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Fascinating ARG Stats

November 29th, 2007 (Visited 1962 times) Tags:

Christy Dena :: ARG Stats.

Not sure I have any comment, except to note a few differences from MMOs:

Huge penetration.
Poor retention by traditional metrics.
Astounding impact as marketing tie-ins and transmedia experiences.

Why aren’t there more marriages of ARG and MMO?

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22 Responses to “Fascinating ARG Stats”

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Christy Dena :: ARG Design Charts wrote on November 29th, 2007 at 8:29 pm:

[...] Comments Raph’s Website » Fascinating ARG Stats on ARG StatsARG’s (not the noise a monster makes). « Mark Iddon - A Multiplatform [...]

Wet Wyered :: View topic - Ralph asks a good question wrote on November 30th, 2007 at 8:27 pm:

[...] says: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/11/29/fascinating-arg-stats/ the header "Fascinating ARG Stats" points here [...]

Extenuating Circumstances – links for 2007-12-02 wrote on December 2nd, 2007 at 2:18 am:

[...] Raph’s Website » Fascinating ARG Stats Raph: “Why aren’t there more marriages of ARG and MMO?” (tags: arg mmo raphkoster christydena statistics questions genre blending) [...]

Vex Appeal: A blog by Guy Parsons about games, social media and stuff: All quiet on the western front wrote on December 2nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm:

[...] out with someplace to live in the Big Smoke soon.Blown away by this video:Raph Koster wonders why there aren’t more MMOG/ARG crossovers, followed by a load of the usual crap in the comments about “OMG TINAG!” Woohoo.Also, been totally [...]

Extenuating Circumstances – Why aren’t there more ARG/MMOG crossovers? wrote on December 3rd, 2007 at 4:08 am:

[...] what Raph asks, and interestingly (and annoyingly predictably), the conversation soon strays into the “ARGs [...]

Adam Crowe - links for 2007-12-04 wrote on December 3rd, 2007 at 4:49 pm:

[...] Raph’s Website - Fascinating ARG Stats Dan Hon on the TINAG philosophy: “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.” (tags: gaming alternativerealitygaming augmentedrealitygaming biggaming ambientgaming chaoticfiction mmorpg narrativeenvironments virtualworlds storytelling transmedia) Filed in delicious [...]

Reader Comments

Jeff said on November 29th, 2007 at 5:40 pm:
I believe one of the issues with ARG/MMO cross-over is the TINAG mentality of ARGs. The entire content of ARGs revolve around it not being a game. No MMO has taken this stance. There is a definite line players have to cross to enter the game (the login screen) unlike ARGs. In fact, ARGs exist inside of a time-based space that MMOs usually try to avoid. An ARG can be completed and cannot be played anymore, unlike the current MMO model.

I suppose one of the other issues is the usual stand point of MMO content, which exists not in an alternate reality but in a different world completely. Since the main outlet for ARGs is the internet, most sites have to at least look legit. Take “I Love Bees” for example. The website could be a legitimate website for people to visit. I am not sure how their could be a MySpace page for Thrall, for instance, without it breaking the TINAG mentality.

Of course, a cross-over would be possible using MMOs as a rabbit hole or puzzle location through the use of player created avatars. These avatars could be specifically created as a contact for an ARG. Or even an ARG based around the MMO’s company. The possibilities are there, but I think that multiplayer mechanics of ARGs and that of MMOs are different. While both use cooperation, MMOs cooperation is based around self-rewards while ARGs are based around group rewards. Everyone benefits from the completion of puzzles in an ARG in all situations. No one person is given higher rewards than others, unlike MMOs in which rare-drops can only be won by one player.
Christy Dena said on November 29th, 2007 at 10:20 pm:
Thanks for the link love Raph.
Michael Chui said on November 30th, 2007 at 1:32 am:
No MMO has taken this stance.

You mean besides Second Life?

MMO content … exists not in an alternate reality but in a different world completely

This is the Immersion Problem. ARGs are more accurately described as “augmented reality games”, rather than “alternate”. The sense delivered by an ARG is that the real world can be expanded and become a vessel for the flowering of one’s imagination. They don’t “immerse” you–at least, not in the traditional MMO sense–whatsoever. Instead, they embrace reality and beyond-reality.

Interestingly, White Wolf RPG products also revolve around this basic concept, which makes what CCP could potentially do with the license very interesting.

This highlights a distinction between the intentions behind ARGs versus MMOs: MMOs escape reality; ARGs do not. If not for this mindset, MMOs would be very easy to “marry” with ARGs.

Why couldn’t you say that Thrall lives in the White House, and every now and then, there’s a TV broadcast from the Oval Office… but in the ARG, it’s a proclamation from the Warchief, and the tools they provide allow you to re-analyze the speech to be a coded message regarding known plots by Dwarven, er, terrorists. (Yeah, I’m terrible at this whole creativity thing. =P)
Jeff said on November 30th, 2007 at 7:36 am:
You mean besides Second Life?

I don’t believe that Second Life has the TINAG mentality. At no point does Second Life every claim not to be a game or have mechanics based around this. As you say, “MMOs escape reality”. A player has to pass into the “magic circle” in order to play an MMO. ARGs, on the other hand, do not have this “magic circle”. Their is actually no way to tell if this post was part of an ARG, unless you were actively playing the ARG. When a player logs into Second Life, they know they are playing a game.

I thought it was very creative Thrall 08?
Amaranthar said on November 30th, 2007 at 9:20 am:
OK, Raph, I’ll say it, since you are looking for someone to notice the possibility.

Metaplace would be perfect for a marriage of ARG and MMO

Yes, I agree that it could be done quite nicely. A modern day game of Intelligence agencies or a sci-fi universe of players from another planet seeking the escaped intergalactic criminals hiding among earthlings. Or some such thing.

With Metaplace’s ability to link to the net, it would be a perfect setup.
Raph said on November 30th, 2007 at 9:55 am:

I wasn’t fishing… honest.
Amaranthar said on November 30th, 2007 at 10:16 am:
Regardless, the links between Metaplace and advertisers could become even stronger with such a system of gaming. And someone(s) could make lots of money too, after seeing those figures.
Michael Chui said on November 30th, 2007 at 10:46 pm:
I don’t believe that Second Life has the TINAG mentality.

Er, I did a quick Google search and found this.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17538999/

Second Life pioneered the TINAG mentality.

ARGs, on the other hand, do not have this “magic circle”.

I think you’re misunderstanding the concept of a magic circle. A magic circle is a conceptual border between rulesets. There’s no need for conscious knowledge of the border. If I was an I Love Bees player, it would be “cheating” for me to raid 42 Entertainment and find out what to do next. If I wasn’t, it’d merely be corporate espionage. The context of the game is the magic circle: it changes the meaning of what you do.

The magic circle is a game concept, not an MMORPG one. The difference between MMOs and ARGs is largely where they put the magic circle, not whether or not they have it.
Will Emigh said on December 1st, 2007 at 1:43 pm:
Michael, I think you’re misinterpreting the TINAG philosophy. Like most of the terminology surrounding ARGs, it’s a little confusing. TINAG isn’t just about not admitting it’s a fiction (lots of things do that, including plays and many games), it’s about embedding your game in a larger existing space (usually the web, but not always). Second Life has very well-defined boundaries. Sure, it might not be a game, but it’s a definite space.

When you’re at a bus stop reading billboards, you’re not in Second Life. When you’re in a rustic cabin in Tennessee, you’re not in Second Life. When you’re searching for an old book in a library, you’re not in Second Life.

But you might be playing an ARG in any of those cases. You might even be playing an ARG while you’re in Second Life. The whole point of TINAG is that you just don’t know.
Kim said on December 1st, 2007 at 1:55 pm:
Stretching the definition a bit, but aren’t things like webkins, UBFunkeys and Barbiegirls something along the lines of ARG + MMO? MMO in the sense that they have a virtual world with multiplayer, and ARG in the sense that, to kids anyway, the dolls represent or are part of an alternate reality.

BTW, if you haven’t purchased all those and played with them yet, you really should all pretty interesting.
Michael Chui said on December 1st, 2007 at 11:39 pm:
Michael, I think you’re misinterpreting the TINAG philosophy.

Yes, I was. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found it was more total blend than self-descriptive.

You might even be playing an ARG while you’re in Second Life.

I think this statement seals the deal that it is very, very possible to “marry” MMOs with ARGs.

Also, who says the reality has to be the Earth one?
Guy Parsons said on December 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 am:
I think the distinction is partially false in that “ARGs” are considered an inflexible arrangement of attributes, rather than a free-form set of elements ripe to be borrowed and incorporated. Can you imagine an MMORPG with:

a mysterious story revealed through clues?
a world and plot that responds to the actions of players?
that reaches out into different media?
with challenges requiring massive collaboration?
with mind-bending puzzles?

I reckon so. Who cares about TINAG? It’s really a hopelessly obtuse and outmoded concept that doesn’t do anybody any favours, least of all the ARG industry.
Michael Chui said on December 2nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm:
an inflexible arrangement of attributes, rather than a free-form set of elements ripe to be borrowed and incorporated

That’s what a genre is.

“Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you…”
Juliette said on December 2nd, 2007 at 2:55 pm:
Having been involved in running something that was a cross between an ARG and a treasure hunt on our World of Warcraft server over a weekend, one of the problems is the issue of different servers. If you’re going to put lots of effort in, you want a population rather bigger than the typical server population, but I’m not sure how you’d run something across more than one server.

There’s also the fact that it’s very hard to actually change the world in any way, restricting the sorts of things that you can do. We managed to leave some corpses around and unexpected items in the auction house and obviously used the mail system, but we were mostly limited to what we could do in our characters when we were logged on. That was another issue - if you want higher level characters then you have to be relatively serious to want to spend the time to level them up specially!
Dan Hon said on December 3rd, 2007 at 4:06 am:
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.
Moses Moore said on December 6th, 2007 at 8:26 am:
Is there a distinction between the ARG that is bonded to a schedule/timeline (”alternate” reality) and the ARG that is a filter on elements in the real world (”augmented” reality)?

Wait, I just answered my own question.

There are already alternate reality games that are massively multiplayer with persistent-state worlds: White Wolf’s Mind’s Eye Theatre is the first that comes to mind, followed by the swinging-sticks-in-the-woods LARP games like SOLAR. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to include the Society for Creative Anacronism, although if you don’t think Second Life (big sandbox, no goals) is a game, you won’t accept SCA as one either.

Augmented reality games could be made massively multiplayer, and online, with little effort. ARQuake is the first game that comes to mind, and it’s a negligible step from high-score lists to experience points. Oh! Why didn’t I remember Chore Wars? or PMOG?