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.

Let's run the numbers

You want 5-10 people at a minimum for any live event. Our experience is that each level of interactivity appeals to about 10% of the previous level. In a non-ARG context, for example, if your blog has 1000 people reading, only about 100 will ever post a comment. That means that to get our minimum for a live event, we'll need 50-100 people to participate asynchronously (emails, voicemail, what-have-you). To get that many asynchronous participants, we'll have to have 500-1,000 following along. A lot of these people participate indirectly (discussing the game on forums, etc.), but that's difficult to measure. In the end, we'll have to interest 5,000-10,000 to get enough players at our live event. On the Internet as a whole, that's not unreasonable. If you target a population that's predisposed to play ARGs (like ARGNet's) you'll get a lot more than 10% moving from interested to following along, so you can get away with a lot fewer initial eyeballs too.

However, MMO players probably aren't more likely to play ARGs than the general Internet population, so you'll need that whole 5,000-10,000. And since World of Warcraft (WoW) and similar MMOs are separated by server, you can't run an ARG with the entire population of the game. In addition, WoW makes it difficult for Alliance characters and Horde characters to interact, thus halving the effective population of a server. According to WarcraftRealms, the server with the largest discrete population has about 25,000 people. This means that you'll have to reach a third to half (depending on the level requirements of your event) of all the Alliance players on that server to have a good live event! If you're on a less populous server, you'll have to approach even more.

That can't be right!

True enough. This is just a first-order approximation. If you increase or decrease barriers between levels, you'll definitely change that 10% number. For example, since the Cyphers story required people to subscribe, we had way fewer than 10% going from "not participating" to "following along." Once they were invested in the story, though, about 50% took it to the next level and participated actively.

Still, I wouldn't want to run an ARG entirely in WoW. It's just too hard to get people to play in the limited ways available. Which goes some way toward answering Raph's question about why ARGs and MMOs aren't working together already.