What I Am Reading: "This Is Not A Game" by Dave Szulborski

First thing’s first: “onstreaming” is the password.

Now, then. I discovered this book after it was cited in an article I read about Ong’s Hat, a progenitor of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). An alternate reality game is a story that is told interactively, involving the players as participants. Usually, the players chase a series of clues across the internet and (less commonly) through real locations and interactions, experiencing a carefully-curated story and going on a quest. In practical terms, a typical ARG begins with a website or posted message that has some sort of code that eventually leads someone to find (and share) another website with its own code, and so on. The story can also be followed and advanced through emails, phone calls, direct interactions, and any other medium the game’s creator can think of.

 Ong’s Hat, cited briefly in this book as a precursor to ARGs, was an elaborate prank started in the 80s by a group of punks and intellectuals, propagated and spiraling off into its own conspiracy ecosystem through the 90s. The story was that the eponymous location, a small, deserted village in the New Jersey pine barrens, had been the site of interdimensional travel and experiments. More on the Robert Anton Wilson end of the conspiracy spectrum than the militia/William Cooper side, it attracted some knowing participants and some unhinged ones. A good ARG creates immersion by skillfully blending fiction and reality, incorporating real historical (and even current) events into the world of the story. However, as the article describes, this can have sinister real-world implications. Some think that the dangerous QAnon conspiracy on the right bears the hallmarks of a malevolent ARG; in that it involves participants in uncovering clues, and does not simply disgorge them. Joseph Matheny, one of the propagators of the Ong’s Hat fakelore, notes that “not everyone can function with a level of elasticity in their reality.”

Anyway, back to the subject of more wholesome entertainment. The late Dave Szulborski was one of the first independent ARG designers, and his book is a good non-academic summary of the theory, history, and practice of ARG creation. The book was written in 2005, so I had partially intended to read it as a cultural artifact, to see if it contained much commentary or reminiscing of the early internet days. However, most of the outdated commentary is not particularly jarring, and mostly consists of an absence of any mention of Facebook or other social media platforms, and a little marveling over new technology like caller ID and such.

I don’t have much background in game theory beyond poli sci applications of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, so I found this section to be the most interesting. It is brief, only the first seventy pages, but lays an intellectual framework that the book continuously returns to. Szulborski believes that an alternate reality game does not strictly fit the definition of either a story or a game, and that they are “a hybrid that combines many of the best features of stories or games.” He discusses ludology vs. narratology (those focusing on the mechanics of games vs. those viewing games as a delivery mechanism for a story). I’m not sure if I agree with them, but I liked the radical ludologists like Markku Eskelinen and Andy Cameron, who do not think that a game is a narrative.

“The moment the reader intervenes to change the story…is the moment when the story changes from being an account of events which have already taken place to the experience of events which are taking place in the present. Story time becomes real time, an account becomes an experience, the spectator or reader becomes a participant or player, and the narrative begins to look like a game.”

Andy Cameron in DISSIMULATIONS: illusions of interactivity

 The section on theory also covers differing conceptualizations of immersion, a very important topic for ARG designers. Obviously, on some level, ARG participants know that they are playing a game, but it is important to ensure that their immersion is as extensive as it can be despite that fact. Again, I found absolutist positions interesting, such as those arguing that it is impossible for a video game to be immersive since the player is only ever interacting with a symbolic representation of the concept involved.

This isn’t an academic book, but Szulborski has clearly done his homework. The discussion of game theory is very interesting, but is dispensed with quickly. He spends quite a bit longer covering the history of ARGs. He first covers previous examples of interactive storytelling, from “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Borges to the multimedia campaign for House of Leaves (one of my favorite horror novels) that I had not been aware of previously. The history of interactive fiction is only covered briefly here, but is a fascinating topic in its own right. From there, he moves on to Illuminati Online, hypertext fiction, Ong’s Hat, and Pink Floyd’s Publius Enigma, before getting to the first ARG proper: “The Beast.” This was an advertising tie-in for Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. From here, his history becomes more hands-on; he was not involved in “The Beast,” but was involved in many of the large, subsequent ARGs that took place in the half-decade or so prior to the book’s publication, such as “Urban Hunt” and “Chasing the Wish.” Some of these games started as his side-participation in larger games, whereas some were created of whole cloth. His chapters become briefer here, as he shifts to giving a brief summary of each game. One of the most important historical trends were that several attempts to create commercial ARGs, mainly through a subscription service, failed in their objectives. Meanwhile, a clear fan community developed, and was able to bring in new members when ARGs connected to preexisting commercial projects of fandoms, such as the “i love bees” advertising campaign for Halo 2.

The second half of the book is filled with practical advice for ARG creators. As someone who has maintained a minor interest in ARG creation and (“puppetmastering”), I think a lot of the advice offered is very practical, including the extensive discussions of immersion, collaboration, puzzles, and other topics in the indices. Ultimately, a lot of this advice comes in the form of storytelling, recounting his tales of successes and failures over the course of several of his games. An alternate reality game has no limits on what a creator can incorporate, so there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules about what must be included. There are only suggestions: a rabbit hole (the way a game is discovered by participants) can take many different forms; puzzles are a good way to pace players as they proceed through the game, attempting to moderate their speed or intake of content; there are many ways that webpages can appear to be inauthentic, thus ruining immersion; player activity should be incorporated, when possible, but choices should be guided, to avoid committing resources to a pathway not taken by the players.

I’m sure there are many resources available on the internet concerning the creation, enactment, and pursuit of alternate reality games. This book, despite not being entirely current, is a good discussion of the author’s history with ARGs, and his tricks of the trade. I think that any hopeful ARG creator or participant should keep the philosophical and theoretical aspects in mind as well, this framework can only improve individual games and the genre as a whole.