2007vt12 Transcription
From ARGFest-o-Wiki
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Examples of Experimentation
Experimentation Example #1: Founder
ELAN: So let's talk about one of those classic mistakes where that trust was so important, because this was a puzzle in the Beast that was utterly messed up from the very first moment of design. We'll walk through what the puzzle was.
SEAN: And yet returned, mysteriously, in Vista! Expiation! <audience laughter>
ELAN: This was a very personal puzzle for me. I had this bizarre idea one day that wouldn't it be cool if we took a bunch of Play-Doh and a bunch of clay and molded it together into a bizarre shape and if you took that shape and started to slowly get down next to it...
...lower and lower...
...you'd start to see letters form until you got right down next to it and...there's a word!
And wouldn't that be cool for the players if they could reconstruct that little model and then lie down next to it and see a word and it'd be like a magic trick in everyday life and how did this get there?
So I thought okay, well, that's really cool. Now this shot is proof that I had been up all night working on this and was not in a proper frame of mind. In fact you can see the sun coming up over my shoulder right here. It was just really, really bad.
I made a ton of mistakes building this puzzle. First mistake: okay, now I've got all this clay. In order to reconstruct it, I can give them the basic shape, but they need to know how high everything is, how tall all the structures are. I know! I'll build miniature rulers by hand and put one next to each tower, and manually write down the height. <sigh> Yeah, really, really sleep-deprived at this point.
So then I photographed the whole thing from on top, not calculating the distortion that comes in from the lens, the fisheye effect, any of the distortions that come up in Photoshop, then translating to Illustrator then translating to HTML.
Anyway, eventually you get what looks like it should be a perfectly functional puzzle.
Here's the map I presented to the players. There were all these little numbers inside each one telling them how high everything is. I figured well they'll take this, they'll rebuild it, they'll lie down next to it and voila! They'll see "FOUNDER."
This is what they got. They started building it and I was very, very happy. Immediately people started modeling it in 3-D and this was going to be so cool.
And they got....
Well...there's an F!
All the distortion started to come out.
And it wasn't just one player. A ton of players tried this separately and each got equally ridiculous results that made no sense.
This is one of my favorites.
Clearly there's an A, right there.
But this speaks to the idea that we had by this point built up a lot of trust and the players did not run away screaming. We eventually delivered the answer to the puzzle through a different mechanism. But people didn't leave the game. They thought, "okay, well, we're learning, and we're going to try it and we'll make it better."
Kind of a point of pride is that in the Vanishing Point, finally we were able to re-deliver this puzzle with Mike and Steve's expert help.
We thought, "Well, what if we did it with legos? Legos have a clearly defined shape and if you say 'two' there's no ambiguity about how high two legos are."
And so we built it in legos and again, same thing, as you start to duck down lower and lower, G-E-M-I-N-I, Gemini spelled out across.
So that was really fun and it actually worked and I have all kinds of 3-D models of this as well and it was just really exciting. Players got it really quickly -- in fact I'm sure some of those players are in this room -- and it was very exciting to have that opportunity to try something, fail, and try it again and have people learn with us and get better at the genre as we go.
Experimentation Example #2: The Red King
ELAN: So let's talk about the Red King.
SEAN: So the web developers -- with the ham sandwich? <audience laughter> -- we asked them, on the Beast, to build a website for like hax0r revolutionary underground macho type subversive people 'cause I had one of those guys that I was going to write a bunch about.
And the developers threw in a sound file that said: <heavy Russian accent> "Hacked and cracked by Red King!"
ELAN: Just 'cause.
SEAN: Four hundred posts. OH MY GOD! WHO'S THE RED KING!? <audience laughter>
Um...the...star of our story...? Better write something about him! <more laughter>
Actually, the beauty of this is that the Red King, which was totally accidental, his first job was to fix typos. Having kind of lost track of everything, there was a guy in a news article named Jason Felton who was killed in an elevator and was referenced elsewhere as being Jason Furter, who was killed in a car crash, <audience laughter> so I took the character that I hadn't meant to write and wrote a very elaborate backstory about how the typos were not actually mistakes at all. <more laughter>
That was part of the game, really, particularly with that audience: it was kind of we screw up, you make fun of us, we claim it was on purpose. <audience laughter>
Brian spoke to this earlier, about the serendipities of this -- although he called them sort of "beautiful synchronicities" or something like that whereas mine usually just seem to be mistakes that are then gilded. <audience laughter>
My background is as a science fiction writer, and I have a small but passionate following among people who don't like very much science fiction in their science fiction, which is kind of a depressing oeuvre. <audience laughter> But one of the best pieces of science fiction I ever wrote came because the art department on the Beast used the same piece of stock photography in two different places and I had to think of some really clever reason why that had been totally on purpose.
And again, to try to drag kicking and screaming back to the theme, people theorized <audience laughter> about why that might be so, rather than saying "Lo-sers!" <audience laughter> because we had built up just enough credibility that even if they were thinking "Lo-sers!" there was kind of that sick fascination of seeing how spectacularly we were going to screw up. <audience laughter> Kind of like watching the drunken tightrope walker <more laughter>: he makes it to the building on one side and then he has another bourbon and heads back. <more laughter>
Experimentation Example #3: Complicated Stories
ELAN: Complicated stories. I'm going to draw on the whiteboard a little bit. We're going to trace out the story of I Love Bees, because this was an important lesson for us to learn. So. We had an AI from the future, who crash-landed in the present day. And along with it came a little program trying to rebuild her, and also there was a virus, and these two guys <scribbles between two names> fought a lot, and...
SEAN: Oh! Don't forget the comatose girl in the glass coffin!
ELAN: <still drawing> Oh right, sorry, sorry. So also, comatose girl. Oh, and back up here she was also a military robot, and she actually crash-landed on a hacker's website up here, who had a neighbor who was kind of a modified human being, and her father <audience laughter> was in the military which was related to the actual Halo story, and so as we went on...
SEAN: Can anyone help us out, because I think we're missing some stuff. <audience laughter>
ELAN: Oh, oh, right, there was actually this guy, Kamal, and his roommate...
SEAN: A medical student...
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Rani! Coral!
ELAN: Right, so this nice girl, and there was also...oh right, so all of these guys had to work together to help this AI combine with...
SEAN: Wait a minute! Weren't there phones in this game? <audience laughter>
ELAN: ...and it all pointed...somehow...back to Halo. <more laughter>
So this taught us an important lesson. <audience laughter> If you don't have an easy elevator pitch to tell your friends, your friends aren't going to play. This was important to us: it became so important that we were able to communicate these concepts really succinctly and enable the players to spread this around and to evangelize the project for us in ways we couldn't do ourselves, and when you're looking at this nightmare, it's just impossible to do. Luckily, people stepped around it and it was still a success and we have learned from that experience and benefited from the trust.
SEAN: <gestures at ILB sweatshirt he's wearing> That's why we bought your t-shirts, 'cause, thanks. <audience laughter>
Why is trust so important to Alternate Reality Games?
ELAN: So let's move on to the final point here. Why this genre in particular? Why does this actually matter for Alternate Reality Games? And really it's because ARGs require an extraordinary -- an incredible kind of player, very different from an audience member of a movie or a television show, and very different from someone who picks up a book and just goes and reads a book.
We require players who have instant access to every skill, talent and resource imaginable. This was an initial bet we made when we were first sitting down plotting out the Beast, we realized that not only is this trust issue important, but we have to go and trust the players. We have to trust that if we put out a puzzle that involves 16th-century lute tablature, and Photoshop, and you have to be an expert on every work of Shakespeare, that's going to happen. Yeah. Don't worry about it. We'll trust the players that they will be able to muster those talents and those skills and if they can't, they'll find them.
Additionally, they propagate information with lightning speed. And this is something that we ultimately saw on I Love Bees in the very final challenge. Do you want to talk about it? You're better with this tale than I.
SEAN: This was another puzzle Jim built. We were monitoring the communications and one of the things we did in Bees was watch the communications infrastructure the players were building and try to guess a day or two before they did how powerful it could be. Jim set up the last task to involve -- as it was actually solved, Melissa called someone in Seattle, Washington and gave them a keyword, which a group of people had to find online and communicate down on the ground to another physical group of people in Washington D.C. inside 30 seconds. The CIA dreams of this. <audience member>
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We did a good job.
ELAN: You rocked.
SEAN: In one sense, part of that game was betting on you even before you knew quite what you could do. It's the old trust game, right? "Now, we're going to hold the anvils and fall backwards, but they'll catch us."
ELAN: And it really showed that this trust had to be a two-way street. We had to trust the players just as much as we were wanting them to trust us.
And the final point is, it's a player who has the desire to collaborate, socialize and create. And, I mean, this group, the people sitting in this room and in the chat groups and the people who make up Unfiction and ARGN and the kind of satellite networks have shown this ability beyond anything we've ever seen. Anything we ever imagined. I mean, here's proof right here:
The fact that this is even happening demonstrates these abilities. This genre could not possibly exist without a group of players that demonstrates those skills. Otherwise it would be a solo experience and could not exist -- it just wouldn't ever go anywhere.
SEAN: People who don't know this space often come to me and say to me, "So why aren't you writing more books?" Because books are classy -- not mine, but books in general. <audience laughter> And I tell them that, "Look, the best thing that ever happens to me when I publish a book is I get a nice review. The best thing that happens to me when I run a game is I get invited to weddings. Come on! <audience laughter>
The other thing I wanted to say is that I was making a sound a moment ago like we guessed what all the players would do. We totally didn't. We had the theory that they would communicate, but as an example of how not worked-through it was, the official model for the Beast was the hard clues go out for a puzzle in Week One. Then we clue it for the next group of players in Week Two. And by Week Three we give it so that even the slower players who don't want to invest a lot will get it. So, that got telescoped down to about four minutes. <audience laughter and applause>
Earlier someone was talking about competitive versus cooperative models, and there's a huge advantage in competitive models, especially replayable ones -- like in Last Call Poker, we put poker in the middle of it so you'd have something to do that was replayable -- but there was a thought that the Beast would eventually, after a few weeks, create teams and they would compete for some thing as yet to be defined. But we watched the boards for two days and said, "Okay, whatever. That was so 20th century. <audience laughter> Whatever is happening right here is so much more powerful and so much more fascinating that we would be crazy to take it and create a competitive model. Because what's happening here is changing our -- forgive me for saying this -- it truly changed my faith in humanity. It really was inspiring to me. And we all looked at one another and said, "We would be crazy to change this into Pong, when we've got sort of Woodstock++ happening." <audience laughter>
ELAN: So this was the really long way of saying that trust is the most important part of any alternate reality game.
And just to conclude, again, what we've gone over here is that the trust that we're talking about is between the players and the puppetmasters and the only way to establish that is through quality and through innovation and through really interesting game design which we try our best to do constantly. It's necessary because like we were saying, it's all about trial and error and you have to have the room to make mistakes and hope and pray that no one leaves because of those mistakes. And then, again, the trust is a two-way street. We have to trust that the players are going to be this new kind of player, and that they're going to interact with our game in the way it was intended and even in many ways it wasn't intended, and help us grow on our side as well.
Those attributes, those elements, constitute trust, and without them, the genre would not exist. And another way to phrase that is, simply, without trust, alternate reality games cannot exist.
So that takes us to the end, and the question, of course, is do you trust us enough to ask us questions? <audience laughter>
SEAN: You can trust us without believing us. <audience laughter and applause>
Q&A
SEAN: That was a whole lot of talking from one side, which is very not-ARG, so maybe we can do this Q&A thing.
Relying on the Name for Trust
SEAN STACEY: Will you ever rely on the name 42, or will you always rely on the game mechanics <indistinct>?
ELAN: For those who didn't hear it, the question was would we ever rely on the name 42 to establish trust, and the part of that question that I almost heard that scares the hell out of me is "instead of making something cool."
SEAN: That would probably be one of those errors that would be swiftly and savagely corrected. <audience laughter>
ELAN: Sometimes the name getting out there helps us, because the space is becoming quite crowded and we have been blessed that most of our campaigns have been successful, and the audience has started to build some cash in that. I would never want to get to a point, though, where we rely on that, where we say, "Hey, let's leak the name because that will help us." If we ever start to have discussions like that within the company, something has gone terribly wrong.
SEAN: Yeah, think of your own behavior, right? Imagine a new book by an author you really like, or a new movie by a director you really like, and you go in there and it sucks. It might get an extra five pages, but if it sucks, it sucks. And it's just not the right way to go, I don't think. I think you have to make it good, or die trying.
The Weephun Incident
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question about trust and the community, going back to the infamous Weephun incident in I Love Bees. I am really curious about how you as the designers thought that that was going to affect the community. You can tell the story better than I can, but in the community, there was so much energy and emotion and effort and discussion that went on for a couple of days until we got a new update and everything was okay. <audience laughter> So what I was wondering was how did you perceive that from your side, for what effect that was going to have on the community and how do you feel about that generally? <Sean holds up crossed fingers, and there is audience laughter>
ELAN: Why don't you tell the story?
SEAN: For those who don't know, we had this ongoing narrative and at one point there was a cute cuddly character called the Sleeping Princess and an evil crazy character called Melissa, and the evil crazy one was hunting down the nice one, both played by Kristen and only barely scratching the surface of those volcanic depths. <audience laughter> We knew that the players sort of knew where the Sleeping Princess was, so Kristen would call them up in her Melissa persona and say <evil voice>: "Where's the little girl, and her little dog too?" <audience laughter>
And then, out of nowhere, just because of her commanding aura, one of the players said <raises hand> "I'll show you!" and just totally narced out Anne Frank. <audience laughter and applause>
So you think, "Wow, did that just happen?!" and then part of you thinks <hand to chest>, "How could you..!?" and then another part of you thinks <speculatively> "Huh..." <audience laughter> And then it's one of those terrible conversations you have: "it would probably be really wrong, but, oh my god, would it be cool if you came back and there was just scorched earth where the Sleeping Princess was supposed to be and we posted that file? <long pause, audience laughter> Or would it be really bad?" <audience laughter> And you know sometimes how you have an idea and you're not quite sure if it's really good or really bad, but it has a fatal fascination? <audience laughter>
ELAN: We thought, also, that it would get us off the hook for puzzle design for about the next two weeks.
SEAN: We did worry a lot, and we did have contingency plans in place, and generally people like seeing their names on TV, although probably no one has had a more mixed experience with that then Weephun, God bless him. <audience laughter> It was a real concern. We think about these things a lot, and in some senses where the lines are drawn in something like a book is much clearer, and the day will come when someone makes a truly disastrous mistake in an ARG. I don't know how to avoid it. There are a ton of things we haven't done because we think they're immoral or unsafe. There are certainly -- you know what would be weird and creepy and certainly people would notice if you were actually playing games in cemeteries. <audience laughter> And I had enormous qualms about that. At the same time, it's so compelling an idea that you start down the road of how can you do this in a way that's safe, that's respectful, and that makes a larger point. And we built the Small Favors and tried to make that an experience that -- you know, that's the game probably of the ones I've been involved with that fewer people have played, but the people who went out to cemeteries and did things amidst the dead I think had an experience that no other game we've run -- I mean, as an individual and powerful moment, it's hard to replace. It is a tightrope.
ELAN: All right, we're just about out of time, should we do one more question?
Asymmetrical Resources Between Players and Puppetmasters
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I appreciate that you said that it's not an us-them experience, and it's got to be some kind of cooperative, win-win experience between puppetmasters and players. But it strikes me, if I can use this word, that it's a form of very asymmetric warfare. You have this collective intelligence of tens of thousands of people on one side, and this small team on the other side, if I can use that. And people on the first team can sleep and do things, <audience laughter> and your commitment is like 24 by 7 by 48! How can that continue? How can you have this...?
ELAN: It's probably worth saying that every time we've ever finished any game, we always say "We're never doing that again."
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Like having babies.
ELAN: Right.
SEAN: In fact, it's exactly like that. Three months later it's "oh, isn't he cute?" and "don't you love the sweatshirt?" <smooths his I Love Bees hoodie> But for one thing, there's no high like it. I mean, everyone here who's run a game knows what I'm talking about. For a writer, who would normally turn in a book and eightteen months later it comes out and then it gets a so-so review in the Connecticut Daily News. Or, I write something and nine hundred people are saying "Oh my god, I'm crying," the next day. I mean, it's like crack. There's no <covered by audience laughter>. I mean, it's like any other drug that you do just because you need the hit. <more laughter>
It was a very funny thing in the middle of the Beast -- sorry, digression -- but in the middle of the Beast, we were working these hours...which we don't work anymore because that would be unprofessional! <audience laughter and applause>...and it was exactly the situation you described, and I wrote a little passage about it in the time when the Red King -- now starring! <audience laughter> -- and his buddies rescued this robot from dire clutches and it was this passage which was quite moving to me as I wrote it about being very few people with very limited resources trying to keep at bay an enormous army of people with unlimited resources, and that bit came out and the players saw it and said, "It's us!" <drops head into arms on table>
<Elan makes a 'we're done' gesture>
<applause>
