2007vt03 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 (2 of 2), ARG Fest-o-con 2007, San Francisco, CA
Player Incentive
Audience Member: Can you talk a little bit about motivation? Perplex City has a monetary prize, Deus City has a karma system, Sammeeeees I believe was more traditional in that the rewards for playing were intangible -- other than getting more story. Why did you choose the type of motivation structure that you did? Are you glad you chose it? Would you do it next time?
AH: We did the big prize because it was a headline-grabber, basically. It caused us no end of problems in game design and puzzle design, and we're not going to do that again. I don't think many people were playing to get the prize. The guy who actually got the prize wasn't expecting to get it. He lived about two hours from the site...
BC: What, with all his digging? <audience laughter>
AH: <indistinct> you know, he actually went to the forest and had a look around, but I didn't see anyone...
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Again, and again, and again. <audience laughter>
AH: But I didn't see anyone who said, "The main reason why I'm playing this is to win $200,000." I don't think anyone thought they were going to win <indistinct>. If it was just for the money, then the bigger prizes you offered, the more people would be playing. And there have been [games] that offered $1 million, $2 million, and they haven't done very well, so that's not really the big motivator.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: As a player, I think that the motivation is the discovery, and <indistinct>.
BC: This is an interesting conversation to have at some point as a player community, because a lot of that incentive structure is built into the community at Unfiction, in terms of what Unfiction values, what they praise, what they reward, what builds prominence in that community. That's almost now a certain level of constant that we as developers have to at least acknowledge, even if we're like, "Yeah, I don't want to do that," you have to at least acknowledge that the natural momentum will be towards that.
EJ: I think our project started with -- the main motivator was the story. That was the interest. You had to get people engaged enough that they wanted to help somebody or break somebody down, or whatever they were doing that day. So those were the big motivators for us, but what we found that was sort of a hidden piece was that reputation had a big role to play, and if you somehow linked in your reputation to gameplay, then gameplay became a very big commodity.
AB: For us, the phrase that we like to use is "ARG for ARG's sake." Kind of a pun on "art for art's sake." I didn't get this whole thing started just to, this project -- I didn't even expect it to go as far as it has. We had 430 players just sort of suddenly that came out of the woodwork, came out of nowhere, and it really surprised us. It wasn't something that we expected just that fast, and for us, it's been kind of freeing not to have corporate backing or corporate sponsorship. Our themes are sort of anti-corporate anyway.
BC: So are ours. <audience laughter>
AB: We're dealing with, you know, end of the world-type stuff, so to talk about the demographic, if you're not into sci-fi...
BC: That's a highly brandable event. Like, everyone wants their logo attached to the end of the world. <audience laughter>
AB: So it's really been kind of amazing to me that the 47-year-old woman factor is really interested in the story that I'm telling. I didn't expect that. I expected the 13-year fanboys to be interested in blowing stuff up, but I really didn't expect the level of interaction with characters -- we've had some folks really take it kind of seriously and I'm a little worried they're going to go blow their money on bunkers or something. <audience laughter> It's been a lot of fun, and it's been freeing, with lots of experimentation.
In-Game Puppetmasters/TINAG
AB: Chris and I used our real names, and as soon as people hear that, they go "<gasp>!" but the purpose was as an experiment and we wanted to see what would happen and you can ask my wife her opinion on that -- she got phoned at work -- but it's been great. We've really been playing. The question mentioned some of the karma system stuff and very early on, we were accused of a lot of things, like splitting our own community, playing players off of each other, can this model work, can you have an ARG which does not bring the community together, people are hiding information, this can't be good for the story, but what's funny is that a lot of the information that's kept hidden really isn't important to the story, because we find ways to let it out on both sides. And the most fascinating thing for me is to watch the players scramble to figure out, should I let this out, should I not let this out, and whenever I let out a piece of super secret information to one side that piece of information comes back to me a day or two later as another character. And that's the biggest thrill in the world. So it's interesting, because when you're free to do anything you want, you can do it. And that may limit us, it may take us farther, I don't know. Time will tell.
SS: Adrian, how's that working out for you, being in-game?
AH: When we started, we thought it was going to be really cool, actually. <audience laughter> But the moment we realized that it wasn't working as well as we thought it would was when the BBC came over to film us, and they kept on asking, "So where's the Cube?" and we said, "Well, we don't know!" but they (said "You do know," (?)) and you know, we're not actors. We can't keep it up for that long, and it just started getting -- it started actually interfering with the story, so we retreated from that a little. This is a question of This Is Not A Game, basically -- that's what we're getting at. <audience laughter> And if you're playing on the laptop, the Wii, or the phone <audience laughter, applause and shouts of "Bingo!">
But I think -- you look at something like LonelyGirl or you look at something like the Beast, which I think <more laughter> did the This Is Not A Game thing on a very deliberate level, it worked very well for those stories. It's something for developers that we need to think about -- when does it work, and when doesn't it? Sometimes if you try to say This Is Not A Game too much, then you can't really make a good game. So, it was a nice experiment, putting ourselves in the game, but not something we're going to do regularly.
Measures of Success
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I actually had a follow-up question to Adrian's last remark, which was how do you measure success in something like this? I know a lot of people sort of use web hits, or how many people are in the chat rooms, but I'm especially curious for those who had corporate sponsors, how they measure your success. Are they counting traditional press articles, are web hits good enough? Are they looking for grassroots, word of mouth in general? What are they looking for? And what are you looking for, to gauge your own success?
BC: All of the above. From an ad agency perspective, that's a big trend these days, trying to figure out how to do integrated campaigns, and how to measure integrated results. Ultimately, for most sponsors, it comes down to return on investment. So, ultimately, sales. How did the release of the Audi A3 go? If there weren't any sales, we would be among the people that they were looking at with squinted eyes. But the biggest stuff use -- we do use web metrics, but I think that's primarily for engagement. What percentage of people sign up to participate? How long do they spend per session? How many times do they return during the story? And then we start looking at things like press hits, and buzz entries and media reach. I mean, a lot of times even ads that go along with these kind of campaigns produce a phenomenal <indistinct> click-through ads, compared to more traditional "buy a car" type click-through ads. So a lot of times when you look at that efficiency in terms click-through for media spend, you try to build something that connects all of that together, but I don't think there's any accepted roadmap for how that's done yet. That's still something that individual ad agencies are trying to figure out.
EJ: Just to build on that, Brian, I think it might be a bit of a luxury to work in the advertising field, because advertising has this amazing way of measuring the reaction, even when it seems like a bit of voodoo, sometimes.
BC: What, the Nielsens aren't voodoo? <audience laughter>
EJ: That's a funny thing, is that people have measurements for how many people have seen that billboard, and it's some magic way that they have of formulating how many people look that billboard.
BC: Rolling Stone is seen by eleven people. How'd they figure that out? <audience laughter>
EJ: And the Nielsens is also the same sort of system. But what's interesting is that I don't know if broadcasters know that. Because there only is one system, and it's whatever Nielsen says is the truth, because we have nowhere else to look. I mean, there are other places, but that's the one. So when you come back and say, "Well, there are different ways of interpreting this data--" we have these web metrics and we have our registered users and we have our daily visitors and all those different things and what we do from that is say, "Here's where we think we are." And what we've found is that actually because there isn't a third party source, it's very hard to get people to buy into that and say, "Okay, I have full confidence that we have this amount of people that are attached to this project."
BC: What you're also hinting at there is parity. Even if you have great descriptive statistics, the next question is, "Is that good? How is that compared to other ARGs?" That's what you don't have. With Nielsen, you've got a relative measurement. If it's a messed-up system, it's at least uniformly messed-up for everyone participating in the system. Everyone agrees that it's messed up, but we're going to use it. Whereas here, you're right, I think everyone on this panel is using a different process to try to determine what's working or what's not working.
EJ: And what's really difficult is when you have a corporate partner that starts comparing apples to oranges a little, and says, "Well, you're not getting the World of Warcraft numbers that we were thinking..." <audience laughter>
BC: Well, we didn't get the World of Warcraft budget we were thinking, either. <more laughter>
EJ: I think, to answer the question a little bit obliquely, is that one of the things that's important at the beginning, to speak about developing an ARG, is to make sure that whoever you have that's going to measure success at the end has a very clear understanding of that measurement at the beginning.
BC: How will success be judged? That's one of the questions you've always got to ask your sponsors. How will you judge success? Because you can always design a game to help reinforce that. If it's reach, then we know we need it to be accessible to a broad number of people rather than being too deep and complex an experience. If it's about time of engagement in the campaign, then we know it's going to be rich and frequently updated with lots of twists and turns. So we can kind of stack your deck toward what that <covered by coughing> is about.
DS: I also think that's what this entire area -- the fact that all of us are talking about how we interpret the data and have to present it in a certain way is one of the big obstacles we have in the genre yet. It's one of the things I face constantly when I have to make a proposal.
BC: I don't think it's just this genre.
DS: Right. I don't think it's unique to any internet --
BC: Anything that stops being just a banner part of <indistinct> where you can measure, like, exposure to click and have a nice, easy <indistinct>.
DS: Well, you know, I've had proposals that have never gotten past the stage of, "Well, we can't give you those numbers. Based on our interpretation, and this is how we do it--" and they just stop and don't want to hear any more after that.
Gamejacking
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Lately we've seen a pretty troubling trend, and that's gamejacking. We reported on that. It's a two-part question for the panel. First, has any thought gone into gamejacking when you were developing, and did you increase--
BC: Like, have we thought about gamejacking? Or have we thought about whether we would be gamejacked?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right, how do you prevent it, and is that going to rise based on the fact that it's happening more and more often?
BC: SomethingAwful.com. <audience laughter> No, seriously. They were rooting for the goons in the Heist. They were rooting for the goons. We couldn't figure out why there was all this traffic coming from SomethingAwful, and it was because they were trying to figure out how to gamejack, how to turn it so the bad guys would win. But ultimately, they don't have as much power as they think they do. <audience laughter> The players think they have a lot of control, but really, what you even choose to acknowledge or not acknowledge makes a huge difference in how that plays out.
DS: And there's a real fine line, I think, between gamejacking and user-created content.
BC: Roleplaying! <audience laughter>
DS: <continues talking, but it is covered by audience laughter> ...are so involved in the storyline. So you as a puppetmaster still have to be able to handle that, and maybe even direct it back into your story if it's good content. Like Brian said, the audience comes up with better ideas than we do a lot of the time. Maybe I'm partially favorable toward gamejacking because if I think about it, that's kind of how my career started. I kind of gamejacked Majestic by making my own content that wasn't part of their storyline. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, unless you do it to try to destroy a game, and I don't see many people doing that.
BC: Yeah, but I can remember some times in Benjamin Stove, in the discussion boards, when it was clear that someone was posting who was an employee of another ad agency who wanted to get in on the project. <audience laughter> Trying to get people to believe that that link had something to do with this story. So what you were doing wasn't jacking, because you were also contributing to the experience of other players, whereas some of this stuff doesn't necessarily contribute, it's just parasitic rather than mutually symbiotic.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: But sometimes it distracts, and it takes audience members completely away...
BC: But all you've gotta do is just one, quiet little backchannel communication to one of the players, like "Stop believing that person, they're not a character." <audience laughter> Oh, really, oh, okay, I'll tell everyone! <audience laughter>
JL: I had a character actually deal with it. I had someone do it and they were also a stalker. So I had Mr. Alan Johnson deal with him and just basically say, "Please stop," and I had him also address the players and say, "Don't look at that man <indistinct>."
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So this was a real man, stalking a fictional character?
JL: A young boy. I had two stalkers.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that's a first. <audience laughter>
EJ: We have a particularly rigid way of dealing with <indistinct>. Our games are meant to be sandboxed in that it did not acknowledge that the rest of the world existed, so everything was contained that way. And part of it was built so that containment was acknowledged by listing what was in-game, rather than listing what was out-of-game. So, you went to the central site -- like on the Ocular Effect, oculareffect.com, and if it was on oculareffect.com, and the main character said that we should look at it, it was in-game, because he was leading the investigation. And so as soon as players would find something, they would go on that site, and it would confirm or deny what was going on. And so you can build systems like that, that will make it very hard to jack an ARG that way. But I think that that's a particular choice, because you're not then having that kind of fluid in and out of fiction and reality that a lot do.
AB: So the question, do you think about it? For us, yeah, we really do, ourselves, because we want players to wonder, hey, is this a gamejack, or what? And we actually had two trailheads and I think that's just now coming out in the last couple days and so there's been a lot of discussion on our forums whether or not this was a gamejack, whether this was meant to be in-game, and we did it on purpose, we wanted people to think about these questions, we wanted people to question reality.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think it's been partially answered by others, but I think part of Nicko's question was not just how do you feel about gamejacking, but in development, what mechanisms do you design so that yes, people can contribute but you can maintain control so that players know what is going to be in and what is not?
BC: But do they always want that? Isn't that part of the pinch-me sort of situation, is wanting to give them a definitive list?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, there should be mystery, but you define the problem that you can lose control if you're not careful enough. How do you--?
BC: I still think it's hard to lose control. I mean, let's do an extreme example. Benjamin Stove got hacked by Turkish anticapitalists. <audience laughter> Yeah. We came in one day, front page was taken over, something in Turkish, was evidently a "Screw Corporate America" kind of thing. And that's no different than any other web server security thing that you've gotta do. So really, you can be web-jacked, or web-server-jacked, or domain-jacked or -- so I think there's a broad sort of set of security that we think about, but I don't think we worry specifically about people's motivation for disruption. So, I think protection from disruption is something that we all sort of develop a lot of systems for, even if maybe the gamejacking isn't one. I mean, I didn't think about Turkish anticapitalists. <audience laughter>
EJ: The only other thing I'll add to that is that gamejacking, if it really worked, it would be pointing a finger at your story and saying "The players want to know about this. You better start going in that direction very quickly because if you don't, they're going to always wonder." In particular, there was a character in the Ocular Effect that everyone wanted to know about, it was this very, very oblique reference and it kept coming up and it kept returning and so it was one of those things that we brought back and said, you know, we need to go with this direction because everyone wants these questions answered. It's obvious that our storyline hasn't plugged that hole. And it allows the gamejacking to happen.
Player-Generated Content
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We heard quite a bit about players coming up with content better than yourselves, and gamejacking. Adrian, did that scare you when you were developing episodic content, where you could then have it happen in one and completely invalidate the next episode?
AH: No, not really. <audience laughter> I think user generated content is really better than <indistinct> in ARGs. You use it in specific situations, but it's not like you're letting the players write the story.
BC: We want you guys to think you're running the story. <audience laughter>
AH: Well, that's the thing. <indistinct> because our job is telling a story, right? If you want to get up and tell a story about <indistinct> I think it's a cooperative thing. The game designers have this idea, and sort of know they're going from A to B to C to D and the players sort of get to move different <indistinct> together, but you know where you're going. With the episodic thing, there are a couple of things. First, the episodes are partly stand-alone. So they're a bit like Buffy in the sense that <audience laughter> -- or Doctor Who, if you watch that -- they have these discrete, sort of stand-alone <indistinct> so you can't really mess it up too much. I don't know how relevant this is, but we're basically developing an ARG that allows it to be played <indistinct> game. So that really removes any possibility of people being able to hijack the story because when you play a game, it will be obvious what's in and what's out. In live games, when you have <indistinct> episodes first, it's going to be a lot more predictable. And there have been times when people have tried to hijack the story, but there are some really simple things players can do: they can look at the IP address of the server, because all our sites have the same IP address, they can look at WHOIS information, they can see if the site's been linked to by any other site. I don't think there are many games anymore where you just sort of find another site without any link whatsoever. The only way you'd do that would be by typing in the name <indistinct>.
SS: Domain tools.
AH: Well, people have found a lot of our websites by reverse IP lookups, and that's something you've got to bear in mind.
EJ: I wanted to just add one thing to that, which is that the episodic content -- and I know Adrian's probably gone through two years of this, but every time you come up with another episode, you're aware that you're sort of closing off your story a little bit every time. And every time a new season commissions you're aware that you have to deal with all the baggage of the past, because contradicting that is going to go very poorly with your audience. And that's what leads long-running series -- even television or other media -- to sort of jump the shark at the end.
BC: It was all a dream! <audience laughter>
EJ: It's very tempting, in the writing, to just wipe the slate clean and say we're starting over.
AH: I think that's one of the challenges...
EJ: Yeah, I think that's ongoing with all things. It's nice to know that there's a certain shelf-life to all sorts of projects.
SS: Any more questions? Shad0?
Designing Rabbitholes
AUDIENCE MEMBER: First of all, bingo twice. <audience laughter> I know this is something that comes up a lot, and you all have lots of experience in this area. When you're developing, at what point do you start thinking about "How am I going to get this to my audience? Where's the rabbithole?" That's one of the biggest complaints about a lot of these -- people start bitching right at the beginning: "Well, that was a stupid way of launching it!" So at what point do you start thinking about that and what's your <indistinct>?
JL: Well, for me, I started thinking how would I get my characters -- because of the storyline, they would be seeking out ARG players. I wanted to come up with a suitable way of saying, "Yes, I'm looking for ARG players because they have specific traits," and so then that just sent me to Space. So I sent the boxes, not even to trying to hide it: "I want you people, and here it is."
BC: We think about it kind of overall, and we kind of think about what the phases of it are as well. In the beginning trailheads and rabbitholes are really for the fan base, for you guys, not about generating a big audience. But then later, once you guys are starting to have that experience, so that the other audience can see a model of how one gets involved, then you have to be thinking about a whole other layer of <indistinct>. And also, when you're doing it at a phase where your goal is to generate <indistinct> reaction, like "What is this ad?" and they're going "I don't understand what I'm seeing," or whether you're trying to create a more out-of-game experience where it's like "This game exists, this is what this game is," and figuring out what the right type is to make those two things happen without ruining the experience. If you're the fans who don't want to be reminded that this is a game versus an audience that doesn't even know <indistinct>.
AH: I think there's no perfect solution. You have to think about your audience or games and what you want to keep. Some games will never want to have an official out-of-game site anywhere and will just go through the <indistinct> rabbitholes, and it pays off. But if you have a sponsor or if you want to make it very accessible, then you'll have a very explicit out-of-game site and say, "This is how you start playing." Because that's basically why people don't know how to start playing an ARG <indistinct>. So, anyway, different games <indistinct> different players and <indistinct>.
Fan Sites
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you help out fan sites?
AH: Do we help out fan sites? Well, yeah. We love our fans, they--
BC: You don't sue them. <audience laughter> Yeah, we do. That's an awkward -- because of the expectations of you guys as a community, sometimes there's a difference between how we interact with you guys during a game and after a game. Because you guys don't like puppetmasters coming out from behind the curtain too much while the game's going on, and so sometimes -- <smiles at someone in audience> Did you get to check off another one? <audience laughter> -- but I think that an important thing to keep in mind is what do you guys want, as fans, out of the relationship with the creators? Because a lot of times we're taking that cue from you guys, from what you're saying as a community is the right way for us as creators to deal with you in your home. Your rules apply.
AH: There's getting to be multiple communities now, and that's a good thing, because obviously there's more <indistinct> while a game's playing, and you don't want people coming in and <indistinct> their game and talking about it, but other communities will be happy about that, and that's going to be a problem.
JL: <inaudible question to Adrian>
AH: Yeah, but it's not like--
BC: Audience expectations, right?
AH: <indistinct> wants the game for themselves, and when you've got two people who've got very different -- or multiple communities <indistinct> in the game, I think it's something that really has to be considered. It's not so bad with TV or whatever, but with an ARG where community interaction is really important-- And maybe it's not as big a deal as I'm thinking --
BC: No, I think it is. I think there's also that conflict in the community between them wanting to have an experience like the game that they first fell in love with -- like everyone wants to find someone like the first girl they fell in love with -- versus also not wanting clichés. <gestures toward Sean Stacey> Like with the cracking jokes about the clichés of people in trouble, and strange IMs, which leads to a blog... So the community's both aware of that tendency toward cliché but also the desire for a reproducible experience and the tendency not to give them that.
AH: And also, the clichés for a new audience aren't clichés. You kind of don't want to overdo it but <indistinct>
BC: So does that mean there's a new Cube coming?
AH: We're just going to keep doing Season 1 exactly the same <audience laughter>.
BC: <says something about the Cube which is covered by audience laughter>
SS: Okay, one final question. Marie?
Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned
MARIE LAMB: I was wondering if you guys could speak to mistakes made, lessons learned, bullets dodged and "Oh my god, I'll never do that again." <audience laughter>
BC: Hm. Cars. <audience laughter> Jane, you know.
JANE MCGONIGAL: Awwww. In retrospect, wasn't that one of the things that <indistinct>? The fact that you made us so passionate about that game -- we still wonder what made us so emotional.
BC: Yeah. But at the same time, the idea that because a car wasn't unlocked by a subcontractor who didn't even know it was a game <audience laughter> there was a whole team that showed up at Coachella that wasn't able to get an SD card, and the sadness of seeing your faces in the picture, sitting by the car with the sign saying, "We were here. Where we you?" <audience laughter. Brian drops his face into his hands> So of course we killed an intern <audience laughter> ...we were dealing with our frustration. So I think that really raised for us the idea of, what do you do to give the audience a chance to feel that their actions were integral to the advancement of the story, but how do you contain the ability of small little mistakes like that to completely derail the story.
EJ: Yeah, I've got a similar story of just the fragility of the whole thing and how important it is to make sure that everyone on the whole team understands what's going on. And with a large television production, there's a big team to manage, and I've found that it was really important to go right down to the individual people who were holding the lights and dealing with the props and all those things because we found that that bit us otherwise. And one example was we had an episode, and in the episode, one of the characters said "Email me at blah-blah-blah dot CA." The dot-CA is a Canadian URL. And so it was going to be great. Here we go. And I get the first run of the rushes that come out. And someone along the chain had said, "Well, dot-CA is not going to work so much. Dot-com just sort of flows better." <audience laughter> And said, "Email me at blah-blah-blah dot com." So I get the rush and think, "Wow, that's going to be a problem." So I go to look at the registration and it's been registered.
AUDIENCE: Ooooohhhhhhhh.
EJ: We had a major problem on our hands. Now, thankfully, it had been registered by one of the staff. <audience laughter> But we could have found ourselves in a very different situation. And I think it's the same issue. That person who, under no fault, didn't unlock the car, is the same person who thought that dot-com sounded better. And it's the appreciation for how fragile--
BC: Every little detail is integral.
AH: You can't trust anyone, ever. <audience laughter>
JL: Which is why I did it by myself. <audience laughter and applause>
DS: Actually probably my biggest regret is that every game I've ever developed, I didn't have enough time to create it the way I wanted. Whether it was my own game, for various reasons that I thought I had to launch it at a certain date, or whether it was a commercial game, you just never have enough time to develop the thing that you see in your mind.
BC: That's true of art in general. I know there are filmmakers who say that films are never finished, they're just abandoned. You stop working on it and say, "Ah, it's done!" but you still look at it and go, "That isn't right." I mean, Lucas remakes Star Wars and edits it after it happened for that same sort of reason.
DS: It's always amazed me how you can spend six months developing something and a week into it have to be rewriting it as something new because of something you didn't anticipate or something the players have taken in an entirely different direction.
SS: All right, I think we're going to wrap it up there. Thanks to everybody on the panel. <applause>
