The tilte

The final version of my proposal was submitted a few days ago. So, it is time to give some more details about my project.

The title of my dissertation is:

Emerging Interactivity: Collective Intelligence and Immersive Aesthetics in Alternate Reality Game.

The main inspiration is from my guru of ARGs Jane McGonigal and partly from her presentation given in TED this year.

The main issue that I am going to explore in my dissertation is interactivity in ARGs.

• I am going to explore the game community as a new rising form of Collective Intelligence.

• I will examine the new form of Immersion called This Is Not A Game (TINAG), created and used by
ARGs designers.

• I will compare and examine connections between those two aspects of this game as main forces creating a new form of interactivity in and outside the game.

These are roughly the main points. However, I feel like I should make it clearer. In a few sentences, the phenomenon of collective intelligence is as long as human history, but at the present time the internet bring it into new, easy and everyday level. As a collective in the Internet we are able to achieve completely new goals, for instance Wikipedia. On the other hand our intellectual potential is still too fragmented, unused on the Internet. I believe, this may seem a little utopian, that if we used a potential which gives us the internet, as a civilization we would be able to collectively solve many problems that plague us. The first ARG community ‘cloudmakers’ had shown that potential. Jane McGonigal did two ARGs which also bring some taste of global collective work on serious problems in the form of games. That is my inspiration.

I will try to analyze the ARGs community from that point of few – Collective Intelligence. I also assume the TINAG as a new form of immersion, has been moved the game through the plane of fiction into the real world, everyday life, and is the main stimulant of formation of giant groups of players intellectually very dedicated to solving the problems and obstacles.

In my research I am going to study this phenomenon from a few aspects. I am going to look at this from sociological, psychological, philosophical points of view and of course from the point of view of new media studies.

I am planning to conduct the online questionairre among the ARGs players, and also I will analyze the ARGs community players on their games group website, and study their progress and behaviour during the games.

ARG Community

When gamers interact with their environments… probing often takes the form of seeking out the limits of the situation, the points at which the illusion of reality breaks down, and you can sense that it’s all just a bunch of algorithms behind the curtain.

                                                      Steven Johnson (2005), “Everything Bad for You Is Good for You”

I have not written this blog for a long time. This does not mean that nothing has happened around my research for my dissertation. 

I finished my last post with Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky’s concept of Zone of Proximal Development and scaffolding. What seems to be quite an appropriate choice to understand how and why the ARG community works.  However, in order to support my psychological line of dissertation I have found another psychologist Erice Berne. In his book “Games People Play: The psychology of Human Relationship” he investigates motives behind our relationships and exploring the role that we try to play and also the social connotation between our behavior and roles we are forced to play. I know that seems to be irrelevant to my subjects but I am looking for a general psychological explanation of the needs to act in real life, find the motivation behind playing in real life, and look closer at social interrelation (in the aspect of a game). Also for the same reason I will look at other book “Man. Play and Games” by Roger Caillois, the French sociologist, who was studying the sociology of play and game. 

Very inspiring and helpful turned out article 'This Is Not a Game': Immersive

Aesthetics and Collective Play’ Jane McGonigal (2003), which is fully dedicated to the phenomenon of the first ARG community and studying their motivations and behaviors during their first immersive (ARG) game and their aspiration after that.

Among many of papers about ARG I have found the massive work of International Game Developers Association named “Alternative Reality Game White Paper” (2006) to be very useful.

This is a collaborative work of scholars and game expert considering in depth many aspects of ARG such as types, methods & mechanics, business models, studying audiences, and educational & philosophical aspects of ARG. 

Another paper “Participant Roles in Socially Expanded Games” from two Scandinavian scholars Markus Montola and Annika Waern discuss an issue that is very close to my subject. In this research they study how pervasive games have invited bystanders into participation and general social expansion in pervasive games.

‘Collective Intelligence’ in ARG is a subject of study of three other scholars, Kenton O’ Hara, Hazel Grian and John Williams. In their work “Participation, Collaboration and Spectatorship in an Alternate Reality Game” they analyze how the narrative is produced and progressed through collective player interaction and how the experience is created through a collaborative suspension of disbelief. This paper explores aspects of collective participation among players, the motivations underlying such participation and the factors that shape these contributions, and this is going to be my main line of dissertation. But my final title will be read in next few days.

I have just received a book that I have been waiting for a couple of weeks, and now it is time to start to read it.

Ryan, Marie-Laure(2001), “Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media”  

MODERN DON QUIXOTE

“In short, he so buried himself in his books that he spent nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits. He filled his mind with all that he read in them, with enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, torments, and other impossible nonsense; and so deeply did he steep his imagination in the belief that all the fanciful stuff he read was true, that… he decided… to turn knight errant and travel through the world with horse and amour in search of adventures.”

                               Don Quixote de la Mancha


                                                                                                                                    Vision Fine Arts Gallery

The life of Don Quixote, living 150 years after the invention of the printing press, is a clear example of the dangerous power of books that creates world, sometimes even ‘more real than reality’. Then, almost 350 years later Regent Roddenberry reveals to the world his new vision of the literature. The creator of “Start Trek” sends the crew of starship “Voyager”, for recreation and entertainment, into the holodeck, the digital cave where they can be any fictional character from any book, or story. The holodeck can be programmed any time you wish to travel to new places, or be a new character. Any time you wish to change the ‘book’. A ‘few’ years later we were the witnesses to the birth of World Wide Web. The magical tool that with a few clicks is able to take us instantly into a medieval village or to the center of flying city in XXXVI century. Digital media can take us to a place where we can act out our fantasies. We have our ‘holodecks’ now on our desktops. We are now the modern Don Quixote, with digital windmills.

Ok, that is more or less what I have been doing last week. I have been looking for some proof that I am following a good path, the true idea. The Idea that good literacy narrative is able to work as a Virtual Reality, is able to transport us, of course depending on our fantasy, into a magical and pleasurable place, is able to give us the experience of Immersion. I have done a little research about the history and theory of the definitions of Immersion. I found a few interesting concepts.

1997 – Coomans and Timmermanns ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Virtual Reality User Interfaces’

“The feeling of being deeply engaged where participants enter a make-believe world as if it is real.”

1997 – Janet Murray ‘Hamlet on the Holodeck’

“Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool – the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.”

2002 – Marie-Laure Ryan ‘Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity and Electronic Media’

“…immersion is the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous, language-independent reality populated with live human beings.”

2002 – Steve Poynter ‘Immersed in the News’

“What’s immersive? It can be roughly defined as story presentation that allows the Internet user to interact with story elements or data. Instead of ‘reading’ a story online, the user gets to ‘do’ something –and in the process learn, and better understand the topic”

2003 – Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman “Rules of Play”

“The Immersion fallacy is the idea that the pleasure of media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant into an illusory, simulated reality. According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is party of an imaginary world.”


However, ARG creators are using a different tactic of immersion named after the first ARG game “Beast” (2001) TING (This Is Not Game). Then I have been studying elements of gaming, especially what makes a game a game. Very helpful in this point was an article by Jesper Juul: "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness"(2003) from Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings.

The next step was to start looking in wider context. Because if it is not a game than what? The first clue comes with the article written on unification.com, by award-winning science-fiction/fantasy writer Sean C. Staccy, who wrote the story for first ARG game “the Beast”. In his blog post “The Puppet master-Player Communication Dynamic in Alternate Reality Gaming and Chaotic Fiction”,


“Alternate Reality Game is about telling and producing a story while the audience interacts with it. In some cases, this means that audience member may converse with fictional characters. In other cases, it means that ideas produced by player brainstorming session might be incorporated into the plot.”


This citation gives me two main lines of studying. Firstly, that the ARG is a story, a new form of narration, transmedia storytelling. A book told through all possible media and even beyond them. The second thought was that this story is interactive, like a cyber drama, or interactive fiction, but what make it different from all existing new forms of interactive storytelling is that ARG engages players to act in real life, or in other words, real life is the interface of the game. And the second difference is that ARG forces player to act collectively, and this element of ARG makes this game as interactive as a hypertext. Players become authors of a game.


To understand these few aspects in depth I have started to read a couple of books:

Janet H. Murray (1997) “Hamlet on Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace”

Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) “Narrative across Media. The Language of Storytelling”


I also have a list of authors and websites from one of scholar from our New Media department, places where I should start looking for some examples of Interactive Fiction and some important authors and theorist in this field. There are a few places to look:

Nick Montfort; Denis Jerz; Carolyn Handler Millere (in her new edition of book (2008) “Digital Storytelling, Second Edition: A creator's guide to interactive entertainment” she argues that ARG is a form of evolution of IF), or sites like ifarchive.com, directory.eliterature.org


There is another aspect of ARG which was predicted a few years before the first ARG – “The Beast” in Janet H. Murray’s 1997 book “Hamlet on Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace”. In this book she predicts that VR – based interactive drama can match both the entertainment and the educational value of literary narrative. And along with the first ARG the Internet collaboration of players presented a huge potential and a phenomenon of collective intelligence. It was a group of players of more than 7000 who gather under umbrella of website cloudmakers.org. The phenomenon of massive collaboration is still studied (Jean McGonigal has done this for the last nine years) and even creates a new genre of ARG that tries, through the global collaboration of players, to solve the real global problems. So, for this study I moved back to the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. His outstanding achievement in the field of development psychology, child development, and education, I think are very accurate to this phenomenon. I am talking about his two innovations on the fields of development psychology, which could be applied to massive collaboration in ARG. That is a concept of Zone of Proximal Development and related to this idea of Scaffolding, in this case inside of the group of players.


If think that is all for this week.

INTO RABBIT HOLE

As the title of this post indicates, I have made a decision. I have finally decided to write my dissertation on the Alternate Reality Game. There are a few factors that convinced me to do this.
First of all, I have realized that I am not only interested in this topic, I am passionate, or even obsessed. When I started looking for some more sources and academic papers, I became totally immersed into the world of ARG. That should be sufficient for all the other arguments for why I have chosen this subject, but there is more. My doubts about a lack of sources and academic papers were premature. The ARG seems to be not only the temporary trend in the ground of gamers. ARG is in the constant process that develops and transfers. From small games made by groups of fans, through to the games designed for global players (The Lost Rings), and even to global activist games aiming to solve the global problems (World Without Oil, or Evoke). ARG is also used as a powerful tool in the world of advertisement, with enormous success (“The Art Of The Heist” – Audi, or “33 Keys” – Mazda), for this reason ARG is sometimes wrongly called a viral marketing tool. ARG is doing great, and as some voices in this field proclaim, it seems to be some alternative for gamers and marketing tools for this century.
For the same reason there are some books fully dedicated to ARG, like the Dave Szulborski book “This is not a game. A guide to Alternate Reality Gaming” (2005), or “Beyond Reality: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming” by John Gosney (2005). However, as I mentioned also the scholars started to be interested in this field and there are enough journal essays and research to support my dissertation. A guru of the ARG and master of design this games, Jane Evelyn McGonigal is a games researcher, and a future forecaster for games, and also very active Doctor of Philosophy, with the dissertation “This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” and many others publications.


However, I still have not decided the exact field or the title for my dissertation. I am considering two main areas: Immersion elements in ARG and how and why they affect players, and Analyzing ARG as a transmedia, interactive story which is read and written by the players, like a hypertext. Next week I will bring more precise answers because I have a couple of meetings with lecturers from our school who are specialist in the field of hypertext, interactive fiction, multimedia and new media in general.


But one is sure: I am in the rabbit hole.


There are few more examples of ARG from the masters and fathers of this gender "42 Entertainment"

42 Entertainment

 The Dark Knight

                                                       42 Entertainment

 

                                                         NIN: Year Zero 

Svergies Television; Sweden

The Truth About Marika

 (won an International Interactive Emmy Award for Best Interactive TV-service in 2008)

week1

My primary idea for a dissertation was a creative work from a field of New Media. The plan was to make a hypermedia story. It had to be a tale based on transmedia form including elements of films, graphics, hypertext and wikis from across the internet, with a multiple choice way of reading. However, after a short amount of research on this topic and assessment of my knowledge and skills I decided I would prefer to write about it rather than do it.

Over this week I have tried to formulate a few potential questions or topics from this field, but always ended back at the subject that I had superficially studied last year. This Is Alternate Reality Game. So, I stopped resisting this subject and just decided to go into it. On one hand I am deeply fascinated with this form of games (or activity) but on the other hand I am aware of the fact that there are still not many academic papers or books on this subject. Over the last few days I have been looking deeply into scholars’ resources, not only at Bangor University, but much further. After analyzing my findings and fascinations on this fields, and looking at it from an academic perspective I have built a small mind map (below), and formulated a few potential topics:

The structure of magic. Immersion in ARG.

Storytelling, interactive fiction or game: Case study of ARG.

Game or Interactive story: Case study of ARG.

If it is not a game then what? How to understand ARG.

Into the rabbit holes. Immersive aesthetics in the ARG dimension.

Transmedia storytelling: From Big Brother to ARG.

My other subject of interest is documentary films, particulary the movent named Cinema Verite/Direct Cinema. There are many  books and journas dedicated to this mater. I have watched and own most of the important films made by the liders of this movment. In the previous academic year I wrote a couple of esseys which directly or indirectly concerned this subject.

From this reason I would rather treat this field as a reserve, because I would learn and discover something new from my dissertation, then rather looking for the same perspective or point of view in the field which I already know.

However, for this subject I also prepered some small mind map of potential fields in the Cinema Verite/Direct Cinema. I have not formulate any potential topics, but the graphs itself is almost in form of propsals.    

Objectivity and subjectivity in Cinema Verite: Anatomy of uncontrolled documentary.

Realism as a style in Cinema Verite: Revolution or evolution of documentary films

Visual anthropology vs. unobtrusive journalism: Comparative analysis of “Primary” and “Chronicle of the summer”