evan Jones, Stitch Media: That's a great point - IGDA, their accessibility group is quite interested in alternate reality games just for the fact that they are so accessible. The game play devices already have things like TTY for telephones and all these different aspects. But, to your question - the way that I define things: I've been presenting on this a while just recently, and the way I've tried to sum it up lately is I talk about how the characters believe that they're real[...] It's not through the user's experience, but through the creative experience - that the characters in the story do not let go of the notion that they exist; from there all the other things sort of emerge.
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