TINAG, For My Part

This is a response to Michael Andersen’s opinion piece for ARGNet and an endorsement of Jan Libby’s comments thereon.

I’m pretty new to the developer community of ARGs (transmedia gaming, pervasive games, immersivisated gaming experience-stories, or whatever buzzwords tickle your fancy). I attended my first ARGFest in Bloomington last year, where I had the pleasure of meeting many pleasant, accepting, and talented game creators and players. For the most part, my life in ARGs has been limited to creating rather small-scale games with my closest friends and family. We’ve made a few, and each time we’re shocked at the new complications we find. It’s a rich and rewarding kind of game design, and a challenging way to tell a story.

I’ll always contend that what makes telling a story through an ARG so hard is the constant flux introduced by players. An open mind and nimble creativity are essential. However, I believe that a firm, guiding philosophy like TINAG (however you interpret it) bears equal importance.

Now, I’m definitely part of this second (third?) wave of “newbie” developers and designers who know too little about the genre’s roots and probably misuse the term, at least in the eyes of the ensconced veterans. However, I’ve been through the design and development process several times. I’ve had successes and failures. I’ve gone back to school to learn more about storytelling, and now I teach undergraduate students storytelling for games. Timid as I’ve been in the past about getting into such discussions, I think I’ve earned the chance to weigh in on this one, if for no other reason than that I may well be part of the group named in Andersen’s final move to retire the term.

So here’s where I stand: Jan Libby was right when she commented on the post, saying, “…when someone, like an aspiring PM or Dev, latches onto the idea of TINAG and twists your definition or my definition (and so on), they are testing the boundaries of the idea.”

That’s the essential element here, in my view. Trying to retire a term this way, especially one that serves as a succinct and comprehensive design philosophy, smacks of an elitism I’ve heard several indie designers lament. Who cares how new developers and designers interpret the term? If it inspires them as storytellers, I’m all for it. If they tell terrible stories without structure, they shouldn’t expect that anyone will pay much attention.

Andersen has responded to Libby’s comment, saying that he thinks confusion over the term serves as a barrier to innovation in the ARG space. I can’t imagine that’s true, though I doubt there’s much evidence to support one view or the other. I’m open to the discussion.

For the record, I love ARGnet, and I enjoy the coverage Michael Andersen offers. I know first hand what a good thing the site does for indie developers. The times our games were featured on the site, our traffic and player enthusiasm saw considerable spikes. Moreover, I think the majority of the post in question provides an informative history of the term.

I don’t want to offer my own definition of TINAG any more than I want the undisputed ARG news site of record telling designers to drop the idea. For my part, though, TINAG will remain a guiding principle as I design my games and write my stories. I will continue to tell my students to mind its implications when they express interest in ARGs as a creative outlet. Finally, I suspect that should we abandon the term altogether, this community would miss TINAG as shorthand for a game’s ability to immerse the player without overt betrayals of its fictional, ludic nature. Let’s be honest; #TINAG is much easier to tweet.

If you care about this discussion at all, you should follow both Michael Andersen and Jan Libby on Twitter. I’m fond of both feeds.

A Year Like a Month

This is the last weekend of the the last month of my year-long MFA program. It moved about as quickly as any part of my life has, and I’m incredibly excited about the skills I’ve learned and the things I’ve accomplished. I completed a narrative draft of a video game concept, and I’m already mixing my time rewriting sections of it and beginning  with new ideas.

A year isn’t a long time in the world of graduate degrees. It’s pretty short, actually. The number of things I went through in that time, though, has surprised me. The thesis portfolio options were varied, offering a chance to learn the ropes for writing nearly any kind of entertainment media.

I went in thinking I would write another alternate reality game. After a month, I was convinced that I should write a television show that could employ supplemental, transmedia fiction heavily. Then, during my research course, I came up with a crazy idea for a video game that I really want to play. I never looked back.

Pistolsniffers is already back to the hard, complicated work of writing and planning ARGs. We’re planning some good fun for LARP HARD’s second chapter, so everyone can look forward to that. After so much time dealing with rigid story and dialogue branches, it’s proving difficult for me to get back in the mindset of such an open-ended, inspiration-dependent medium.

After a year gone by so quickly that it felt like a month, though, I think I’m ready for that challenge and plenty of other ones.

A Pistolsniffer Update

Well, well, well. It looks like old Winston has an update over on the Pistolsniffer Industries website.

I’ll post more about what this all means soon. For now, make sure you’re following @pistolsniffer on Twitter.

…. and, hey! While you’re over there, why not follow me, too?

Launching the New Game

So, as you may or may not have noticed, things are happening in the world of Pistolsniffer Industries. Randy and Earl have gone into the woods for a semi-secret adventure (they seem to have a remarkably difficult time keeping secrets, don’t they?), and the public face of the group will take a break to let the game breathe on its own. Until the new game ends, if you see a tweet from @pistolsniffer, it’s probably an attempt to clear something up or gently redirect play. Hopefully that won’t be necessary.

Jane Doh just posted a wonderful article about us on ARGNet. Her post coincides with the first week of our trailhead, and we’re all thrilled that she took the time and interest to write it. If you’re wondering whether the new activity from Randy and Earl or the new Sticky Itchers Shower Scrub web site is a sign of the new game, consider this confirmation. The new game begins now, and we hope you’ll join us. It may be the silliest thing we’ve ever done, but we’ve put more into it in every way than we have into any of our past projects.

When trailhead ends (it won’t be long), we’ll be looking at around 2 months of game. This may change based on how quickly our players move through the content we’ve created, but the plan is for 8 weeks.

As we set out on the new adventure, I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who has helped us or supported us along the way. We make these games to bring a little laughter and fun to the world, and the supportive feedback we get is tremendous. Thank you all so very much.

Now let’s play!

Building the Game: Music

Where the music lives

I write the music for our games, and so far that’s been an easy task. For our next game, however, I’m having to do a good bit more of that than ever before.

In our previous games, I’ve added accent music, light theme music, and not much else. You can see what I mean if you listen to Creepy Luny Inn‘s walking series of notes, which underscore her opening narrative in each episode. You can also hear a snippet of Randy and Earl’s theme song at the beginning of each Sticky Itchers video. Beyond that, I haven’t ever had to add much. Since video is a big part of upcoming project, that’s all about to change.

My parents got me a guitar when I was in 6th grade. I’m not going to recount my entire experience learning to play. Let’s just say that it was a long time ago, and I’ve learned a lot about the instrument. Now I’m (slowly) learning to play piano. Hopefully I’ll be able to combine the two with Rob‘s drum skills to make many fine musical numbers to supplement the games. (It’s worth mentioning that my good friend, Bubba, is invaluable in developing and accenting any music I write.)

So here’s the real question: How about an ARG soundtrack?

I mentioned in a previous post that we’re looking at ways to monetize the games without looking like we’re only out for your money or making our games pay-to-play. The upcoming game may not have enough music to constitute an entire album of songs, but perhaps we could throw together a low-priced half-album to serve as a soundtrack. Would that be something you’d buy?

I think I would, if it were a game I liked. I love the Gregory Brothers, and even though I can access their Auto-Tune the News goodness for free any time I’d like, I still bought several tracks to show support.

Let me know what you think.

The Latest on Our Next Game

Things are heating up in the land of Pistolsniffer (I don’t think I’ll ever stop giggling over our name).

There have been plenty of developments in the last week or so that really excite us, and they’ve given a fresh jolt of energy to our efforts. We were so pleased with our recent video shoot and the footage we got that we’ve decided to go back to the well. Our location and equipment make this a pretty big decision, since both require a significant investment of time and energy. We’ve got some great folks involved in this production (in addition to the great folks on the team), and everyone is bringing enthusiasm and positive attitudes to the process.

This is shaping up to be a very fun experience for us. We’re making a game that I would love to play.

I have a couple of pieces of information I’d like to release/confirm about our next game:

• Randy and Earl will be back again (thanks to a few special players)
• As I mentioned before, there will be significantly more video in this game
• The game will last about as long as our previous ARGs, which is around 8 weeks.
• There will be a week or two of trailhead/antecedent action to build up the world of the game. This is when you’ll find out the game’s theme and basic character set.
• The game will be complete before the end of the year.

I know it’s not much, but I wanted to get some information out there. We’re very excited about the upcoming project, and we hope you are too. Feel free to ask questions, and I’ll answer what I can.

Building the Game: The Web

Pistolsniffer.com is up and running in all its glory. It represents a lot of work, so I hope you’ll take some time to poke around and let me know what you think. I’d love to get some feedback on how we can improve it. Feel free to send any thoughts or suggestions to mike@pistolsniffer.com.

My last couple of posts have dealt with the process, decisions, and challenges of making alternate reality games (ARGs). In this post, I want to get into the digital end of these games. It’s important stuff. If ARGs were football games, the Internet would be the field. I know that newspapers, billboards, radio, television, movie theaters, and all sorts of other media get involved; none of those would work very well, though, without the foundation the Internet provides.

That is, of course, why these games are part of the conversation about new media. It’s funny, because some of the coolest moments in ARGs come when puppet masters (the people pulling the strings/putting on the game) make use of old media. The payphones in I Love Bees were what hooked me, and they’re more or less obsolete. (For the record, in case anyone responsible for that idea ever reads my blog, I think the payphones were the most inspired choice in the history of our young genre.)

So what goes into a good website for an ARG? That’s the biggest question around, at least for me. I’ve been building my web design skills as I learn to make games, and I’m not being modest when I say that I’ve made some real stinkers. I’m getting better, though.

The best sites I’ve seen have used Flash, Silverlight, or extensive javascript to add interactivity to the page. Now that HTML5 is becoming the new standard, I expect to see some shift in this regard. The key here is that the site needs to react to the user. Since the user is the player, the site needs to have some number of moving parts that a player can manipulate or else they’re not really playing. They’re reading.

Of course, I’m not saying that the site has to be interactive no matter what. Blogs, YouTube channels, and static pages with images, text, and codes all have their places. However, the best games (in my view) have always had an interactive, mysterious page as an anchor. I’ve already professed my affection for 42 Entertainment (the folks who made I Love Bees), but it’s worth noting that their games have been excellent in this regard. Year Zero, in particular, continued this practice.

If you’re a fan of our games, you’re probably noticing that I’m talking about something we’ve never done. Before I close out this discussion of the web and its importance to ARGs, I ought to touch on how we plan to use it moving forward. In my first Building the Game post, I mentioned that we’re bringing video into our next game more than we did in our previous ones. This is a much easier change to make than adding interactive sites would be. Frankly, I’m still learning HTML and CSS, and becoming a flash developer is a bit above my pay grade.

Our games have used Flash countdowns and interfaces that require passwords or codes, but they’re never the anchor of the game. That’s because I’m not yet confident that my work with Flash can be effective enough to serve as our first interaction with the players. I’m still thinking about making that leap for our next game. If you’re one of our players, tell me what you think. Has our Flash been effective? How can we improve it? What would you like to see that we haven’t done yet?

Now’s the time, because our next game is approaching quickly.