2007vt02 Transcription
From ARGFest-o-Wiki
Contents |
Credits
- Panel Discussion I: Developing An ARG -
- Moderator: Sean Stacey (SS)
- Adam L. Brackin -- Fundi Technologies (AB)
- Brian Clark -- GMD Studios (BC)
- Adrian Hon -- Mind Candy Design (AH)
- Evan Jones -- Xenophile Media (EJ)
- Jan Libby -- Indie Puppetmaster of Sammeeeees (JL)
- Dave Szulborski -- Indie Puppetmaster of Chasing the Wish, Urban Hunt, etc. (DS)
Credits: Panel Discussion I -- Developing an ARG (1 of 2), ARG Fest-o-con 2007, San Francisco, CA
Introduction
SS: Why don't we go down the line and have everyone introduce themselves? Tell us a little about yourself and what games you've produced. So, Brian?
BC: I'm Brian Clark from GMD Studios. We did Legend of the Sacred Urns for Sharp, and Art of the Heist for Audi <audience cheers> and Who Is Benjamin Stove? for GM. And we have a project that you'll find out more about in March.
JL: I'm Jan Libby and I did Sammeeeeees. <audience cheers and applause>
AH: Hi, I'm Adrian Hon from Mind Candy, and we did Perplex City. <audience cheers and applause>
AB: I'm Adam Brackin, mostly responsible for Deus City, and one other that you may have heard of. My partner's sitting over there <points into audience>, Chris Brown, he's the techie guy. <applause>
DS: I'm Dave Szulborski. I've made a couple independent games -- Chasing the Wish, Catching the Wish -- and I've also made puzzles for GMD Studios, for Art of the Heist and Who Is Benjamin Stove? and <indistinct> current project running... <applause>
EJ: My name's Evan Jones and I am with Stitch Media, which is a new venture in cross-media entertainment, but you may have heard a bit about my role as creative director in the past at Xenophile Media, where I worked on Regenesis for two seasons, and the Ocular Effect.
Development Time
SS: So today we're talking about developing an alternate reality game. And I know that everybody comes at these things from a different angle and has a different development process. I'm really interested in hearing what each one of you has used as your process to develop a game. All of you have done completely different games -- Perplex City: how many years in development was that? And has been running for two years, now?
AH: Yeah, about that.
SS: Jan, I know that you spent a year and a half developing your game before you launched it, which is unheard of for an indie game.
JL: I did that mainly because I was doing a lot of it by myself, so I needed to make sure it was all plotted and every possible road [it could go down], I'd have to have an answer for. So I started with the story, and that I wrote over about six months <indistinct> about character development and then I just kept polishing and polishing, and then I started working on the game aspects, and then -- mostly, I wanted the game to come out of the character, rather than doing the game first and then the story after it.
SS: What do the rest of you think about that? I mean, is the story the most important part? That's my opinion, personally.
BC: I think it is. From my point of view, it's the story that creates the immersion, but I think if the games aren't done right, they can destroy that immersion factor, but ultimately, if you don't love the characters or feel for their struggle, or for the guy who lost the pen... <audience laughter> ...if you don't know the guys who lost the pen, how can you care about this plot? <gestures to Jan> So I'm like you: I tend to start -- you know, since we do work for commercial interests, a lot of times it seems to start with them. Like for Audi, they were releasing the A3, so there's this objective there, that we then try to find a creative solution to. So it starts with story, again, but we tend to learn something from that sponsor, about who they want to entertain, what kind of story they want to tell, that sort of reinforces what the brand wants.
So, I guess that's sort of the other thing in contrast to you <addressed to Jan> that we do is that for us, they tend to be pretty large teams and teams that don't have real distinct roles. So, people who are designers, people who are writers, all of them sort of collaborate on the overall story at the beginning, and that specialization doesn't really play in until the game's actually going. In the beginning it might be twenty or thirty different people that are all contributing little bits of ideas of how the overall story will run.
So that's generally a month. And then maybe a couple of months to actually get it developed and launched. So typical for our commercial games is sort of a three-month turnaround.
SS: How fast do you develop, Evan? I know that you generally work with other people's creative property.
EJ: Yeah, that's a very different process from us, because we usually get approached by someone else who's got something already developed. In the case of both Fallen and Regenesis it was a television series. A television series really has a strong bible behind it that defines the characters and really sets up the rules for the universe that you're playing in, and so the way that I've always begun is with a lot of things set. In a lot of television series, the narrative isn't always binding -- the arc of the season may go in a different direction, or from season to season things can sometimes change pretty dramatically. And so what I tend to do is actually work with the original creators because what we find is that an ARG really tests the boundaries of what a bible defines. <audience laughter> Although a series bible may have a page or two about a character, it really doesn't go into the kind of depth that the players want to go into in this field. So we end up working with the original team to -- as I say -- "dance lightly on their creative" so we can expand it into different areas, like gameplay, and not contradict or disrespect the original intention for where the story is going.
SS: Dave, we haven't heard from you. What's your experience with developing games? I mean, you've worked on both kinds of games with your own intellectual property and others, right?
DS: I definitely agree the story is the basis of the whole thing. I look at any ARG as a story that is broken up and made into a puzzle. So it's one overall large puzzle that needs to be reassembled. But if the story isn't there, there's nothing to reassemble. There's just nothing to hold the interest of the audience. But I kind of identify with both what Jan and Brian said: when I have the luxury of working on my own things you can definitely put a lot more time into it, but when you get into commercial work it's a whole different ballgame. They want things -- like Brian said, you have a month to develop this and launch it no matter what, and that's part of the project you're developing and the schedule it's on, but it's a whole different ballgame from <indistinct> and that frame of reference -- and like Evan said, with other people's intellectual property, with some of it, they can be so controlling that they're telling you you can't use a certain first name in a puzzle because it's too "ethnic-sounding" or something like that. We had that happen in Art of the Heist, where I came up with some names and the lawyers came back and said "You can't use that, it sounds too Germanic."
BC: And I think that's one of the interesting things with storytelling, is the limits you have on you when you're doing commercial work, when things have to get evaluated under advertising law, it's totally different than if you're getting evaluated in traditional storytelling. So, like on Art of the Heist, if we wanted to mention the name of a restaurant, we had to have an intern go down and get a signed permission from that restaurant on that corner in Manhattan so we could reference that name. We had a bible, too: a bible of brand names that we were actually allowed mention <audience laughter> and the ones we had to gloss over. They had deals with Apple and deals with Treo, they had signed deals with specific restaurants, but that legal bedding went all the way down to what you could call Virgil Tatum's old video games. And that was one of the things we did, is eventually we learned to give the lawyers twelve names that all have to do with pirates <audience laughter> because they're going to trademark search every single one of them and come back and tell you which one you can use. And we were always getting like our sixth or seventh choice, which is why Virgil's games sounded so utterly ridiculous.
When you're doing it for yourself, you can do things like LonelyGirl does, which didn't need to be afraid of touching other brands, touching real music, real imagery, real events, so I think that's all sort of a big trade-off between commercial and self-produced.
SS: Adrian, do you have any trouble mentioning brands and stuff in Perplex City? I know you've made up a lot of brands. <audience laughter>
AH: <indistinct> since we have to keep track of all the brands we've made up, and in Season 2 we're sort of making up even more companies, which is hardly the thing I want to do. In Season 2 we're going to a more episodic form, which means that we're having -- unlike sort of spending one year creating a two-year-long game, we've basically got two or three episodes at the same time, that we're doling out one after another, and we <indistinct> sponsors in Season 2, so it's going to be an interesting bit of <indistinct> learning how to <indistinct>. But the sponsors that we've talked to, well, either they're naive or they've got really good lawyers <audience laughter> and they didn't really [seem to care?] -- maybe it's just the U.K.
EJ: It's interesting, the different cultures, sometimes, of companies and collaborators. You do start to assess the level of risk, and I think it's very different for different organizations. I've worked with one that said, flat-out, "You cannot mention anything without it getting approved legally," and I've worked with one that was like, "You know, we want to see where this goes." It's really important to establish right at the beginning of the development process who you're dealing with and how they feel about it. If you've got any collaborators, and I'm sure that everyone's done that, but we've found that it can really change things like your budget and scope, style, and everything, if you believe that you're going down one path and end up on the other. Especially one direction that I can't talk about. <audience laughter>
BC: I've found fear works good. <audience laughter> Seriously. Like, basically, if you can get the client terrified of ARGers, right? This starts to be the right level of respect. It's like, you know, no small mistakes -- you trip up, they'll eat you alive. You do it right, they'll be your biggest fans forever. And that makes them start to go, "Okay, I think we'll take the native guide's opinion on which one of these trails to take." But you're right, there's definitely how much risk they can take and how much control they're used to having over things, because this is certainly about surrendering a lot more control to the audience than most corporate marketers are ever used to giving. They're used to having everything in lockstep, and the idea that you might turn around and say, "Eh, we're rewriting the film..."
"What do you mean? We're halfway through!"
"Eh, yeah, we think we can come up with a better ending."
In our process, we accept the idea that these stories we come up with before launch, we're going to have to rewrite at least once after launch, because once the players get their hands in it, sometimes you guys have better ideas than we had, and we go, "Wow, that's a better plot twist than what we had written! How do we pull that in? How do we make that work?" But that's terrifying for clients that are used to having a chart of absolutely everything that's going to launch, and when it's going to launch, and how each of those pieces tie together. To open that up to ambiguity really tests their comfort level.
EJ: I think it'd be an interesting panel for next year to interpret the dreams and nightmares of PMs, because I have a feeling there'd be <audience laughter> there. I have a running sort of tally of nightmares that I keep track of <more laughter>. I wake up and I'm like "Someone has breached the server!" <more laughter>
BC: That's every game for us.
SS: Adam, let's hear from you. Your game is a little bit unique because it's a Ph.D. project.
AB: It's the subject of my real dissertation. It started about four years ago as a screenplay, strangely enough, and after that I novelized it, and that's going to make its way out eventually. What I decided to do is to see what would happen if you told a story from every view except the main character. And the main character of the story is a guy named Sawyer, but there's no way to contact him and no way to interact with him and every other character...I agree with Jan completely -- character's the most important thing. And we've got evil, total bastards, and we've got guys who are just trying to make it, and we've got some real nice guys, and they're all characters, and I think that interaction with those characters is what's making the story. We're at a point right now, having launched like three months early, due to user demand, that we're finally at a point where we can start to tell the story. So it's interesting that we're at the point where we finally feel comfortable enough with our characters and the characters who've created themselves...we've got a prophet who has returned that -- that was never written. <indistinct> So yeah, I hear what you're saying.
SS: I'm out of questions. <audience laughter> Let's turn it over to the audience.
Intended Audience
AUDIENCE MEMBER: When you develop a story, do you develop it with an audience in mind, or do you just throw stuff out there and see who bites?
BC: Definitely with an audience in mind. I think that's the ultimate act of storytelling, is knowing who you want to move and how you want to move them, what emotions you want to evoke, and I think that requires understanding who the audience is. I think ARGs are a long way from being such a mass medium that they have to appeal to everyone. It's more important for them to be really good inside of the texture of what they're trying to do. Sometimes the clients tell us what that audience is, sometimes we're doing it for ourselves, and that audience might flow more naturally from the story if you are the storytellers. So there's a give and take between those two. It's not like we ever sit down and have a super-narrow target, but I think what's interesting is that a lot of the times the audience that sponsors most want to reach is not necessarily you guys, but the ripples that come from what you guys do, from the people that are lurkers or are reading news coverage. That kind of <indistinct> is a lot of times what we're thinking about as much as we're thinking about what the Unfiction community will get into or what the ARGN community will get into.
JL: I was just thinking of Unfiction with the launch. It was really designed <indistinct>.
AH: I think it's different for games where you're selling something, games like Perplex City. <indistinct> for a broad audience. At the same time, when we were developing Perplex City, there were a lot of buzzwords thrown around like "mainstream." Perplex City's gotta be for the mainstream. And there really isn't a "mainstream" anymore. If you look at something like <indistinct> whatever, everyone in this room would kill to have that sort of audience, and that's not mainstream. <indistinct> So obviously ARGs are going to aim for early adopters who spend most of their time on the internet. But I think increasingly what's going to happen with ARGs is we have to start making it easier to play. Not just for one audience, not just to make it more enjoyable for the people who are playing at the moment -- I think that's <indistinct>
BC: But I think you're right, I think a lot of times ARG developers have used puzzles as a time gap creator, right? And the same way that things like World of Warcraft create level scales that are designed to create ever-increasing means of time consumption, because early in ARGs it was the only way you really had to meter or control the audience tempo for your story. I think you're right that the more complex the puzzles become, the more it's an all or nothing sort of bet, rather than having smaller things that everyone can sort of enjoy.
DS: Yeah, I definitely find that when I'm making proposals to people for commercial ARGs, those are the two major obstacles we face: the complexity of the game and how people have to invest so much time to be involved in it. This is one of the concerns that major marketing companies have -- exactly like you said, the all or nothing proposition. Two weeks into it if they don't have the numbers that they want, they feel it's a total loss because people won't be able to catch on. So that's why we need to as developers find ways to make them more accessible from the beginning all the way to the end of them. And one of the other things I wanted to say, while we're still somewhat on the subject of story is, I've found that since I've started doing ARGs, I've started to write in entirely different ways. As I write the story, I'm actually starting to think about the delivery mechanisms of each part of the story. So it's not like just sitting down and writing a novel or a screenplay because you're only dealing with one medium there and you don't have to think about that. But when I'm writing an ARG, now, I'm starting to think about, "Oh, this is where I'm going to use video, this is where I'm going to use email," and I've found that the story sort of wraps itself around the technology at the same time I'm writing it, which I think is an integral part of eliminating a lot of the production problems in ARGs.
When Do Delivery Mechanisms Enter The Process?
SS: So you actually come up with a lot of the delivery ideas while you're writing the story? That's way early in the development process. What about the rest of you? Do you come up with those delivery ideas later on?
BC: Yeah. Because I think for us one of the things we do pretty early is try to describe what the channels of interaction are between the audience and characters. And that starts to really lay out things like can you email this character? Can you call this character? Does this character have some kind of journal or diary? And as you start to lay that stuff out then you start to get a feel for how that story's going to be told across those pieces. What the audience can see, what the audience can't see, what the audience will experience versus what the audience gets told by a character.
SS: But Jan, you said you did it differently. You wrote the entire story first.
JL: Yeah, I did what Brian said later. I did the story and then I wrote each character, like, okay, Mr. Alan Johnson is going to communicate with his -- I look at what he's about and think okay, how would he reach out? And the same thing with the puzzles. Any puzzles that went with specific characters, I felt, had to feel organic to the feel of that character, to their personal traits.
EJ: I totally agree with that. I think that way that I work with it is that you define the ways that people are going to communicate. I have a character that's on the run, so that character is going to deal with hidden packages. I have another character that works in an office, so they're going to be on the switchboard. And all these different ways...and so then these become narrative tools that I can pull out of my box of tricks and say, you know, I need to have something happen at this point, so who's going to be responsible for conveying that plot point? This character, well, they speak this way and so that's the way that it works out.
How Much Of The Narrative Doesn't Get Used?
BC: I have a question out of curiosity for Evan. How much narrative do you guys develop that you end up having to throw away? And what does your heart feel? <audience laughter. Jan groans, and the audience laughs harder>
EJ: I can tell you without a doubt that the stuff we develop, very little of it makes it out to the public. But the way it informs everything, and the subtlety of it, is that this character may have a huge backstory of abuse or neglect or something and it's going to then inform everything that they write and it gives the writer so much more to add to the plot. But that never comes up. It's just not an issue for this story. It's just a tone that's going to extend from then on. I would say at least 50% of all creative never makes it out in an obvious way. It may be there under the surface, but it's never really said aloud.
AH: We use the Just-In-Time Method of making content. <audience laughter>
BC: I'm stealing that one.
AH: We don't really waste anything, although at the same time it gives us <indistinct>. The problem we had was that we didn't have enough story, so we had to keep on making more and more and more, so very, very little actually got lost. Now that we're making much more discrete episodes, we're going to <indistinct> away, and it's not seeing how much you can make, it's seeing how little you can make it. It all comes to detail in a short amount of time so it was really sort of energetic overload, because I think previously we didn't actually think about what medium would actually convey the story. It was mostly writing and we didn't have the time or the resources to do a lot of video or audio -- I don't know if that's going to change. But now, I think, the two reasons we're changing: one is that we have more time and more resources, so we'll try more different methods of delivery, and secondly, I think, we're cutting down on the amount of text that you have to read. We certainly used a lot of text as --
SS: Filler? <audience laughter>
AH: <indistinct> Yes, I think we sort of did really good, but it's a different sort of game. And most people don't really read much these days. Books aren't really selling. It's incredible, actually, just reading about how many people buy books these days, because it's going down...
BC: That's the problem, you were reading. <audience laughter>
AH: And also to be fair, a lot of sponsors are saying, "Oooh, LonelyGirl -- that used video and it got a million viewers, so you've got to use video!" <audience laughter> Which is an interesting thing, so there are a lot of competing...
EJ: It was very interesting to come out with an ARG during the summer of last year with a mysterious young woman traveling around the world leaving video messages. It was "oh, like LonelyGirl!" And it was like, "Yeah..." <audience laughter> Yeah, sort of like LonelyGirl, except we did this a little before LonelyGirl! Anyway, it's been really interesting, the design of Ocular Effect, the way that it was built was that a lot of the mainstream storylines, if I can put it that way, the ones that were intended for our larger audience, it was all told through video assets, so animation and video. And so all the text that was there was intended for that sort of secondary group of players, the ones that were interested in getting more out of the story. And that was the way that that was created. And one of the things that I wanted to mention that was sort of an answer to your question was -- I'm not sure if we should admit this, but the idea was that when we designed the projects that I've worked on, we actually did have a demographic in mind, but we were incorrect in our demographic. And what was interesting was not that we were so wrong, but that there was a whole other demographic that was interested that we had not noticed. And I think it continually surprised our collaborators to find out the maturity of the audience that was interested in participating in these. The word "game" breeds teenage --
BC: Thirteen-year-old boys?
EJ: Yeah, thoughts of sort of basement game-a-thons and it was interesting to throw the convention of our demographic into that. And what I found was that once we did understand that, we started to shift our focus into telling some more mature stories as well.
Development Tools
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can some of the panelists who worked on some of the more epic games that were a little less just-in-time <audience laughter> talk a little bit about what tools you used during the development process to keep track of all this? Yellow sticky notes or hyperlinked text? Did you simulate things and events, or...?
JL: I had foam-core boards for each character, and it would take me through each date, so I would look at them and <indistinct> Tuesday and <indistinct> Thursday and I'd refer to all that. And as the game went on, my living room was filled with boards, and I was like, "I wrote too many characters." <audience laughter>
BC: I was going to say, I think there's two main tools we use. One of them, sad as it is, is Excel. It's in part because you can build something that lets you take multiple storylines, going down, in columns, and multiple weeks going across in rows and start to really look at, okay, this week looks a little thin, and this story doesn't have a bump here, and you can start to sort of craft that together. But I think the biggest thing is collaboration tools. The quantity of emails that fly around, the quantity of documents and revisions of documents. We use this web service called Base Camp. You know, it's $14.95 a month and it does threaded discussion a and file sharing, so we use a simple online tool for that.
EJ: Can people access the same documents on a server, or just email them around?
BC: They work on a version and then they upload it to the shared server where it's like an attachment in a message chain. So you can kind of watch and comment and give feedback and have a pretty open collaborative process, but at the same time, schedule milestones, make to-do lists, stuff that people are checking off, all that stuff that just helps you function...
AH: We use Base Camp as well, in addition to a wiki, and the wiki basically has all the content that we use. When I tell you something's just-in-time -- that's like the missing content, basically. We have a whole set of basically photo <indistinct> made in <indistinct> on a map, that describe all the different interactions in the story. You can actually see that in our retrospective, some of the stuff we used. And the flow-charts -- we use everything from live events to the entire <indistinct> of different episodes, and they're really just a way of visualizing what's happening at different points. But Base Camp is really used for participating -- if you're just using email all the time, it's very hard just to tell what's going on...
BC: Re: Re: Re: Re: Role Call! <audience laughter>
AH: Yeah. But it's all kind of media wiki, for getting content on there, it's a bit stronger than Base Camp for that sort of thing.
SS: Yeah, what's the address of that? <audience laughter>
EJ: What I was going to jump in and say is that I'm so paranoid that I don't use online tools to collaborate when it comes to the development of a project. We tend to do a lot of work face-to-face and if we're forced to do something online, it's incredibly temporary.
SS: It's all ROT-coded? <audience laughter>
EJ: The main tool that we use is gigantic flow charts on paper like that <points to easel>. That easel over there is my bread and butter. An interesting thing that we did in Regenesis was that as a walkthrough we actually published the flowcharts. So we would scan in the flowcharts and release them to the players after that episode had elapsed, to show them, if they hadn't solved it, it would describe the way to go through it.
DS: And I would say that, just because it's an epic game or a commercial game doesn't mean that the development's not being done just in time. <audience laughter>
AB: I have something to speak of that actually I -- nobody's ever accused us of being epic, but one of the interesting challenges for me is that my team exists all over the world. I go over to Chris' house occasionally and we'll work late into the night, but other than that, our taskmakers, as we lovingly call them, the people making puzzles -- they're everywhere. We've got guys in London, we've got guys in college. And this really is a sort of small project from one perspective, but in the other scope, it's a worldwide project. Yeah, we use a lot of online tools, we use a lot of email. If my laptop were to get yanked from me at the airport or something, there would be a slight delay in the next chapter because everything's on there. But one of the amazing things to me is that not only the game itself requires the internet, but the development does too. You know, we've got the best of the best in some of the art schools and some of the visual art schools around the country and in other countries, and we're really looking forward to using their brains, because it's not something that -- I love my school -- UT-Dallas is a great school, but there's not enough people there that can do what we need to do, so it requires brains from all over the world.
SS: I don't think you're the only one that works with people around the world. I mean, Brian, I know you've worked with people on your teams that are...
BC: Yeah. But I think he's got a fair point that even the biggest commercial game is an independent media project when it comes right down to it. It's still 1% of the ad-spend, it's the experimental try. So the difference between a grassroots developer and a big epic game or whatever label you want to put on it is a lot thinner. And a lot of people who do them are doing both. The players are also ARG element creators. And I think the great thing about this community is that the line between creator and player is really thin, and it's constantly changing, and everyone's kind of in all of those roles.
