Last summer I took a vacation in Walt Disney World, and after riding a few of the rides, it really struck me how similar imagineering is to designing ARGs. The people who design the attractions at the Disney theme parks are called the Disney Imagineers. All of the rides, from Space Mountain to the Tower of Terror, are the result of their work. But what makes designing theme park rides similar to ARGs?

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I ran across a great comment about the difficulties of running an ARG inside World of Warcraft (WoW). The blog entry connected to it was Raph Koster (designer of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and now Metaplace) noticing Christy Dena's amazing collection of ARG stats. Raph pointed to the stats and then wondered why ARGs and MMOs aren't partnering more.

The comment itself talks about the difficulties the author had running an ARG in WoW. Some of the criticisms are about the structure of WoW and could be helped by using a more free-form structure like that offered by Second Life. What struck me was that server size was a real problem for them. Since the game world is broken up across servers (and in any case is a subset of Internet users), it can be difficult to get enough people playing the ARG.

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We've been discussing the topic of cheating here in the Cypherdrome lately. How to prevent it, can it even happen in ARGs, etc. The fruits of these discussions will no doubt get their own post in a week or two, but in a twist of synchronicity, I recently came across the Scrabble for Cheaters charity.

Bascially, teams sign up to compete. Whenever anybody donates money in their team's name, they get more opportunities to "cheat" during play. Cheats range from swapping letters out ($25) to inventing new words ($500!)

This combines gameplay and fundraising in a great way. By using elements of the forbidden (we get to cheat!) along with providing an emotional connection to who wins the tournament (I'm helping them!), they've really hit a great formula.