ARGs Are Not A Narrative Design Problem

Lately I’ve been working on Get In The Game for Northwest Vision and Media, and as a part of that I’ve been listening to pitches for games. Several companies have pitched ARGs, and it occurred to me during the last pitching session that absolutely everyone I heard speak about or pitch ARGs seems to approach them as a narrative form. Story is what they stress during the pitch, and mostly, telling stories is exactly what ARGs do (The best so far, like World Without Oil, let people tell their own stories and run through their own what ifs).

ARG design at present is really backward. Another company pitching at Get In The Game were not making an ARG, but had a really, really clever idea of how to tie in social media with their game. I’m really sorry to be vague in this paragraph, but I won’t divulge the concept since, as far as I’m aware, noone has done anything like it yet. It’s really very intelligent: Appropriate to the theme, aesthetics and audience of the game, somewhat obvious in retrospect, and it serves both the user and the publisher.

Alone, it does not make an ARG, but it’s a smart interaction between one platform and another. Someone, at some point, is going to make a good ARG, not just with a story told competently on multiple platforms, but with sensical, worthwhile interactions between those platforms. Things that truly feed into each other rather than merely referencing each other, or hosting a jumping story. It will also do a lot more than funnel a larger base of casual users down to an infinitesimal amount of deeply engaged players, as most ARGs do.

I think a large part of the problem with ARGs at the moment is that they’re essentially research projects rather than viable commercial ones. Too many of them remind me of the way many PR companies quantify value, i.e. exaggeration and bullshit over engagement, column inches, financial value, and so on.

We can make a lot of compelling media right now, but we’re rubbish at gluing it together. It’s not about taking TV and print skills into new media, it’s about taking game and interaction design skills out into all media. It’s extremely risky, unexplored territory, but how do you make it work without investment?

We know very little about these interactions so far, and they’re unlikely to emerge plentifully from a narrative led approach. Someone’s going to manage it eventually, but when they do, it probably won’t even be called an ARG. It will emerge from a heritage of many individual, clever interactions. Late 00’s ARGs seem to be houses of straw; what we need is to establish how to make individual bricks.

(CC image by umjanedoan)

This entry was posted by davidhayward, on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 5:48 pm and is filed under args, convergence, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.