Its a live treasure trail adventure, which we designed to coexist alongside other real world events.
We ran it concurrently with a club night at the Cardiff Arts Institute.
i don't want to dissect it here, although I'm sure I will eventually, but we are still postmortem-ing it as we speak, and redeveloping it for its next bigger and better outing in Bristol at the Old Vic as part of Forest Fringe and Mayfest.
One of the key elements of the game is the fact that we do not pre-announce it. Its hidden from plain view and waits for its participants to come to it, to stumble on it and become gradually and unexpectedly drawn into play. There's a whole slew of reasons as to why we chose to do it like that.
Partly inspired by an ARG (alternate reality game) aesthetic which revel in their own duplicity and the blurring of the lines, or 'the curtain' as it has become known which is an increasingly useful term when referring to gameplay that takes place within a permeable world. The curtain is a term usually designed to refer to the curtain behind which the so called 'puppet master' is hiding.
The 'puppet master' in turn a term used to refer to game designers of ARGs who create the events and trails that the players follow.
The role of the Curtain (here with t capital 'c') is an uncertain one. The players become confronted by it when they stumble upon a game. Traditionally ARGs are not mass appeal media, or perhaps more appropriately transmedia. They are stumbled upon, found, discovered ect.. Although they are become more prolific and you could go and join one right now, to be in one from the beginning you need to have discovered it, hidden and embedded in something else.
The initial moment of exchange between player and game is left almost entirely to the player. The game puts out its offer and the take up is then up to the potential player. There is no financial exchange, no deliberate act of going to play, rather the curtain is suddenly erected and the player finds themselves confronted with it after one click on a website too many.
Although it strikes me that the curtain analogy is perhaps not fully exploited as it hides not only the 'puppet master' but also the game itself. The players of ARGs are in a constant negotiation with the very nature of the games' invasion into reality, the curtain hiding not just the PM but the player's own reason to participate. To see too much of a game or of its mechanics behind the curtain is to ruin the game and not just your own enjoyment but that of others as well.
But the mechanics are often obvious, although hidden in mysteries and clues, the players discuss the game's fiction and unfiction alongside each other accepting the immersive experience as one of play and discovery and as they step closer to and then step away from the curtain which not only hides the Puppet Master and his machines but is the game itself projected onto the curtain. Participation and active play is essential, as is a willingness to suspend disbelief in the mechanics and actions necessary to undertake the game.
I come from a theatre background, and they struggle with that over there. Matt Truman wrote on the Guardian blog recently about immersion and immersive theatre's inability to take us to certain edges of human emotion and to truly swallow us up. I often think that this is in part because of people's confusion of participatory and immersive experiences as simulation. To look for tangible reality in a place of artifice is a lost cause, to perhaps hope for a heightened experience as afforded through participation, interaction, and increased activity (at least compared to traditional theatre) is perhaps better. Immersion is an oft misunderstood term, or at least the manner in which i understand it. The act of reading a book or watching a film can in and of itself be immersive. Immersion does not mean actually doing, it means being drawn in. Immersive theatre however has become all too often a short hand for simulation. Expectations of 3dimensional mimetic performances and environments, rather than poetic aesthetics that use the increased sense of presence afforded by interaction to enhance or re-imagine the relationship between viewers and their work.
And this is what draws me to games these days, an honesty in the interaction between player and work, defining them as audience, agent and player all at once, happy to skip between the roles in a fluid transition of participation without getting caught up in the meta conversations.
And the immersion that players of ARGs allow themselves to experience through the act of play, to engage and solve mass narratives as communal activities was a big inspiration to Follow the Bird. But we wanted to reduce the visibility of the curtain at the outset of the game. How can participatory games take up players by creating a permeable membrane between their reality and the reality created by play? And at what point do they stop being 'civilians' and become 'players'.
There was a key moment in the game we performed last week. A point where the initial group of people who had taken up our invitations of a free drink found the note hidden in their ice cube and texted the number on it where they consciously or not became players. From there on in it was a negotiation between them, the game, and the club night they had expected to experience.
By wanting to pick up the players on the night of the game itself through accident and people's innate curiosity we knew out biggest potential obstacle was the friction with the real world. People coming to a club night with their friends or in couples stumbling upon a curious invitation will constantly be measuring the two experiences up against each other. The experience of the expected activity compared to the experience of the acquired activity. The game seeks to maintain them in a border land between the two, and at its best transforms the expected activity (here the clubbing experience) enhancing it, allowing it to be viewed through the prism of a ludic activity, embedding it with a secondary narrative, that of both the story and the meta narrative of play itself.
It isn't that different to pervasive games that take in cityscapes, allowing players to reinterpret their relationship to their environment through the act of play and ludic spatial practice. In Follow the Bird we wanted to re-imagine not only the participant's geography but their relationship to the act of clubbing in this context.
In order to do so the experience itself was placed in a constant moment of tension and unconscious comparison. Put simply either it was interesting enough to keep playing, or the bar and dancefloor held a stronger allure, and for some it did.
This tension was heightened by the fact that most participants had not arrived consciously to play the game but stumbled upon it whilst already in the process of 'being out'. Mainly this led me to think about why we play?
We talked early on about the sense of agency we would be instilling in our players. What were we providing them with to make them want to push on through to the end, and stay in play. I (and everyone else) have talked at length about the culture of achievement points, about the faceless and cynical psychological trick of awarding points for actions, which it turns out is all it takes to motivate some people. At its worst it is exemplified by financially manipulative games like Farmville, or even this. The Conservative website Cash Gordon website gives you points for performing simple tasks such as linking to an article or posting the website's campaign message to your facebook profile, which is enough to motivate people to generate 227,980 points. That's only 1754 members, but still the main motivator is a simple point giving system, that some people have actually described as fun, reading PDF documents and linking to them on your Facebook profile is never fun, unless you get points for doing it.
So what was the motivator for our players and why would they choose to participate. The most obvious is that the game itself had to make people want to play, building the pace and difficulty of the puzzles and actions they needed to undertake into the game in a ramping scale. The pleasure for us had to come from the act of playing, from the thrill of being part of this parallel experience to the expected activity. and that was in and of itself relatively self evident. But what were they playing towards? A resolution, be it narrative, or structural in game terms was needed to conclude the experience, and in the end there was a 'winner' of sorts although what she won the opportunity to do was debatably not everyone's idea of winning. But built in along the way were a series of gates that simply selected and cut off players who did not make it in time. If you didn't get to a room in time and meet the performer or solve a riddle the game closed around you and that was it. So in a way the game itself was propelled along by a series of small 'wins' which simply meant that you increased your play time.
So why do you choose to play? Is it curiosity, the fact that you might win even though you are uncertain as to what winning means? In the next incarnation we are embedding a narrative far deeper into the game and hope to use the momentum of human interest to propel the game forward, but we also want to be much harsher with the gates, cutting down from 100 player to 20 within the first twenty minutes of play.
By not subscribing the piece to a traditional financial and audience model, where people pay to play and turn up expecting a certain amount of guaranteed experience we are consequently freer to mess around with some of the core concepts of play and game. Part of the play around the game curtain in the ARG world is exactly how deep the game goes and the uncertainty of the expectations is part of the excitement for players allowing them to speculate, experiment and in the end construct a large part of the game experience themselves. And although that negotiation of game and real life overlapping presents a bigger challenge in terms or retention, when successfully implemented we hope that the rabbit hole will appear much deeper.
No comments:
Post a Comment