ARGN revisits an earlier article about competition in alternate reality games, aggregating responses to that piece, including this fine Unfiction reflection. We wrote a brief response, then.
I agree with some of the commentators about the importance of cooperation within ARGplay. Indeed, that's one of the key affordances ARGs offer for learning. ARGplay requires collaboration. ARGplay rewards it, grows on it, thrives in collective teamwork, perhaps moreso than any other game.
So I'm interested in the possibilities of creatively, constructively combining competition and collaboration. Let me distinguish several levels or forms of this:
- Is some hybrid of competition and collaboration possible? One team's investigation, for example, trying to exceed a second team's, benefits a third team. There are some ungainly words for this, like collabetition and co-opetition.
- What about synthetic games, bringing together two separate ARGs into one combined game? Imagine, for example, one ARG exploring, say, a mysterious corporation in North America, while another discovers a library-based conspiracy based in Europe. Clues lead each group of layers to the others, as it becomes clear that one of the librarians founded the corporation, building on connections to sustain their agenda.
- Can we interleave ARGplay and puppet mastering, combining roles through a mix of competition and collaboration? Imagine players building up a game, while playing another one; at the same time, another group builds the game content for the first group, while playing their game. It's a reversal of subject (player) and object (game content).
I am reminded of a conversation I had a few years ago with the great novelist Richard Powers (an unsurpassed genius for fiction about information technology). We were discussing gaming and avatars. What he was interested in was having game characters, not player characters, making code. There's that reversal of subject and object.
I'm also thinking of an old, subversive WWII wargame from SPI, covering the last year of the European theater with a killer twist. One player played the advancing Soviet Union's forces, along with the western front Germans, who were fighting to delay the western Allies. The other player played those advancing western Allies (Brits, French, Americans, Canadians), and the eastern front front Germans, striving to delay the advancing USSR. It was a clever solution to the gameplay problem for 1945, because the Nazis don't have a chance of driving off both sides. In terms of this ARG issue, it created an odd collaboration of enemies, and simulated the competition between erstwhile ellies.
- This is exactly the sort of game issue for Major Fun to address.
On a related note, I am resisting the Da Vinci Code game so far, since I am not a fan of the book, with its too-easy puzzles, sexism, shameless lifting of ideas, and sheer dullness.
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