Thoughts are Progressive

Roles and The Team

My pre-game roles in The Unit were to create the:

• Missing Person Poster.
• Probull Website.
• Write up Spencer’s Diary.
• And convince my sister that she wanted to be Annie and do a video blog and voice message for us! No, my sister was very good and didn’t take much convincing.

My in-game roles were:

• To be ready with the voice message. Due to my message bank playing up we had to resort to playing Annie’s voice message into Pheobe’s phone. We had tried making it Phoebe’s message bank, but decided it wasn’t clear or loud enough for the game. That was the only technical glitch in our game.
• I was the ‘agent’ that the players met outside O’Clock.
• And I was with Pheobe, Sharani and Grace in staying one step ahead of the players.

The roles and responsibilities were designated fairly and evenly between the team and we were all very good with getting our parts done in time for the next meeting. Our meetings were productive and we used the time to look at the individual sections we had been allotted to make sure that they were all cohesive in design and to discuss what was next to be completed. I am very glad to have been able to meet and work with Sharani, Grace, Natalie and Pheobe.

The Game Itself

The running of The Unit went really well. There were a couple of small glitches (phone message and thinking O’Clock was O Block), but in the end they didn’t hugely effect game-play. After watching the video of the players, it looks like they had a lot of fun playing our ARG and were a bit stumped every now and again. This was good because it forced them to think and meant that our clues where challenging enough.

Immersion: The idea is that the set up of the plot should make it difficult to know that Amene is false. The integration of it into the real world should be seamless. Having an actual product that people can buy and using real world companies to back it are part of this illusion. Then the game-play shouldn’t detract from it as they make sense. I’m not getting them to do anymore decoding after the initial rabbit hole because being on the blog seems to be safe so they don’t need to do things secretly. The tasks involved in Amene are meant to be very practical. How else are you going to stop it all unless you go out and get people to stop.

Agency: The main use of agency is in the graph that shows the progress of the earth’s stages (critical to non-critical). Without this, the players don’t have any indication if what they’re doing is bringing proper results. I could have just had Nelson Crouch post comments like, “My Monitor went crazy today, thanks to so-and-so for having such a big group. We’re getting closer and closer to non-critical now!” But this would actually effect the immersion, he doesn’t have to the Monitor and could just be saying that. It doesn’t strike me as being as believable. The graph seems more legitimate, trustworthy, regular and instantaneous.

Narrative: I’ve used a typical narrative arc. It begins with an exposition that engages the players (the discovery of Amene); followed by rising action which excites the players (finding that the archaeologists have been sneaky and placed clues about the ‘real deal’); next the climax which might evoke concern in the players (learning the true story behind the destruction of Amene and that it’s happening again); and finally the resolution which brings satisfaction to the players (being a part of changing history and saving the world). This certainly seems to be a fail safe way to do it.

Here’s a link to the website. The game is finished, but it uses the Wayback Engine and you can have a look at the old site and other little things.

Perplex City

Perplex City is a fictional city that has connections with Earth somehow. Their culture is all about puzzles and mind games and they have this event called The Academy Games, which is equivalent to our Olympic Games but using mental strength and not physical strength. They also have an object of great value called “The Receda (reh-kay-duh) Cube” shortened to just “The Cube” which has been stolen and has ended up on earth.

 People from Perplex City who interacted with Earth were sisters Scarlett, Violet (through blogs); Pietro Salk an investigative reporter (through online newspaper) and Kurt McAllister and I wasn’t able to discover how he interacted with the players. There was also something called Mind Candy, which sold puzzle cards and it was through these cards that players progressed through the game. The cards held many purposes, not just a puzzle, but some had invisible ink and pieces of maps for other aspects of the game and led to websites and the usual features.

 Interesting thing about this ARG is that it wasn’t promoting a movie, TV show or anything. They did make money through selling the puzzle cards, but this might have only been enough to keep the game running. And there was actually a money prize of £100,000 for whoever found “The Cube”.

 The game ran from 2005 until 2007 and because of the longevity of it, the game achieved some interesting traits. A book was written by the players and published so that a fictional character from Perplex City could achieve something and a cd was released from a Perplex City musician. Some more ‘normal’ (for an ARG) activities included a banner plane with an access word; an in-game event where one member was revealed as a mole and the actual Perplex City Academy Games was played in both London and New York.

 I like this ARG because it was able to incorporate proper mental puzzles in without ruining the ‘This is not a game’ mentality. I think they managed immersion through making Perplex City a puzzle based city and this then represented what the norm was for the players. Other immersion would be through collecting the puzzle cards, because they were like baseball cards where some were more rare than others. But players didn’t just have to buy the cards to participate. They could follow the game online without them. Possibly then, the people who bought the puzzle cards were more immersed, but I don’t really know!

 I’m not sure that they employed agency too well because it seems that the only outcome from submitting an answer to a puzzle card were points. I’m assuming that there were other outcomes, you know, ‘the answer from the puzzle you just completed puts another piece of the jigsaw into place’ sort of thing, but I couldn’t find out what they were exactly.

ARG in simple terms. Thanks to sineadraffertycom on YouTube.