arg

Alright so I have followed ARGs. I have read about ARGs and I took part in creating puzzles for one. For my final I decided I was going to create an ARG from scratch which was extremely fun, but I think I did it slightly off. I followed all of the instructions I received on the final for creating an ARG. I also followed the rather formulaic method of having an issue of an oppressive entity that the protagonists are trying to over through and combined with the other ARG plotline they are on a quest to find their imprisoned loved ones.

So far so good, I have a working plot line. Yet, as I started to make the puzzles and figured out how my main character, Dr. Guerrero, was going to ask for the players’help. I had an epiphany. See Dr. Guerrero’s wife and daughter are being held hostage by this king pin who is obsessed with finding seven indigenous relics that could resurrect his dead love. In order for Guerrero’s family to be safe and eventually be returned to him, he must decipher ancient riddles that explain the use of the artifacts. Guerrero starts a blog which he calls for any one and everyone’s help in deciphering the texts. He also encodes messages asking for help.

At the beginning of this course I had no idea what to expect. In fact, I thought World Building referred to a style of colonization where worlds were actually destroyed and then built up.

Needless to say I was completely wrong, and it has been a much more pleasant experience because of it. Also, needless to say, I had no idea what any of these topics we covered initially were. Cyber Punk? Transmedia Fiction? No clue.

But now that we are at the end of the semester, and we've had all kinds of crazy discussions, I feel enlightened about a world I never knew existed. My perception of people who played ARG type games was that of nerds dressed in Medieval times fighting with rubber swords. I had no idea that these games were intense and involved an incredible amount of mental fortitude to first of find out about, and second of all, complete in a reasonable amount of time with perfect success. Those within the ARG community are incredibly talented at what they do, and even though I still think of them a kind of creepy, I have way more respect for them now as opposed to before.

For a section of my final, I decided to delve deeper into the connections between Jane McGonigal's argument and our class ARG. This is written from a fictional journalist's perspective.

Jane McGonigal and “Breaking the Beards” by Jeremy Krawford of Gamewow (an online gaming blog)

“Breaking the Beards” has been criticized and praised by many. For those of you who don’t know, “Breaking the Beards” is an alternate reality game created by Mary Washington’s English 376 World Building class. It was made without sponsorship or product advertisement, and it lasted about two weeks. The class was introduced to Jane McGonigal and her ideas previous to the start of the ARG, so I would like to compare McGonigal’s ideas with the concept of ARGs, and in particular “Breaking the Beards”.
McGonigal states in her TED talk (advantgame.com) that she has a vision for the future. She talks of gamers around the world and the large amount of time spent playing video games. She says if this energy, time, and brain power was geared towards helping to save the world, then so much could be accomplished and fixed within the U.S. and elsewhere.

At the end of the semester, it seems only fitting to write a conclusion sort of blog post, and at the risk of sounding like a suck up, this was by far my favorite class. Not only was the material interesting, it was well taught and the people in class made it all the better. I'm actually disappointed to see the end of the semester for this class. Perhaps I'll have to take another class with Doc Whalen before I graduate next fall.

I've started looking at things in a new way. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." I think that's fairly accurate. In this class, as in most classes where someone is actually paying attention and attempting to learn, once the information is in your mind, you can't help but apply it to your everyday life in ways you'd never imagined.

For instance, now every time that I log into a game, i think about the development of ideas that went into crafting it. How someone may have set about to make me feel something for these characters and want to get involved in their story, help them, play the game. Now, when I see random URLs written somewhere, I instantly wonder if it's part of an ARG.

Speaking of ARGs, and to go a little off topic, for some reason, I still have a difficult time explaining what an ARG is to other people. I tried explaining it to my roommates a few times with little luck. I always ended up with an awkwardly drawn out explanation about how it's a game online run by people who use different sorts of media to make it seem real, even though it isn't.

This semester has been the craziest semester I've ever experienced at UMW.

image courtesy of http://wellington.thursdaynightcurry.com/

I got a job, 30 hours a week, on top of 4 300 level English courses and a 300 level Theatre course as well.
Not to mention I had to fit time in for my family and my now ex-boyfriend.

But New Media has by far been the best part of all of this insanity.

The wiki for New Media says this:
"New media is a broad term in Media Studies that emerged in the later part of the 20th century to encompass the amalgamation of traditional media such as film, images, music, spoken and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices and most importantly the Internet. There are many promises related to the term. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. Another important promise of New Media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content."

Yeah, that sums it up about right.

I was exploring TED he other day and came across this talk by Tom Chatfield regarding how video games reward the brain, and needless to say it sounded perfect for our class. By the way, whenever you have free time, I strongly recommend visiting the TED website and watching the amazing talks given by brilliant people, it’s amazing.

http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_chatfield_7_ways_games_reward_the_brain.html

Tom Chatfield discusses his belief that video games help brain activity and he proposes 7 ways in which it happens. However, in order to gain a context for his speech he first introduces the idea of Virtuality, and how video game designers are now capable of measuring every desire and unsatisfactory response by gamers. His running theme behind this is the concept of reward in games, and how rewards are given out.
He insists on the use of probability tables to offer different awards at different times, and even says that the game has been programmed to give better rewards at certain times on order to keep enthusiasm up for the gamers. He says that the gentle balance between getting incredible rewards and mundane rewards level out so that the games are not too easy or too hard.

Chatfield’s 7 ways that video games help the brain include Experience, Long and Short term Goals, Reward Effort, Feedback, Uncertainty, Enhanced Learning, and the inclusion of Other People. In the talk he goes into detail with all of these, and if you watch the video you’ll notice that all of these processes we’ve taled about and even implemented with our own ARG project.

It's amazing how one little mention in class can spark a blog entry.

Someone (and I do not remember who, sorry, if it's you I will gladly give you credit) mentioned the radio broadcast "War of the Worlds".

For those who do not know what this is, I will explain.

image courtesy of the Rocketeer

Wiki says that the radio show Mercury Theatre on Air was reading an adaptation of Wells' famous novel "War of the Worlds" on October 30th, 1938. Their broadcast was set up to sound legitimate, with news correspondents and scholarly reports on a supposed alien invasion. While they did preface the broadcast with a warning (this is only a story), people took it seriously, and panicked. Mass hysteria ensued. People died, killed themselves in order to avoid the impending alien attack. Something that was meant to be trivial, a simple radio storytelling, turned into something insane.

This was totally an ARG.

H.G. Wells' novel "War of the Worlds" was transferred into a real life scenario; it's as if someone were to take the story of Harry Potter and make a realistic television broadcast saying that dark shadows were flying around sucking the souls out of people.

In my art class, I decided it'd be fun to make my sculpture project out of five mutated Barbie dolls. They're all missing limbs and I painted them all dark red, which, consequently looks kind of like I took their skin off and their muscles underneath are showing through. I thought this was a really, really neat idea. The majority of the people sitting around me now think I'm going to be a serial killer. (In relation to the Ice Truck killer on Dexter. If you don't watch Dexter then... I'm sorry, you won't get the reference. Maybe google will tell you.)

But, that sort of got me to thinking. Granted, it got me thinking on a slightly creepy train of thought, but thinking nonetheless. Serial killers who leave clues for the cops are playing games. It's sometimes literally described that way. One of the main examples that I thought of was the Bone Collector. In the movie, A paralyzed Morgan Freeman is teaching Angelina Jolie how to be a better detective and hunt down a serial killer known as the Bone Collector. He would leave little cryptic messages behind in the places where he'd killed. The clues could be anything from a scrap of paper, to a screw, or a finger with a ring on it. Yes, a real finger. This is a common theme we see in a lot of serial killer movies. I don't know how many actual serial killers leave behind convoluted notes so that they can prove how much smarter they are than the police, since I don't know too many serial killers, but I still find it fascinating. (I think maybe the Zodiac killer may have? Or maybe that was just in the movie, too?)

In a recent blog entry by KyleWorksEveryTime he discussed the relevancy of ARGs as a viable means of promoting and generating interest for products and ideas. He said: