The fol­low­ing blog post is my entry into the “ARGs are Seri­ous Fun” round­table dis­cus­sion.  The con­cept is basi­cally this: a topic or prompt is posted some­where (in this case, on Giant Mice) and peo­ple have a few weeks to make a blog post as a response to that topic.  As responses are writ­ten, links to all of them are col­lected together so that you can see and com­ment on what oth­ers have writ­ten on the same topic.  So, here goes…

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I am writ­ing this as “just some guy.”  I am not an aca­d­e­mic, nor is my degree in any­thing close to writ­ing.  The last and most advanced writ­ing class I took, just after Eng­lish 100, was some­thing like Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing 105.  It pretty much con­sisted of writ­ing user man­u­als that are nei­ther Engr­ish nor kit­ten pid­gin.  I prob­a­bly will not be cit­ing ref­er­ences in foot­notes or a bib­li­og­ra­phy or a Works Cited sec­tion or what­ever the MLA has deemed cor­rect and proper these days.  I’ll write.  You’ll read and (hope­fully) be enter­tained.  Deal?  Deal.In the world, there are games and there are puz­zles.  Often, games are social and puz­zles are soli­tary.  Another typ­i­cal view is that games are fun and puz­zles are hard (but “fun” in that they are reward­ing once solved.) Quick!  You, the reader: think of three games!  I bet you came up with things like a fam­ily around a Parcheesi board, a bunch of bud­dies at a poker table, a pair of old men at a chess board in the park, or per­haps a first-person-shooter death­match on the X-Box.  They are usu­ally social and have some bal­ance of skill vs. chance: Chutes and Lad­ders is won entirely by lucky rolls of the dice, whereas poker requires some skill and some good cards, and chess is entirely skill–but they all have one thing in com­mon: mul­ti­ple play­ers work­ing with or against each other.  Now think of three puz­zles!  The term “puz­zle” brings about images of jig­saw pieces, cross­words, sudoku, and the like–more soli­tary behav­ior.  That is not to say that there is a rigid link between game<=>social and puzzle<=>solitary.  While there may have been true in past decades, that line is increas­ingly blurry.  The same com­puter games that allow you to throw grenades at your friends and neigh­bors or play poker against some­one a thou­sand miles away also allow you to play in single-player mode.  Puz­zles, too, can be quite fun in a social envi­ron­ment: a group of friends around a cof­fee table with a dif­fi­cult New York Times Sun­day cross­word, a fam­ily around a card­table assem­bling a large and com­plex jig­saw over Christ­mas break, and a dis­parate group of indi­vid­u­als across the inter­net try­ing to find the right sequence of com­mands to unlock a chunk of immer­sive fic­tion.  Wait… wha?  Yeah–this is where ARGs enter into my monologue.

Not all ARGs employ puz­zles, but those that do almost always do so with the puz­zles being a cat­a­lyst for get­ting groups of peo­ple to come together–much like the group of friends around the cross­word.  ARG puz­zles are typ­i­cally so large, dif­fi­cult, and com­plex that no one per­son is expected to solve the whole thing.  Col­lab­o­ra­tion is the key.  Solv­ing can be a lot of work, require some seri­ous skill (and usu­ally a won­drous “Eureka!” moment), but all of that seri­ous work can be quite fun and is rewarded by unlock­ing the next piece or chap­ter of a larger story.  The puz­zles are seri­ous work, but the col­lab­o­ra­tion and the pay­off from com­ple­tion is extremely fun.

With ARGs, even folks that are not “puz­zle people”–who always say “I’m only in it for the story; I don’t do the puzzles”–end up with some seri­ous knowl­edge and skill from some­thing as fun and super­flu­ous as “a story told over the inter­net.”  With most ARGs, there is at least one point where a piece of infor­ma­tion of ques­tion­able authen­tic­ity appears.  This could be a web­site that may not be in-game (either through people’s mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion or by delib­er­ate game­jack­ing.) It could be a curi­ous email.  At any rate, nobody knows for cer­tain whether the item is part of the game with­out employ­ing some geek skills to do a lit­tle research.  These skills used to be known only to a small sub­set of geeks, pro­gram­mers, and inter­net archi­tects.  ARGs are help­ing expand that knowl­edge to every­day peo­ple.  Folks that do not know how to write a sin­gle line of code are now quite pro­fi­cient in per­form­ing WHOIS searches to look up DNS records, exam­in­ing and inter­pret­ing email head­ers like a foren­sic sci­en­tist, and view­ing HTML source code for any­thing that looks out of place.  And, you know what?  These new skills have the side effect of spilling over into other areas of inter­net usage.  Peo­ple whose knowl­edge of the inter­net con­sisted entirely of “if it’s under­lined, it’s a link” started play­ing ARGs, learned these seri­ous skills, and can now eas­ily iden­tify SPAM, prank, and phish­ing web­sites and email as if it was second-nature.  I per­son­ally know sev­eral peo­ple who learned the power and ease of col­lab­o­ra­tion via wiki because of ARGs–and these peo­ple then went on to set up wikis in their work­place intranets.  This is all absolutely amaz­ing!  A piece of enter­tain­ment, a diver­sion, with such ben­e­fi­cial side-effects!

At this point, I feel like I am writ­ing the essay por­tion of the SAT test and should con­clude with a clos­ing para­graph say­ing some­thing like “and this is why ARGs are seri­ous fun.” quod erat démōnstrandum

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Tagged as: fun, roundtable, serious