ARG Deaddrop

…and sometimes the dead drop comes to you.

Forgive the departure from only talking about game events. I promise I won’t make a habit of writing long rambling META posts, but this does relate to dead drops and live events. And you might even learn something of value if you mange to read through this whole thing.

One statement that I’ve seen almost every ARGer make at some point in time is the complaint of “I wish that there would be an ARG in my town/city/general local area.” I’ve even been guilty of this thought once or twice – usually as I’m driving far too long of a distance to attend an event. It’s an understandable wish. Most people don’t really like traveling hours to participate in an event that may only take a fraction of the time it took to get there. And if you’re going out to a dead drop, there’s always the very real chance that it may be found before you even get there, making your long distance trip a complete waste.

What frustrates me, however, is when people seem to refuse to play a game simply because it appears to have a specific geographical tilt. “What if I do start playing and I put all this time into it and then it ends with a live event I can not possibly get to. It would feel like a bit of an anti-climax.”¹ To me, ARGs are more than just the live events that can occur during play. Live events may be the frosting on the cake, but I don’t eat cake just for the frosting, and I don’t play ARGs just to participate in live events. I play for the story that is being unfolded over days, weeks and months and for my chance to impact that story through character interaction or puzzle solving or even just observation. Anything beyond that, from receiving swag or meeting a character, is just a bonus – like finding a $5 bill in the gutter when you’re going out for a walk.

I guess my main problem with only wanting to play local games is that it’s a self-limiting argument. You live in [Random State], so it makes no sense to you to play games that don’t have a [Random State] presence. In the end, you wind up playing very few games. Possibly because the game never had anything in your [Random State] but occasionally because the game was so far along when it did come to your [Random State] that you felt it wasn’t worth your time to get involved in something so advanced (that is if you even heard about it coming to [Random State]). On the flip side, if you play games without regard for where they may or may not have live events, not only will you be able to experience more games, but you might even be surprised as to where events take place.

In my experience, the locations of live events tend to fall into two categories: game driven locales and player driven locales.

Game driven locales are those places that are, for the most part, predetermined either through the storyline of the game or the physical location and reach of the Puppetmaster team. These are usually the locations that players see as being centered around major metropolitan areas although they can also be off the beaten track as well. The initial payphones in I Love Bees were all over the United States and later went worldwide. Eldritch Errors had a camping trip in the middle of mountains of West Virginia. And a hilltop in the English countryside was even a location that could be visited during the Save Vulcan game. As Puppetmaster teams become more creative about how they can reach places that they might not have a physical presence in, the excuse “Live events only happen in [Random Big City]” becomes less and less valid.

However, the most important thing about game driven locales is that they can change in a heartbeat. Just because you launch your game at the San Diego Comic-Con doesn’t mean that you can’t branch out worldwide to give people cakes and bowling balls. Naming your game after a city in the Midwest shouldn’t stop you from inviting people to meet you in New York City. And a game that starts out in San Diego can suddenly have events in NYC before ending up in Berlin. ² If a player only looks at the starting location to determine if they should invest the time into playing, they can end up missing out on so much.

But even if you don’t live near one of the major metropolitan areas where live events tend to cluster (due to the potentially greater number of players in those areas) and don’t want to drive hours to one of the out of the way events, it doesn’t mean that you may never get a live event. Excessively creative PMs can at times bring live events to their dedicated players instead of relying on their players going to the events.

Player driven locales are the result of the PMs personalizing the game based upon their player base. Events may not be as flashy or as large as a game driven destination event but, because they are rarer, they tend to be more special to those people involved. The rarity comes partially from the fact that Puppetmasters often will have to be more creative in order to create events where they do not have any physical presence to oversee them. It’s hard to place a dead drop in North Carolina when you’re in Los Angeles unless you realize that geocachers are nice people and will do favors for you if you ask nicely.

Another factor contributing to the rarity – they don’t tend to scale very well. It’s a lot easier to set up a dozen or so player specific events, like sending printouts to local Kinko’s, then it is to create hundreds or thousands of them. Of course, with enough ingenuity and resources nothing is impossible. Just look at how many people were able to submit new payphones during the course of I Love Bees so that they could have their own local phone calls instead of having to drive to where a payphone was originally scouted.

So why am I bringing all of this up? Partially because this has been a pet peeve of mine for sometime. It’s right up there with the statement “I only want to start playing an ARG that has just launched.” Drives me up the wall. If you ever want to get into a META argument with me, that’s the easiest way. But the main reason for this blog post is because right now you have the chance of becoming one of those lucky individuals who gets their own ‘personalized’ event.

If you have talked with me at all in the past month, you know that my new favorite ARG is Must Love Robots. It’s utterly brilliant with an adorable storyline, multiple levels of participation and interaction, and live events on the East and West coast of the United States. It has also brought events directly to the players who have made an effort to actively participate in the game. It was requested that 5 players send their addresses to a character named Lugnut so that he could send out further instructions to them at a later date. All of us thought that we would be getting something in the mail, but it turned out that we were given a local address where we had to go and collect a package. Although you wouldn’t think it, there is something fundamentally different about going to your mailbox and getting something from an ARG versus going into Kinko’s and asking for some unknown item under your name.

Although the Lugnut missions have been filled, there are still open spaces in the ranks of the 36 Disciples of Pastor Ned Ludd. While I cannot guarantee anything, there are very strong hints that the members of the 36 may indeed get their own individual events to take part in. Upon being accepted as 1 of the 36, Pastor Ned asks the new recruits to provide their location with the name of their city and major crossroads. And the result of my Kinko’s drop talks about “using [his] 36 secret hidden substations, which will be the work of [his] 36 disciples.” So if you are one of those people who is always wishing that something will happen in your out-of-the-spotlight hometown, here your chance. Go listen to the Gospels of Pastor Ned and send him an email at PastorLudd@godhatesrobots.org telling him how much you hate Robots and want to join his cause. He’ll give you directions from there. And then, while you’re waiting for things to happen, go catch up on the rest of the game. Even if the missions don’t happen like I (or you) think/hope they will, Must Love Robots is totally worth playing. Even if you only have 10 minutes a day, take the time to go and watch the videos. Because I don’t want you to come to me in a year and say “I really wish I had played that game when it was going on.” You will not get my sympathy.³

As an aside, I would like to point out that I have gone on 6 major live events and yet I live ~200 miles from the nearest major city (NYC). I have driven between 4-9 hours (one way) for each of the events I’ve attended. So I do know the pain of wanting local events. But I also know that luck and being a dedicated player can pay off big time. If I had decided to skip playing Charlotte Is Becoming Real simply because it started off in San Diego, I never would have been flown to Berlin to participate in the finale event.

So take a chance. Play a game that has some substance with a good creative Puppetmaster team behind it and maybe someday you’ll find yourself in the right place at the right time and end up with one of the ARG stories that people tell years from now. It’s happened before and it can happen again.

1: Quote used with permission from Dominic1978.
2: The games referenced are Why So Serious, This Is My Milwaukee, and Charlotte Is Becoming Real.
3: Unless you started playing ARGs after MLR ends. I’m not completely heartless.

In: opinion | tags: opinion. | #