Vex Appeal is a weblog and collection of projects by Guy Parsons, a game designer, online community and digital strategy dude in London, England. Read more about the saucy butcher boy here.
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101 things in 1001 days
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previously on vexappeal:
Hack Day Now With Added Extra Parsons KO Scanner comics Eww, Mimzy. Can you do it? Eye eye, captain Blech Through a scanner, darkly A Certain Wigga Mobile Clubbing, Zombie Mobbing
Everything is an alternate reality (apart from reality)
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Interesting post at 3pointD.com:
I've always found myself rubbed the wrong way by this "alternate reality" moniker. But it wasn't until I started getting my alternate reality on, via Walker, that I realized why. What's going on in all these cases looks to me less like "alternate reality" than it does like fiction, and fiction being formulated on the same level as broadcast media like television - i.e., it's just the same kind of fiction that's happening in a TV show like Law & Order, for instance, only with the audience involved in writing the story as it goes along. From some angles, it looks like there isn't any such thing as an alternate reality game at all - there's only the fiction / narrative / media of the future.And for what it's worth, I entirely agree. It becomes less and less clear what people mean by 'alternate reality' or, even worse 'This Is Not A Game', which in every recent usage I've come across is almost completely inaccurate.
ARGs are only self-denying in the same fourth wall sense that Jack Bauer doesn't continually quip "But hey, all this doesn't *really* matter - it's only a TV show!" at the camera.
Sure, this narrow conception does apply in some ways. For instance, Mind Candy's recent dalliances with Paul Denchfield were in some ways very 'real', almost hoax-y, in their implementation. But other examples people point at - take the everpresent case-study ARG, The Beast - are far weaker arguments for this sort of thing. Sure, it didn't bang on about being a game all over the place, but it was about androids and stuff from the 23rd Century. It didn't need to. Conversely, take shows like The Office - that, if you think about it, have no special indicators that it's not an actual documentary - and how quickly we've become accustomed to that particular device. Imagine if we called them alternate reality comedies. Yuck!
I think the other place this idea comes from - that ARGs have some special status, seperated taxonomically from other fiction - is their use of mixed-media. Because they're usually executed using media that are traditionally associated with 'real stuff' (blogs, emails, that sort of thing) but I think it's dubious to classify based on the medium, rather than the message. And again, for 99% of ARGs, the message is sufficiently fantastic as to be easily categorised as fiction by anyone remotely interweb-savvy.
ARGs are made up of so many neat things:
- OK, so one of them is the blurred fictive nature of the storytelling (eg: Blair Witch Project)
- puzzles, especially collaborative puzzles (Perplex City, A Treasure's Trove)
- mixed media (like - OMG - Twitter! or 360 storytelling)
- community, online crossing into meatspace (the Ze Frank forums, or flashmobs)
In short? The moniker's a bit ugly. Then again, so is "soap opera", so maybe it'll be around for a while yet...
(In other ARG theory stuff, Adrian writes about epistolary fiction. I have thoughts on this for another time...)
Edit: Curly quotes pwnd me, sorry.
Labels: arg