life behind bars.

Interacting Visually: ARG Proposal: Story Line: First Draft

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:15:06 -0400

Interacting Visually: ARG Proposal: Story Line: First Draft:

Characters - Campbell Newman - Dr Rowan Stevenson (scientific associate 1) - Dr Vladimir Hussein (scientific associate 2) Back story Campbell Newman has two scientific associates, Rowan Stevenson and Vladimir Hussein. These scientists liaise with Mr Newman on environmental and scientific issues…

Related Project Analysis

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 23:16:52 -0400

PROJECT 1

ARG: “I Love Bees”

Purpose: MARG for Halo 2, excite potential players, provide a plausable backstory for the events of the Halo 2 narrative.

About: This ARG was one of the original big ARGs as it was played out over 10 years ago. It came after the Artificial Intellegence ARG “the Beast” and began by engaging mainly people who had been involved in that original ARG by sending them jars of honey that lead the to the corrupted ad hacked I love Bees website. Potential players were also enticed into the realm of I love Bees by a subliminal flash up of the ilovebees.com web URL at the end of the Halo 2 trailer. The game’s narrative was about an Artificial Intellegence called Melissa that had lost parts of it’s memory due to a trojan virus and had latched on to a server in order to gain contact to people to help rebuild her memory.

This ARG was so good because of the high levels of agency, the fact it was highly driven by the narrative and the “this is not a game” complex. Players got to communicate with “admins” which made the game VERY real.

PROJECT 2

ARG: “Why So Serious?”

Purpose: MARG for The Dark Knight

About: This ARG was probably the largest scale ARG ever. It was amazingly intricate in its clues and drew players in so deep some played for 15 months. 10 million unique players. The joker built army of henchmen that completed tasks and cracked codes. This ARG had so many different platforms including online, skywriters, dress ups, newspapers, documents, cakes, phones and rallies. The level of immersion was so high because players became so involved, taking sides and rallying in the streets. The “this is not a game” complex was very prominent.

PROJECT 3

ARG: NO - This is an iPhone App: 100 Floors

Purpose: Entertainment

About: 100 Floors provided me with some inspiration for my ARG design. This is because the player must crack the floor to advance to the next level. This provided me with an example to understand how I would design my nodes. I then decided that for my ARG it would be like a floor on 100 floors - it has to be cracked before you can advance to the next level. Although this is a very simple inspiration, it provided me with a better understanding of what keeps players engaged. The reason why people are compelled to play a game is usually to achieve a goal, the goal of 100 floors is to reach the 100th floor by cracking the codes to the 99 floors that preceed it. Therefore, I gathered that if the players involved in my ARG had a goal from the start, they would be more inclined to immerse themselves in the game and play until the end.

BATMAN, MASSACRES AND ARGS

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 06:33:00 -0400

As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, one of my subjects this semester (KIB102 – Visual Interactions) is centered around Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs. Being as far from a gamer as one could possibly be my first thought was that these were some kind of video game where you were sucked into an “alternate reality” to play. I once sort of dated a guy who was into RPGs, which are role playing games, where you take on the role of a particular character and fight their battles or are involved in a number of quests in order to achieve the ultimate goal of the character. I figured RPGs and ARGs were either the same thing or really, really similar. Boy could I not have been more wrong. This is how Wikipedia defines ARGs:

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform and uses transmedia to deliver a story that may be altered by participants’ ideas or actions.

The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants’ responses. Subsequently, it is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game’s designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.

ARGs are growing in popularity, with new games appearing regularly and an increasing amount of experimentation with new models and subgenres. They tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g. collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City) or through promotional relationships with existing products (for example, I Love Bees was a promotion for Halo 2, and the Lost Experience and Find 815 promoted the television show Lost). However, pay-to-play models are not unheard of.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

If you didn’t already know what ARGs were, and you understood the definition from Wikipedia, you are probably as wigged out as I was when I realized what they were. My lecturer set this cracked article by Andrew Lang as the required reading for week one, and it absolutely blew me away [http://www.cracked.com/article_19346_the-5-most-insane-alternate-reality-games.html]. I highly recommend everyone reads it. It is so fascinating and really really disturbing. The #1 AGR of all time (as judged by Lang) was the game linking to the Batman movie The Dark Night (the one where Heath Ledger played the Joker). Please just read the article, because it is way too complicated to explain it but it is truly disturbing. Really cool, but really messed up. It got me thinking about a number of things: 1. What happens when a REMOTELY psychologically unstable person becomes involved in an ARG?

How do people figure these things out? Seriously, I am a pretty smart person and I highly doubt I would ever pick up on an ARG even if someone put the clue down in front of me.
How many of these clues have actually crossed my path? I mean really, there must be a few of these things out there… and I didn’t even know they existed until today.

Those were the questions going through my mind while reading this cracked article. But what I couldn’t help thinking about as I gawked at this reality I had no idea even existed was The Dark Knight Rises massacre that occurred in America earlier this week. It came into my mind before I even reach the part of the article that talks about the original Dark Knight film and the ARG related to it. The massacre is at the front of mine, and most news consuming people’s minds in the world right now. It is one of the worst massacres I can remember, at least in my life time, and something I honestly never thought I’d live to see. It has been said in the tabloids that the man being charged with the murders of the 12 victim (James Holmes) was convinced that he is the Joker. If you read all the way to the bit about the Dark Knight ARG you will understand why I immediately thought of this terrible massacre. It actually makes so much sense to me if this guy had been a part of the Dark Knight ARG or something similar. That paired with an already psychologically unstable mind may lead anyone looking for an out from everyday life into an alternate reality where they truly believe they ARE the Joker. I find the whole concept of ARGs ridiculously interesting and right now I am itching for 7pm to tick round so I can attend my first Visual Interactions lecture. I would love to talk to my lecturer about the link between ARGs and the Dark Knight massacre. It would answer a lot of questions if James Holmes had been involved in one.

What do you think?

Also, if you want to know more about ARGs the best place I have found is http://www.argn.com/ which is the ARGs Network.

I’d love to hear some feedback.

hi ed

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 06:28:26 -0400

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saveeyoutonight: Whats your name delicate?

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saveeyoutonight:

Whats your name delicate?

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it's not what you say: to figure myself out.

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:53:31 -0400

it's not what you say: to figure myself out.:

notwhatyousay:

I feel like everyone else thinks I have the most well screwed on head of all the people they know. I turn up to classes and I will say to a friend “good luck on your assignment”, and they will say “you too, not that you need it”. This bothers me. Why don’t I need luck? Why is it that people who…

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