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| parn:alternate_reality_games_tutorial [2013-04-16 14:32] – alkan | parn:alternate_reality_games_tutorial [2013-05-17 12:31] (current) – alkan |
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| ====Alternate Reality Games Tutorial==== | ====Alternate Reality Games Tutorial==== |
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| Based on the [[:ARG Tutorial]] by Adrian Hon and Matt Wieteska((Adrian has a background background in neuroscience, Matt in theatre. They work together at Six to Start in London, creating game-like stories and story-like games, both serious and fun. ’After several years of working for hire’ said Adrian, ’we started making our own games, such as Zombies, Run! – an audiobook, game and ARG that you can play while running. We are curious about how to make games at the crux of gameplay, social interaction and storytelling. We are not pushing new technologies but using existing technologies in the context of storytelling.)) | Based on the [[ARG Tutorial]] by Adrian Hon and Matt Wieteska((Adrian has a background background in neuroscience, Matt in theatre. They work together at Six to Start in London, creating game-like stories and story-like games, both serious and fun. ’After several years of working for hire’ said Adrian, ’we started making our own games, such as Zombies, Run! – an audiobook, game and ARG that you can play while running. We are curious about how to make games at the crux of gameplay, social interaction and storytelling. We are not pushing new technologies but using existing technologies in the context of storytelling.)) |
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| ===The prehistory of alternate reality games=== | ===The prehistory of alternate reality games=== |
| The majority of the ARG audience are casual participants. They don’t want to make long-term commitments. If the game is based on mandatory interactions, there is a risk of losing many audience members. Players like to have an illusion of being able to make choices, but most of them just want a good story. In online fantasy games the players’ choices impact their ending. Choices can remove a lot of subtlety from the story, thereby creating many options, but the plots and characters can become black-and white or one-dimensional. When the story is forked, more content needs to be generated. If it’s a story with just one ending, as in a lot of games, this allows for creating multiple perspectives on the same narrative. | The majority of the ARG audience are casual participants. They don’t want to make long-term commitments. If the game is based on mandatory interactions, there is a risk of losing many audience members. Players like to have an illusion of being able to make choices, but most of them just want a good story. In online fantasy games the players’ choices impact their ending. Choices can remove a lot of subtlety from the story, thereby creating many options, but the plots and characters can become black-and white or one-dimensional. When the story is forked, more content needs to be generated. If it’s a story with just one ending, as in a lot of games, this allows for creating multiple perspectives on the same narrative. |
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| The important question to ask when making an ARG is: are you telling a story that is exciting to be told, or a story you want to construct together with the players? The first job (of both designers and players) in an ARG is to assemble the information and make sense out of it, to understand the scope of the problem. Too much ’and-and-and’ in an ARG can be dangerous. As Brenda Laurel writes in Computers as Theatre:((This abbreviation can be found on http://www.lespagesauxfolles.ca/index.phtml?pg=29&chap=1061)) | The important question to ask when making an ARG is: are you telling a story that is exciting to be told, or a story you want to construct together with the players? The first job (of both designers and players) in an ARG is to assemble the information and make sense out of it, to understand the scope of the problem. Too much ’and-and-and’ in an ARG can be dangerous. As Brenda Laurel writes in ‘Computers as Theatre’:((http://www.lespagesauxfolles.ca/index.phtml?pg=29&chap=1061)) |
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| ‘The number of new possibilities introduced falls off radically as the play progresses. Every moment of the enactment affects those possibilities, eliminating some and making some more probable than others… At the final moment of a play…all of the competing lines of probability are eliminated except one, and that is the final outcome… Thus, over time, dramatic potential is formulated into possibility, probability and necessity.’ | ‘The number of new possibilities introduced falls off radically as the play progresses. Every moment of the enactment affects those possibilities, eliminating some and making some more probable than others… At the final moment of a play…all of the competing lines of probability are eliminated except one, and that is the final outcome… Thus, over time, dramatic potential is formulated into possibility, probability and necessity.’ |
alkan