This is not turning into an ARG blog
March 6th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I almost wrote about something else today, but I found out in time that something I thought was true was in fact false and therefore not worth writing about.
But there’s some really cool stuff going on in this Find the Lost Ring ARG that has my brain back at the question of what these storytelling/ chaotic fiction/ media experiences might mean for teaching and learning. In our presentation, Rachel pulled out Sean Stewart’s phrase “search operas,” which gets at some of the connections between these games and information literacy.
Caleb connects ARG’s to learning really well – connecting the way that the narrative is discovered and synthesized and created in an ARG with the way meaning is discovered and synthesized and created in the research process.
And then there’s the social aspect – the idea that you put a whole bunch of brains with different knowledge and skills and experiences on a problem and you can get something richer and deeper (and certainly faster) than anything individuals could accomplish alone — put all of these things togehter and what do you see? Well, I’m not sure that everyone sees learning theory but I bet I’m not the only one that does.
You’ve got the meaning-making of constructivism, and the social meaning making of Vygotsky. It’s not only learning theory, but it’s learning theory that’s had a huge impact on our understanding of information literacy and the connections between information literacy, problemsolving and learning.
So check out what’s going on on this McDonald’s/ Olympics thing. Trust me, you don’t need to read all of the blogs or forum posts to see the cool factor here. It looks like the players right now have located six people around the world with a strange form of amnesia. The first one, introduced via the rabbit hole is Adriane. Since then, they’ve found Markus, Noriko, MeiHui, Diego and Lucie. And there’s some stuff going on in Brazil as well.
The characters are all over the world, and so far they’ve been communicating with the players frequently and at length, by email, IM, and in a variety of social networking sites and blogs — but with a twist. Some of them want to communicate in their native languages (so far – Japanese, Mandarin, French, Spanish, German and English).
(And in a nice T.I.N.A.G. moment – which highlights the potential legal complexity Michael mentioned yesterday — Lucie’s blog is on Skyrock)
Watching what the players are doing to try and deal with this is really fascinating and really cool. They’re not just using online translators — they’re pulling in people with language skills, they’ve got a wiki page tracking the languages players have expertise in, they’re brushing up on languages they know and sharing the good online courses with each other, they’re learning Esperanto and encouraging the game characters to do so as well!
It gets at the multiple levels of learning going on when we explore to learn — specific knowledge/skills/concepts (here, the language skills) and the deeper inquiry those specific skills enable. And it highlights the need for that deeper inquiry — something to give the acquisition of specific skills meaning and relevance. I mean, these people are jumping to learn Esperanto! Would this happen – ever – without a larger context?
It looks like the game will develop in Esperanto and English (the amnesiac characters all have a tattoo that says “find the lost ring” in Esperanto), so that this truly multi-lingual phase might not extend throughout – but it’s fun to watch.
Yes an ARG – and over there, and over there too
March 5th, 2008 § 5 Comments
All of a sudden ARG’s are everywhere – it’s like when you learn a new word and suddenly it’s everywhere? It feels like Rachel and I presented on this topic ten minutes before the Internets done exploded with it!
Michael dropped me some great links in my del.icio.us about this — game designer Elan Lee presented about ARG’s at the O’Reilly ETech conference just yesterday. Most interesting to me was Cory Doctrow’s liveblogged notes on the talk – but his summary at Boing Boing is worth looking at – and there are comments! Three short things about this talk -
1. I love the magnet metaphor. I think that idea that magnets “push, pull and charge” resonated – I can’t wait to see more of the actual talk. But the “charge” idea seems to get at that essential thing about the ARG experience – that it is something co-created.
2. This from the Boing Boing comments got me thinking – “The only problem with ARG’s is once you’ve played one and know how they work it ruins the rest of them.” At first that kind of sounds true. Rachel and I spoke at length about how hard it was to try and go back and describe games that have already been played. As much as we could retell the narrative and show the websites, it was clear that we were missing something about the experience of having played the game. And those kinds of things are often best the first time you do them.
But I wonder if maybe this statement isn’t more interesting in that what it really does is show the importance of the narrative to the experience, as well as the social act of creating the experience with others similarly immersed. It might be hard to recreate one’s first transformative experience with a novel or a movie, but that doesn’t usually ruin the act of reading for the rest of time.
3. I need to think more about the scalability aspect at the end – and by that I mean “I need to see more of the actual talk.” This idea from Doctrow’s notes – “It can’t just be “let me use all the elements of your life to tell you a story. It has to be, ‘Let me look at all your channels (browser, phone IM, etc.) and find a way to turn that channel on specifically for you.’” I want to hear more about how this preserves the social aspect of ARG’s.
And then Wired yesterday speculates that this is part of the rabbit hole to an Olympian-sized ARG – with the Olympics and McDonald’s behind it. And asks – if McDonald’s is involved are ARG’s totally part of the mainstream? There is something simultaneously disturbing and fitting about the idea that McDonald’s couldn’t manage to keep their involvement quiet because they had to cover themselves with the law talk on the website. Some things are just more important than T.I.N.A.G, I guess.
Not an ARG – college coursework as immersive marketing?
March 3rd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I’ve been thinking about this story in Inside Higher Ed all morning — at first because of the academic freedom ideas discussed explicitly, but then the more I thought about the project that the students in this class put together, the more I started focusing on that aspect of the tale –
To recap quickly, about a year ago Hunter College offered a course sponsored by an advocacy group focused on stopping low-cost ripoffs of designer products – the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition.
According to the complaints filed with the Faculty Senate, Hunter agreed to let the IACC sponsor a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real.
There are real academic freedom issues – the course was apparently created outside of regular procedures of curricular review, and the professor involved (as well as others who reviewed the case) maintain that what was taught in the class was also defined by the sponsoring agency. On some level, the problems with this are so obvious I don’t know what more to say about them – but I do have some things I’m thinking about that have to do with the other part of the story – the what the students in this class actually DID part. Just be aware that this stuff I’m going to be saying about ARG’s is not the only thing that matters here.
(When I originally hit “publish” that said “is the only thing” — not what I meant. Probably obviously)
A couple of weeks ago, Rachel Bridgewater and I gave a presentation at Online Northwest called Lonelygirl and the Beast: Alternate Reality Games as Immersive Marketing, Art and Information. And the student project described here goes beyond the creation of a “fake web site.” It has a lot in common with an ARG. But at the end of the day, this is a bad attempt at immersive marketing, and not an ARG. The more I think about it the clearer it seems that the very issues with how this class was conceived and created mean that it could never have accomplished the real immersive alternate reality that an ARG can. At the same time, I think the ways in which this was much less than an ARG can illustrate why a different kind of ARG experience has really interesting potential for teaching and learning.
Alternate Reality Games lure players in with a whisper – they don’t say “hey! cool game here!” Instead, they put information designed to pique curiosity where potential players are likely to run across it – that the normal desire to know more, to find out what happened, to solve mysteries will push these players down the rabbit holes the game designers provide. At Hunter, students saw leaflets scattered around campus. Fictional student Heidi Cee was desperate for the return of her expensive handbag.
Heidi’s blog further builds up this alternate world. She talks about the handbag here, but also mentions her friends at other schools (though she doesn’t provide links to them), links to videos and silly things — she does what you’d expect a normal blogger to do.
Now, the thing is – as immersive marketing, or as an ARG, this really isn’t very good. The world-building isn’t very compelling. I won’t claim that I read the whole blog, but it doesn’t feel very real. She talks about her friends and events, but doesn’t link out to them. So the blog doesn’t reveal more parts of the alternate reality like it should. The blog doesn’t connect you to her Facebook and her Facebook doesn’t seem to be on the Hunter network? And really, this girl would even create a Blogger blog to complain about this? Of course not – she’d use her Facebook. And if she did create a blog, she’d only use it to complain about counterfeiting — she wouldn’t be talking about that other stuff.
Even more, Heidi herself is seriously annoying. I don’t really see people reading this and getting all worked up about her OMG trauma with counterfeiters. At the very least – the world’s puppy lovers are going to wash their hands of her after this:
Anyway, I’m still gonna continue posting up reward money for my bag. I dipped into my savings (sorry mom) for more reward money, because as I said before, this bag is invaluable to me. If I had a puppy, I would give him up for this bag. Really!
Now do you all understand the PAIN I’m going through? It’s making me CRRRRRAZZZYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!
And it’s not surprising that it doesn’t look like it worked very well. I couldn’t find many comments that looked like they came from anyone not in on the hoax.
So – why do I think that the way the class was conceived and executed meant it was doomed to fail? Because it just couldn’t do some of the things that a real ARG needs — even though a real ARG might be trying to get you to see a movie you don’t want to see or play a game you don’t want to play — as a player in an ARG you have some agency. Players and puppetmasters are partners creating the experience of the game. The narrative itself in an ARG is at least somewhat co-created.
In a nutshell – when you create an ARG, you don’t expect to control everything that happens in the alternate reality you’ve created or in the game. You can’t. In this situation, there were no players, just observers. They had no agency, no ability to co-create the narrative, no control over the narrative itself. Beyond leaving comments and friending on Facebook – was there even anything for the observers to do beyond consuming the message?
And the truly disturbing thing, if the descriptions of this class are accurate, is that even the students responsible for creating the game were expected to consume and repackage the narrative. The power of ARG’s as learning exercises in many ways is in how they create a space that encourages creative problem-solving. There’s no indication that the “problem” in this case was ever treated as something that the students were supposed to solve. Instead, it was an exercise in how do we trick people into hearing a message we had no control over constructing.
And honestly, I think this is one of the reasons Heidi’s so annoying. She doesn’t sound real, but like someone mouthing a party line. And one that’s not all that compelling.
A primary characteristic of the ARG is the idea that the players discover the narrative for themelves; it’s never presented to them as a cohesive whole. It’s spread over a variety of websites and media and the players must find, discover, interpret, synthesize and create something out of what’s there for them to find. That means a couple of things. One is that the narrative doesn’t exist in just one place – part of it will only exist in the memories and minds of the players who engaged with the experience. The other is that no puppet master will ever be able to fully control the narrative. And this is one of the things that makes ARG’s so interesting both as learning environments and also as marketing schemes.
The idea of a marketing scheme where the marketers can’t fully control the message goes against much of what we think of when we think of “marketing.” As learning experiences go – look at the list of what ARG’s ask the players to do above, and then look at the cognitive outcomes listed in Bloom’s Taxonomy — that’s some pretty higher order thinking those players can be doing, no? In this class, it sounds like they never intended to give up any control of the narrative — not to the students outside the class who encountered the story. But also not to the students in the class who were acting as puppetmasters. As a learning exercise, this fact alone cut this experiment off at the knees on both levels.
In an ARG, the partnership between players and puppetmasters is not exactly equal, but it’s not exactly unequal either. The players in an ARG are, in a sense, in on the game while they pretend that they’re not. They engage with the scenarios and situations of the game as if they were real, but they expect a certain amount of good faith from those behind the game. These ideas are sometimes referred to as the “this is not a game” or “this is not a hoax” aesthetics. The Hunter community wasn’t in on anything. To them, this was a hoax and it played out as such. Which is the final reason why I think this project failed as a game and as a learning exercise for the campus.
Just to reiterate, I’m not saying this class produced an ARG, or even that it was trying to. I’m saying that it was trying to tap into the same things that an ARG taps into. And I’m saying that it failed. And finally I’m saying that the reasons why it failed as an ARG are also some of the same reasons why it failed as a learning exercise at all.
