Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Alternate reality game whitepaper

IGDA just published a whitepaper on alternate reality games (ARGs).  It explores ARG typology, antecedents, mechanics, audience, business models, ARGs and academia, and current games.

If the reader will allow me my bias (I wrote one section, and am interviewed in another), it's the best guide to ARGs out there.  It's up to date, rich in content, concise, and covers a great deal of ground. Adam Martin did a great job in cat-herding a wide variety of content and authors.

Thank you to the many Infocult commentators who advised on my antecedent exploration!

Second Life notes

Notes from this week's Second Life explorations -
I've been checking in several times a day, partly for research, partly to learn pedagogies.  That's a sort of discipline, especially when one isn't on a highspeed connection continually, and/or distracted by the physical world.

I'm working through the Unofficial Complete Fool's Guide, which is decent enough (and am waiting for The Official Guide).  I'm preparing some teaching documents for Second Life, aimed at higher education and the liberal arts.  SL is certainly an application which requires some helping out for the average user, especially in academia.
 

I've been exploring the Darkwood Trail, which is very good, and I recommend it (thanks, Nick Noakes!).  That's a scavenger hunt across Second Life.  Following it introduces you to at least a dozen territories, while teaching SL basics, and letting you nab lots of free stuff.  The game flavor is fun and engaging.  And you learn a lot in trying to find the cursed flags: navigation, how to approach strangers for information (something I do naturally, but seems rare in SL), when to fly and when to walk.  This is clearly a pedagogical strategy, and should surprise nobody (think: webquests).

Snapshot from the Trail - while visiting the land of Baku, one passerby decided to rain holocubes down upon us.  Another visitor tried out his new pistol in response:

That kind of random encounter reminds me of street theater.  And of ARGs, of course.

I'm worried about the low number of people I see and read about.  Each time I log in I try to save a copy of that moment's user stats.  They seem to drop down, once you approach people logging in, then plummet when it comes to live users:

I should open up a new category in this blog for Second Life exploration.  Tagging helps, but I might benefit from a department, at least for chronological purposes.

The Grow genre continues

The Grow game series is really a genre, it seems.  After posting about one Grow tribute, I came across another one: tinygrow.  It offers a different logic, more open than the ones focused on a single object.  tinygrow's rules, boundaries, and outcomes are similarly opaque from the start.  Again, it's like a first contact simulation.

Are there other grow-ish games we should know?

PS: I'm archiving these in the NITLE casual games wiki page.

Still more addictive Grow games

Can't get enough Grow games?  Albino Black Sheep has a tribute to Grow game.

I love the way the narrative emerges organically, with so few signals of its outline, genre, intent, timeline.

I'm coming to think that this is yet another Web-native art form.  I can imagine doing this offline, but it would be clumsy, not to mention simply derivative. 

Good first-contact training, this Grow idea.  Heck, might be a good exercise for social relations.

An educational game: the BBC's Viking Quest

Viking Quest is an educational browser game, wherein the player conducts a raid against Lindisfarne.    The narrative is strictly linear, based on a series of constrained, multiple-choice selections, drawing on the ancient Oregon Trail design.  Graphics are elegant and useful; sound is minimal and unobtrusive.  The game presents historical content either as explanations and content for choices (i.e., pick some crew members, and here's why each one is useful) or as cut-scenes between choices (a nice sequence of Viking ship-building, once you've picked a model).
The tone is internal to the quest, rather than summative from outside.  It's quietly positive, not condemning your raid, but neither rollicking in the destruction.
It's very easy to play, after the initial load.  Everything's in the one Flash file.  Then the launch page has prominently-displayed links to other BBC pages on the topic.
Not very Web 2.0: no user contribution of content.  No way to export anything, besides screenshots like the below.
Not very social-gaming-ish: there's no way for players to interact.

My raids have gone well so far, but the king is never happy.

Point and haunt house: Stone of Anamara

The Stone of Anamara is, so far, the first chapter of a Gothic game/story.  You investigate a mysterious house, like an increasing number of point-and-click browser games, in order to explain yourself to the police.  Music and sound effects are excellent.  There's also a nicely done ouija board.

I look forward to chapter two.
(via the splendid Blue Wyvern, once more)

Gothic browser games from Bat Design

Three point-and-click Gothic browser games from Bat Design: Ghost Story, Factory of Fear, and
Atrocitys.  They improve technically and in complexity in that sequence.  Each one sports fine photography of ruined and abandoned places.
The stories are thin, unfortunately, and are structured in a pretty linear fashion.  They feel grim, deterministic, partaking of Gothic melancholy.
c

(via Blue Wyvern)

You are in The Village

This looks interesting: Village, a game about social entrepreneurship.

It might be fun to link with literary texts about village life, like Goldsmith's.

(via Worldchanging)

Fiction is trying to catch up with Colonia Dignidad

Today's case of real life imitating the Gothic concerns Colonia Dignidad, "a secretive, apocalyptic religious cult" (NYT), founded in Chile by ex-Nazis.  Colonia is quite the mix, something right out of modern Gothic, or William S. Burroughs.

Founded in 1961 by a Luftwaffe medic, who fled postwar Germany on accusations of serial child molestation, Colonia featured secrecy, isolation, a compound, cult-like organization, hard agricultural work, segregation by sex, a mysterious leader (titled "Perpetual Uncle"), and lots of weapons.  A powerplant and airport complete the James Bond villain picture.  There are also accusations of harboring Nazis.

Isolation and weapons proved useful to some Chileans in the 1970s.  During Pinochet's dictatorship, DINA used Colonia as a detention, torture, and execution center, not unlike Villa Grimaldi.

Colonia drew unwanted outside attention starting in the 1980s, when an American professor disappeared nearby.

Now it's called Villa Baviera, "Bavarian Village."

(via MetaFilter)

Shadows waning

One social bookmarking project seems to be waning.  I wrote about Shadows last year - indeed, I had fun correcting one bit in an earlier approach on the subject, when Shadows changed its offering overnight.  Shadows was a fun addition to the then-burgeoning social bookmarking field.

Now Flock, my main browser, has decided not to integrate with Shadows any longer.  Comments on the Flock blog have been very critical, with some seeing Flock aligning with Yahoo's apparent social-computing empire-building strategy.  Flock's CEO instead points to Shadows' owner, Pluck, which seems to be shifting their focus to their Blogburst product.  That's good to know.

Shadows loads very slowly tonight.  TechCrunch sees that as well.

I still use Flock.  And del.icio.us for social bookmarking.