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?

Post continues, click to read more...

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.

This is a continuation of "Screaming in the Mountains, Part 1"

The designers of Eldritch Errors have said that one of the things they can always count on is Human Nature. It let them get the online community riled up and working at cross-purposes to the campers all while believing they were doing the Right Thing. It was very cleverly done. But while I was there, I learned that while macro level group reactions are important to think about, the behavior of individuals become more and more important the smaller your group is. With only five people, our group was pretty small. Here are some of the things I learned about hosting a live event:

Post continues, click to read more...

The IDS has a nice article about us in today's paper. Many thanks to them for shining a light on our work.

One minor correction, though. That is Will in the picture, not me.

The weekend before Halloween, I attended a live event in the mountains of West Virginia for the alternate reality game Eldritch Errors. This event was the culmination of Book 2 of Eldritch Errors, titled "Scream in the Mountains," which took place over the month of October.

Almost the whole of chapter two was dedicated to building up the importance of "The Feast," an event held in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone where players could go and meet several of the main characters in person.

It's not often a designer gets to attend a major live event for another game, so I have quite a lot to say about it (as evidenced by the "Part 1" up in the title). In this part, I'll talk about the things I loved about the experience.

Post continues, click to read more...

What can I say, Valve was nice enough to include commentary tracks for all of their games, and I can't help but comment on it.

So the topic du jour is Team Fortress 2, released after all these years. (I have some things to say about Episode 2, but they'd be spoilerific, so I'm going to hold off for a while.) For anyone not familiar with TF2, it's a multiplayer only team-based shooter (red players vs. blue players), where each player picks one of nine distinct player classes to use for the round. The way the game plays changes depending on what class you're playing as.

Post continues, click to read more...

Valve Software, makers of the Half-Life series of action games, recently released a very strange little puzzle game called "Portal." If you're unfamiliar with it, I recommend you watch the trailer, because it does a much better job of explaining the game than I could with words.

One of the nice things about this game is that it comes with developer commentary that you can listen to as you play the game, which gives some insight to their design process.

Perhaps the most interesting thing they discussed was that they treated almost the entire game as a tutorial. Which isn't to say that they hold your hand the entire game (quite the opposite!), but rather that whenever they weren't teaching you new gameplay tricks, they were reinforcing the old ones they'd already taught you. They found that if they didn't, players would routinely forget that the old moves were still options.

Post continues, click to read more...

Sometimes the makers of alternate reality games want to do something special for their players, and have an event instead of the usual gameplay. These require much higher player involvement while they last, enough that the players should be warned about it ahead of time.

Most developers try to find in-game ways of doing this. We did this with the RUMI and Boat Poker events. A player says "Hey, something big's going down on Friday, try to be around at 7pm, okay?" For most events, this works just fine. But what if you're planning something bigger? Something that people might have to ask for days off work for?

The folks making Eldritch Errors took a rather straightforward approach to this problem, by posting it directly to their out-of-game blog, Schmeldritch. This is a good solution because it gets the information out that something's going to happen, but there's no burden of knowledge on their in-game characters so they don't have to worry about fitting the announcement in, plot-wise. They haven't said where the event will be, but past experiences plus this recently released map suggest northern Virginia, so players in that area know to be prepared.

And while we're on the topic of mentioning future happenings in out-of-game blog posts, I find it oddly apropos that the Schmedlritch post ends with "The train has already left the station."

We were all pretty surprised when we heard the news of your departure. We’re sorry to see you go, as we were looking forward to the stories you were going to tell during Season 2, but we’re also looking forward to whatever it is you’ll be bringing to the ARG community in the future.

Best of luck to you, in all your endeavors.

The Synthetic Worlds Initiative and Studio Cypher are happy to announce the opening of registration for Ludium II. The Ludiums (Ludia?) are conferences about gaming that are, themselves, games. The topic of this Ludium is “Principles of Sensible Video Game Policy.”

Registration before May 16 is $95. After that, it’s $125, so be sure to register now!

The great people over at the ARG Netcast had a very nice interview with Will and Nathan this week. They talk about designing ARGs, the work we’ve done in the past, and what we see for the future.

Have a listen!

Studio Cypher is working with Ted Castronova on the second Ludium conference at Indiana University. The first one, which we also worked on, was a big success, and we look forward to the next one. From the article at Gamasutra:

Indiana University’s Synthetic Worlds Initiative has announced Ludium II, its second conference bringing together experts from academia, industry, and government to create a consensus platform that answers, “What policies should real world governments have with regards to synthetic worlds?”

...

Designed by Studio Cypher LLC, the game has attendees play as delegates of a political party convention who must agree upon a common platform, and, SWI hopes, “will lead the group to a set of policy recommendations believed by most participants to be important, sensible, and feasible.”