2007vt11 Transcription
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ARGFest 2007 - Keynote Address- Play My Game! (1 of 2) 29:32
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Credits
- Keynote Address: "Play My Game! Trusting Strangers and Eating Their Candy" -
- Sean Stewart (Creative Director, Co-Founder, 42 Entertainment) and
- Elan Lee (VP Experience Design, Co-Founder, 42 Entertainment -- Cruel 2 B Kind World Champion)
Credits: Keynote Address (1 of 2), ARG Fest-o-con 2007, San Francisco, CA
JONATHAN WAITE: Play Our Game! Trusting Strangers and Eating Their Candy. And with that, I'll turn it over to the crime-fighting duo of Elan Lee and Sean Stewart. <applause and cheers>
SEAN: Crime-abetting might be closer to the truth. <audience laughter>
Prologue
SEAN: Before we start, neither of us could be at this event last year. Before we go anywhere else, we both agreed that the first thing we would like to say is thank you. The people in this room represent an incredible experience for us, the most important experience certainly of our professional careers and maybe one of the most important experiences of our lives, both in the games we've run with you, in the communities you've created, and the energy and the passion of establishing the infrastructure. From the very beginning of the very first game, the players have been central to whatever it is they were doing in a way that I don't think players have ever been before. Within four days of the Beast going live, we were using all your reference materials. You've fixed more of my typos than all my copy editors together. <audience laughter> Without the energy and dedication and passion and incredibleness of the group that you represent, our lives would really suck. We didn't have a chance to say thank you before, so thank you.
ELAN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Thank you. <applause and cheers>
Introduction
ELAN: We should start out by saying that keynotes for this audience are really hard. <audience laughter> We can't talk about anything we've done in the past, because you guys already know it. We can't talk about anything we're currently working on, because you guys are playing. And we can't talk about anything in the future, because, uh, well <shrugs> theoretically you're the competition also. <audience laughter>
So we kind of struggled to find an appropriate topic to talk about. And we came across this concept that we both think is really important to ARGs. I also want to say that anything that seems odd, anything we say that you don't agree with, we're going to have a Q&A at the end, so hold on to your questions.
We wanted to talk about trust. And we wanted to talk about this concept that trust in an alternate reality game -- or whatever we're going to start calling them from now on -- is really one of the defining terms of these experiences. We really think it's probably the most important element. And we wanted to start off with a story about I Love Bees.
Case Study: I Love Bees
Two Things We Knew About I Love Bees
ELAN: We finished the Beast, and we took a little bit of a break, and we knew we wanted to do another title. We brainstormed about it and we thought about it and there were two things we knew for sure were going to be included in the next title.
One of them was: this was going to be a story exclusively delivered over payphones, 'cause wow isn't that cool. <audience laughter>
And the second was: not a puzzle game. <more laughter>
So Week One, we started the game, we launched it and we started to see comments like this.
So this was pretty awesome for us. Hey, we picked the right method, this is pretty exciting, this is awesome. <audience laughter>
Week Two, we started to see a little bit of a different kind of vibe show up. <extended audience laughter and applause>
So, this was really a problem for us, because after Week One we started to see stuff like this, and we knew that there were ten more weeks of this.
SEAN: Eleven.
ELAN: Eleven more weeks, sorry, and we had a very serious problem on our hands.
SEAN: And we couldn't even find the article that started "Bees raped my childhood." <audience laughter>
ELAN: Yeah.
So really, this was a game that at that point should have been over. We had an audience that was furious at us, we had no back up plan, and we really didn't know what to do. It really should have died.
And this comes to the core theme of our topic. The reason that we think it did not end at that point is trust. That trust that the players had in -- we say "us" but they didn't know who we were, they didn't know who was responsible for the game -- it was the sense of trust that this started out really cool, and it started out with a really exciting premise, and enough people believed that it would continue to be cool and continue to be a unique experience, so the game didn't die at that point.
We'll very specifically about things that we changed, but first we want to talk about the central premise here. <looks at Sean>
SEAN: Nope, you've gone past where I was going to interrupt, so keep going... <makes a go-ahead gesture> <audience laughter>
ELAN: It's a rare occasion when Sean is not talking, so I'm going to take full advantage of that. <more laughter>
Defining Trust
ELAN: So trust is the most important element of an alternate reality game. And our talk today is going to concentrate on these three key points, because we want to talk about what our definition of trust is in this context. We also want to talk about why do the people in charge of a game even care that the players trust them? And lastly, specifically for this genre, why is trust such a key element? And hopefully as we talk about these three things, we'll get around to why we think that trust, and that concept, is the most important part of alternate reality games.
Let's work on a quick definition here. What is trust and how is it established? And very soon, we're going to go off the I'm just reading slides to you, I promise, I just want to get through the intro.
The belief that in return for their investment of time, resources and energy, a puppetmaster will provide an entertaining experience. It's not the Bible, here, but basically we think that everyone can agree with a term something like that: any player going into an alternate reality game expecting to get something entertaining out of it. Because that game, that experience, is going to ask them to behave in a way that they're not used to behaving.
SEAN: So it's a capital of sorts. You earn it, you expend it, and when you fall below zero, you're in trouble.
Rabbitholes
ELAN: The first opportunity that any game has to earn a player's trust is of course the rabbithole. And I've just brought up a few examples of ways that we have done rabbitholes in the past. You might see strange tick-marks in some wording on a poster and you think, "oh, I wonder if that's a phone number?" and you call it and, oh my god, it is. You're watching a movie and you see a bizarre term show up in a trailer, or what's still my favorite, you're flying from LA to Chicago and you look out the window, and what the hell is that?
Rabbitholes are the puppetmaster's first opportunity to say to the audience, "This is going to be cool. Something about this is going to be unique and interesting and hopefully like nothing you've ever seen before. And it's really the first opportunity to establish that sense of trust, to say, "Look, you're in good hands. Try this thing. It's going to take you out of your comfort zone, but hopefully it will be worth your while."
Basically, just to reiterate the point, this is what hopefully you will get out a rabbithole and why you're going to start to trust the people putting on the game.
<to Sean> Now I'm going to turn it over to you.
Promises
SEAN: When we were talking about this, a lot of the conversation was about something between aesthetics and ethics: the internal approach we have to the games. So we started talking about the kinds of promises we make to players.
You're Going to Have Fun
SEAN: And the first promise is: you're going to have fun. It's going to be cool.
One of the metaphors that I like best is the dance metaphor. <holds out hand> You hold out your hand, the music plays, we want to make it clear that you're going to have a good time if you come dance with us.
If It's Not Fun, We'll Fix It
<audience laughter>
SEAN: If you're not having a good time, we're going to work really, really, really hard to fix that. This goes back to "Bees Raped My Childhood."
Two things we knew: it was going to be payphones and it wasn't going to be a puzzle game. So our first thought was "Okay, that was wrong." <audience laughter> People want to be able to push back more. They want to have more to do.
And there were two basic arguments about puzzles, whether to include them. On one side it was, "People like the sense that they are involved. They like having something to do. This isn't like reading a book. It's the internet, and on the internet, you want something to do." Which was reasonably compelling.
And on the other side, it was, "We are going to die." <audience laughter>
But we looked in our promise book, and the promise book said, "We're going to fix it." So we tried to fix it. And we tried to fix it doing a number of things. One is to make more interactive experiences. One was to make live calls, which we were always going to do but we did much more quickly, using the amazing power of what those of you in psych class will recognize as a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, which means sometimes it happens and usually it doesn't but sometimes it does and that's cool.
So we started making live calls and we started making puzzles.
ELAN: Lots and lots of puzzles. <audience laughter>
SEAN: One of the things we wanted to try with I Love Bees was to have a single centralized website, because one of the problems with the Beast was oh my god, there's like 4000 things to look at. And while it was fun if you were into it, if you were a casual player and you said "Show me something," there was too much. So we wanted to have one place to look. But if you were a hardcore player, one place to look got really boring to look at.
So Elan trained himself to be Neo. We had this very funny conversation one day, where he started inserting things into pictures on the I Love Bees website. And he called me up one day and he said, "It's the Matrix. I'm Neo. I can look at any JPEG and I know what color it's going to be if I put in a word anywhere in the binary. I see code now." <audience laughter>
ELAN: It got so weird. The way we did puzzles for this game, if you guys remember, is we inserted puzzles into the actual binary of the JPEGs, and it altered the pictures in a very unusual way. And it got to the point, like Sean was saying, where we'd be like, "We've got this picture, and wouldn't it be cool if it had some pink stripes, and the bottom was on the top, and this little part was inverted." And I was like, "I know exactly where to put it--" <covered by audience laughter>
We're On The Same Team
ELAN: We're on the same team.
SEAN: Big one. Big one.
ELAN: This is huge. It took us a little bit of time to figure this out, but it's really important to us that in order to establish that sense of trust, the players never feel like it's us against them.
SEAN: Or always, but not really.
ELAN: Right. Sorry, I should rephrase that. From our point of view, it's not us against them. It's so tempting to create challenges and puzzles that are so hard, that we know how to solve but you don't, and therefore we win. And that's such a terrible game design. We have to keep reminding ourselves of this: when the players solve something, even when we're devastated because something that should have taken a month took three hours, that's really good! And we had to learn to celebrate that because really what it comes down to is we're on the same team. We both want an entertaining experience that is rewarding. And it's so, so essential in establishing that trust between puzzle creators and players.
SEAN: One of the things that is surprising sometimes -- there has been a ton of terrific work that's come out of the grassroots community. One of the things you see that is a mistake that sometimes gets made is the puzzle builder who really wants you to understand that he's really smart, and it's such a bad place to go. The end of a puzzle should never be, "These puzzle creators are really smart." It should be, "Oh my god, I can't believe how smart we are! How much we rock!" Because, on the side, it's so true -- it's so manifestly true that the community is a staggering and beautiful thing, so the community is always what you're watering, never what you're trying to fight against.
We Will Never Make You Feel Stupid For Believing Us
ELAN: Next one: we will never make you feel stupid for believing us. I did a terrible job of explaining this the very first time I tried to say it, and it came out as "This Is Not A Game." <surprised laughter from audience> This is closer to what I meant, actually. The idea that we're going to ask you to do insane things. We're going to ask you to believe that an AI really did crash-land on a phone line. And we're going to ask you to leave your home in the middle of a storm. And we're going to ask you to play poker in cemeteries. And we're going to ask you to behave in ways that you've never behaved before. And if you ever feel like you are stupid for believing us, we have utterly failed.
And I don't mean that anyone thinks these things are real. No one really believes that. But if you're willing to play with us -- and that's really what this is, we're just playing together -- if you're willing to play and you feel stupid for playing, we've done something so, so terribly wrong and betrayed a trust that I don't think you can ever rebuild. Do you want to talk about WIRED?
SEAN: When we were working on Bees, there was a point in there where oh my god did we need some publicity, because it just hadn't happened. And we got approached by WIRED magazine, which is the dream publication for this audience. And they wanted to do an interview.
Elan said, "Can't do it."
And I said, "Why?"
[He said] "You know, we just can't. Or if we do, we have to do it anonymously."
I started asking, "Why is that?"
And over the course of the conversation, he finally articulated something I think is really important about this space. Everyone understands the term suspension of disbelief, right? I'm reading the book, and for the length of time that I have the book open, I'm pretending that Sherlock Holmes is real, that he's solving this case, blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. Suspension disbelief is a very well-understood phenomenon. Funny in this case.
What Elan said is, "You're thirty pages through the book, and there's a footnote. And at the bottom it says, This book written by Agatha Christie. This was a good bit, wasn't it? Love how I wrote this book. It would really break it for you." A book has a frame, it has a box that it lives in. Inside the covers, disbelief is suspended. Outside the covers, disbelief is not suspended. You know there's not really Sherlock Holmes, blah blah blah blah blah.
An alternate reality game, however, asks you to extend that bubble of suspension of disbelief into your actual life. That's a very delicate membrane. And the risk you run, by doing an interview with your names in WIRED about it is the same risk Agatha Christie runs if she puts at the bottom of page thirty, "Hey, I wrote this book. Did you catch the smart thing about whatever?" You risk taking someone who has been willing to dance with you and making them feel like a sucker.
It's really striking to me, every time we run a game, and when I look at other people's games, the posts on the boards in the first week. There are a tremendous number of posts like, This must have been left by a plant, We're being fed this, It's just marketing. No matter how many different expressions there are, you can boil them down to No one's going to make a sucker out of me.
You really, really need to make people not feel that you're making a sucker out of them. And you really shouldn't be. Because they're trusting you with something very important. They're giving you their energy. They're giving you their passion and their intelligence. You've got to make sure you're not giving them reasons to feel like they've just been conned.
Something that we put a lot of effort into, and it's really hard to always articulate...for instance, I'm not saying we'd never do it; I suppose if things were dire enough -- or is that another slide?
ELAN: That transitions perfectly.
We Will Always Treat You With Respect
SEAN: You need to treat people with respect. We have always told clients, if we had to push the button, we would push the button. If there was no other alternative, we would do things that cross those walls because, you know, whatever.
As it happens, we have never gone into a player forum, we have never pretended to be players. It's a point of pride for us. And I'm not saying that it's a commandment, a thou shalt not -- it's just that somehow it's tied in very viscerally to the sense of...
To go back to the dance metaphor, did you ever hear this in your Grade Seven Social Dance class, when they're telling you about leading...? The man proposes the step, the lady decides whether she will accept the step. We will propose the step. We will never accept it for you. Because somehow that's not what this is, that's not dancing anymore -- picking up the girl's feet and putting them down on the spot isn't dancing.
And when it's good, dancing is what this is.
ELAN: It's not treating the players with respect. That's really the core issue about that trust. We're going to invite you into our reality, into our space, and you're going to play there. We always take it as a point of pride never to enter your space uninvited.
SEAN: We're like vampires that way. <audience laughter> If you're dumb enough to let us in, okay, but...
ELAN: There has to be an invitation. Along those same lines, I think there's a lot to this that we could talk about for a really long time, but also just really, we never want to end an experience prematurely. We always want to make the promise that if you play with us, we're going to take it through to a satisfying conclusion. We always want to say that your -- <murmurs something inaudible to Sean about hoaxes>
SEAN: John Crowley has the wonderful phrase "snake's hand," which is a digression but it sounds way cooler. <audience laughter>
So, someone earlier was talking about the thin line between an ARG and a hoax. It's interesting that we have this conversation often with clients because clients often love the idea of a hoax. It's like "We'll put this out there, and people will think that it's really real, and that will be so cool."
Dude. Get over yourself. <audience laughter>
There is no possible way to fool this audience. And it's funny, because of the This Is Not A Game mantra, it is assumed that we believe very strongly that it has to be real. Nobody -- nobody -- knows better than we do that this group is impossible to mislead. What you have to do -- and part of this is This Is Not A Game -- is that you will look us up on the DNS server, and it would be nice if there were a little thing there that said Yes, here too we are dancing. <audience laughter>
Sometimes you will look us up on the DNS server and it will say, Fuck. Forgot to cover that. <audience laughter>
You cannot fool people and attempting to do so puts you in a world of hurt because it takes you out -- Let's face it, guys: ARGs are between consenting...<gestures silently for a moment>...people...<audience laughter> and trying to hoax over on someone introduces this element of coercion that is A) doomed and B) you know, not nice.
ELAN: You're smart. We're going to treat you that way. That's the basis of that promise.
Once you've gotten to this point where, hopefully -- I know we're kind of preaching to the choir here, but hopefully this at least explains a little bit about how we think about that trust and what it means to us when we say the players have to trust us.
Why Trust Matters
But now why should talk about why that even matters. This really all boils down to the fact that this is new. We're still figuring this out. We have almost no idea where this is going. For any genre this new, you've got to do it through experimentation. There has to be trial and error. And what is so important to us as gamemakers is that we have the opportunity to make those errors, and the audience will not leave the building because there is that sense of trust. They'll stick around and let us try it again and let us get better at it. Because we're the blind leading the blind here. And without that, a genre cannot really develop. It can't grow into whatever it is ultimately destined to be.
SEAN: My background is, y'know, artsy guy. So I often think about this in terms of sort of the formal qualities of...
I feel so sorry for you guys having to listen to me.
The web is a printing press. We're inventing books, okay? Books have now been around for a very long time, and there are a lot of clearly-established protocols for how you read a book. Let's go back to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the Agatha Christie book. I pick up a book, I know a ton of things about it. I know that the experience inside the book is not real, but I will believe in it for the length of the book. I know that I read that book from left to right, I start at the leftmost page and read it from left to right and I also continue through the book reading left to right. I understand how sentences are formed. I understand that if it has a certain kind of cover on it that I have certain expectations: there will be a problem, a detective will be introduced, order will be threatened, order will be restored. A ton of information about the protocol for consuming a piece of literature. That's all clear, right?
Okay, so here we've got, like, bupkes.
We started this out by saying, "I know it makes no sense that people in the 22nd century will call you on the phone, but sometimes that happens." <audience laughter> Evil robots from the future will occasionally page the phone and you will have put in your mother's number and there will be 'splaining to do. <audience laughter>
The boundaries are so vague. They're so vague. Do you read this left to right? Does it happen in front of your computer? It happens in my life -- I don't know when to turn it on, I don't know how to turn it off. Is it okay if I do it by myself or do I need a partner?
<audience laughter>
It was just kinda lying there all of a sudden.
<more laughter>
Because there are so few protocols agreed upon, we're going to screw up just a bunch. I said in the earlier panel that the only thing that saved us was Elan's sense for how the audience is likely to break a lot of the time and his relentless dedication to remembering how much noise there is in all the signal.
I always think, when I look at a board, what an incredible blessing it is that I can look at a thread of 400 posts and know that it's not relevant. <audience laughter> And how horrible it would be if I didn't know that, <more laughter> and how nice we should be to people who don't know that, that are going to spend...
I mean, famous Beast example, because the past is safer:
So one of the web developers happened to write in the code What are you having for lunch? and his buddy answered back A ham sandwich.
Pages and pages and pages of...you know. <audience laughter>
When no one understand the protocols, you have to be very rigorous about defining them whenever you can, and you're going to screw up enough that you need to have built up a lot of that capital, that suspension of disbelief capital, that will you dance with me capital, to get through those rare moments, when you might screw up.
<This last was said with heavy irony, and Elan has put a slide saying "Founder" up. Audience laughs in response>
