ARGfest was a few week­ends ago.  For those not in the know, this is a con­ven­tion for peo­ple who design (both pro­fes­sion­ally and as a hobby) and play Alter­nate Real­ity Games (ARGs).  The most notable ARGs are mar­ket­ing cam­paigns for video games, movies, and TV shows and are played out over medi­ums like web­sites, tele­phones, bill­boards, and real-world events.  Wikipedia has a lot more to say about ARGs than I can sum­ma­rize here.

I got to meet, re-meet (sorry, clay­foot, I’m some­times really dense when it comes to remem­ber­ing things), and reen­counter old ARG friends.

The event kicked off on Fri­day.  Peo­ple were encour­aged to make robot heads (one per­son make a really awe­some cylon head) for an event called Robot Speed Dat­ing, run by the Must Love Robots guys.  Nobody really knew what this was going to entail, but it turned out to be a typ­i­cal lit­tle fun ice-breaker type of game.  Each per­son was given a piece of paper with a puz­zle and some “sub­rou­tine” envelopes and then had to go around and solve other people’s puz­zles.  There was some kind of point sys­tem, and I believe if some­one solved your puz­zle, you got a point?  The puz­zles them­selves tended toward the basic visual word rid­dles, for exam­ple “head” writ­ten on one line and “heels” on the next, and you’d guess it was “head over heals.”  If you got stuck or wanted extra points, you could open a sub­rou­tine enve­lope and fol­low its instruc­tions.  I was with a con­tin­gent of lurk­ers, so didn’t really play, but those that did seemed to be hav­ing a great time.

This was fol­lowed up by the cock­tail party.  I think this party was great, and it was fun to chat with so many peo­ple.  The only thing I dis­liked about it was the price of things at the cash bar.  My mar­tini, while nice, did not feel like it was worth $9.  Kim’s $10 glass of red wine looked like it came from an $8-ish bot­tle.  This was a pretty big WTF.

After this, there was a grandiose plan for Elan to get his blue-LED UFO stunt kite and fly it from the roof of the hotel.  There was only one prob­lem with this plan: the access code to the roof exit.  Nobody could get the door open, and then an official-looking guy (who could have been a jan­i­tor for all any­one knew) strolled by and inad­ver­tently scared every­body off.  As @misuba said: “What made a stair­well full of ARG­ers stop try­ing to brute-force their way onto the roof and run? The guy with the KEY. *sigh* #argfest” An exo­dus to the water­front pro­vided a new locale for the UFO kite, but the wind was not with us.  After a num­ber of failed attempts (and a really funny video — who has the video of the kite smash­ing into the cam­era?), it was decided a break for donuts was in order.  I always get a kick out of see­ing new­bies’ first encoun­ters with Voodoo.  Maple-bacon for the win!  The night was con­cluded with some peo­ple going to the Shang­hai Tun­nel bar for sit­ting and beer­ing and some peo­ple going to the Fez for 80s night.

The pan­els them­selves I have to recount from hazy mem­o­ries and spotty notes, so I will present brief summaries:

• The indie ARG panel was a great opener.  I missed the first lit­tle bit due to a lane clo­sure on the Ross Island Bridge mak­ing my bus late, but what I did see was great.  It fea­tured the Must Love Robots guys and was fun to hear how things unfolded from their per­spec­tive.  It seems that every year there’s a story of a cou­ple of peo­ple doing some­thing cre­ative on the inter­net that pushes the bounds of sto­ry­telling, and then later learn about ARGs.  Pieces of this talk were a mod­ern update to “I’m a what-master?”
• The talk by The Jejune Insti­tute absolutely floored me.  I think this was the sleeper-hit of the whole of ARGfest, per­haps of the whole pre­vi­ous year’s worth of ARGs.  To over-simplify and sup­press spoil­ers, I guess I can say that this is a sort of trail of hidden-in-plain-sight pub­lic art instal­la­tions about San Fran­cisco, with the entry point being crack­pot fliers (think time cube and Alex Chiu’s immor­tal­ity rings crossed with newage sci­en­tol­ogy) with tear-off phone num­bers posted around town.  The cre­ators really wanted the feel of Dis­ney­land — a world with hatches and trap doors — in real life, and from what I could tell of their pre­sen­ta­tion (again, with­out reveal­ing spoil­ers), they were quite suc­cess­ful.  If you are in San Fran­cisco before the end of the year, when it sup­pos­edly gets shut down, look them up; stop by their “induc­tion cen­ter.”  Dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion, they passed out kool-aid in plas­tic cups with abstract designs on them.  Nest­ing two cups in the right way caused the abstracts to com­bine to reveal a mes­sage (“jazz hands” and a time, which coin­cided with a part of their presentation).
• The blur­ring the lines panel was the same old crap on a dif­fer­ent day.  Peo­ple want to take an ARG-like expe­ri­ence and make it “real.”  They want to make a game wherein the player can’t tell it’s a game.  They want a Michael Dou­glas movie.  You know what?  Michael Dou­glas’ char­ac­ter attempted sui­cide to exit that par­tic­u­lar game. It has been shown time and time again that play­ers are uncom­fort­able with a “real” story or game with­out that “wink” from the puppetmaster/author/storyrunner to let them know it’s okay to sus­pend dis­be­lief.  If some­one I don’t know was kid­napped and the kid­nap­pers were send­ing me infor­ma­tion in coded mes­sages in real life, I’d call the cops.  In a game, I’d decode the mes­sages.  I really do not want to be com­pletely immersed in some­one else’s fic­tional world with­out a safe­word, mkay? Thanks for play­ing. Please drive through.
• The trib­ute to Dave Szul­borski was touch­ing.  He was a vision­ary fig­ure in the ARG world and made a last­ing impres­sion on every­one present.
• The Mazda 33 Keys panel was some­what inter­est­ing, but the talk was a lit­tle slow com­pared to the oth­ers and was focused on a game that played out entirely in the French-speaking bits of Canada.
• The Pirate-themed panel was also a lit­tle slow and not as inter­est­ing, as it played out in Ger­man(?) mar­kets, but was a dif­fer­ent take on ARGs.  In this case, it was themed around busi­ness pirates — fic­tional multi­na­tional busi­nesses, bank­ing, embez­zle­ment, and world dom­i­na­tion.  The ARG was focused toward stu­dents and was used by a con­sult­ing com­pany as an assess­ment for cre­ative think­ing, team­work, and social inter­ac­tion.  The results were then used for recruit­ment.  It’s one thing to give some­one a writ­ten test; some peo­ple can just ace such tests and that does not show how you form and work with a team.  It’s another to put them in a real-world sce­nario and watch groups self-organize and see which peo­ple assume lead­er­ship roles.  Over­all, it was a pretty cre­ative appli­ca­tion of the ARG framework.
• The final talk was about the future of ARGs.  One of the pan­elists came from a screen­writ­ing back­ground to ARGs, so brought that sto­ry­telling dynamic with him.  There was talk of “ARG with­out the G” and “ambi­ent fic­tion” (which is such a cool phrase).  For exam­ple: some of the Twit­ter and blog-based fic­tions like The Loose-Fish Project.  There was dis­cus­sion of peo­ple migrat­ing from a one-way moving-picture com­mu­ni­ca­tions device in their liv­ing room to a two-way device by hook­ing it up to a media cen­ter and inter­net con­nec­tion.  There was talk of the cur­rent set of ARGs being like mas­sive rock con­certs.  If you missed Wood­stock, you’re S.O.L.  Sure, there are plenty of tales recount­ing Woodstock/ilovebees/The Beast, but you’ll never expe­ri­ence it first­hand if you missed it.  What some peo­ple want is the ARG equiv­a­lent of an album.  While that is very pos­si­ble and can still be quite fun and is def­i­nitely replayable, it is obvi­ously a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence from a gigan­tic con­cert.  There are still things to be worked out in this realm, but there is cer­tainly demand for, to con­tinue the metaphor, both con­certs and albums.

Din­ner was amaz­ing.  This, I believe, was the first time we had a keynote din­ner, and Jor­dan Weis­man did a won­der­ful job of riv­et­ing us in our seats.  He’s a great sto­ry­teller and it was good to hear about his projects from his per­spec­tive.  Every­one has heard about The Beast, the orig­i­nal ARG, from the per­spec­tives of other peo­ple on the project, but I believe this was the first time he talked about it pub­licly.  It was fun to hear about his Bat­tletech and Vir­tual World ven­tures, as they touched me even before ARGs.  (I worked at Vir­tual World for a few years and some of the ele­ments later woven into ARGs were present there.  We were never allowed to call it sim­ply a game or video game, it was always an “expe­ri­ence.”  We were always in char­ac­ter.) After the keynote, I even got him to sign my old Vir­tual Geo­graphic League book (a sort of fic­tional his­tory book explain­ing how Vir­tual World came to be; com­pletely writ­ten in char­ac­ter and seam­lessly weav­ing in ele­ments from real history.)

Over­all, it was a great con­fer­ence and a great weekend.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Weird Dream
2. ARGfest wrap-up
3. LJProxy: From friend-locked Live­Jour­nal posts to Google Reader
4. ARGfest
5. Round­table: ARGs As Seri­ous Fun

Tagged as: argfest, argfest09, argfest2009, battletech, jejune, jejuneinstitute, loosefish, mustloverobots, redplanet, virtualworld, virtualworldentertainment, vwe