Extenuating Circumstances is a weblog by Dan Hon

Why aren’t there more ARG/MMOG crossovers?

That’s what Raph asks, and interestingly (and annoyingly predictably), the conversation soon strays into the “ARGs must pretend that they’re not a game” mentality. Here’s what I said:

There should be, and I think we’ll see more (soon, probably) marriages of ARGs and MMOs, but that’s to say that the ARG genre as it stands is still so young that we’re seeing a lot of experimentation.

I find it interesting that there’s so much fixation on the ‘this is not a game’ aspect of ARGs. If anything, I think it’s becoming increasingly apparent that to break out of the (relatively) small audiences that ARGs have garnered to date, producers are pretty much dropping the ‘this is not a game’ aesthetic completely. There’s a few reasons for this:

1) the novelty just starts to wear off: you *know* you’re playing a game, and just because it can seem like you’re not doesn’t necessarily mean that all games must pretend not to be. Instead, they can just be self-sufficient in terms of their setting and be internally consistent.

2) It’s very limiting (not that limits are necessarily a bad thing, either) to only tell stories where you have to pretend everything’s real. It doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of Lord of the Rings (either the literary or moving picture form) to know that *it didn’t really happen*, nor does it detract from my enjoyment of Crash or Back to the Future. Although it would be cool if Back to the Future were real.

I expect I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the future.

But, but, Back to the Future IS real! Doc Brown’s house is right down the street! :o

Why oh why am I always drawn to these discussions of ARGs in Second Life? It’s like being compelled to watch a train wreck. ;)

Reminds me of an interview I read recently with the Team Fortress 2 team, talking about the crucial moment where they switched from a super-real, Counter-Strike-like design ideal to a much sillier, cartoony one. At this point, a whole ton of problems just solved themselves. For example, the problem of how a spy appears to members of his own team when he’s disguised as the opposition – he just looks like he’s wearing a badly-tacked-on face mask.

It’s tragic, but true: having “realism” as a primary criteria in your design is a great way to kill off 80% of the fun of working on it. This is why so few creative people want to work in sports games.