Today’s Plan:
- Explore ARG Research Possibilities
- Homework
Alternate Reality Games
For our third and final project this semester, I would like to focus attention on ARGs, or Alternate Reality Games. Wikipedia offers a concise and substantive definition:
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ ideas or actions.
The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players’ responses. Subsequently, it is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game’s designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.
While I appreciate that definition, I also want to push back on the idea that an ARG necessarily requires a story. To me, SuperBetter is an ARG. Any experience that maps a game structure over/onto the real world is an ARG. What matters isn’t the presence of a story, but the presence of a game. As Jaakko Stenros (2017) showed, it can be quite hard to pin down exactly what makes a game a game (or, more narrowly, how to define “game”). Stenros offers ten criteria to think about; I’d like to gloss five of them:
- Rules
- Players (decision makers)
- Competition or Conflict
- End/Goals
- Un/Productivity
I think ARGs, or at least a particular version of ARGs that I am thinking of, challenge that 5th criteria. Let me put the question another way: is SuperBetter a game? Or is it a (exemplary?) example of gamification. Ian Bogost, in his widely read essay “Gamification is Bullshit” (2011), dismisses the trend to take an unpleasant activity and slap a game structure on top of it. Its like doing the dishes, but with fun! Bogost writes:
Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn’t matter for bullshitters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.
I’ve suggested the term “exploitationware” as a more accurate name for gamification’s true purpose, for those of us still interested in truth. Exploitationware captures gamifiers’ real intentions: a grifter’s game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.
I want to hold onto Bogost’s phrase “interactions with behavioral complexity.” That’s the real meat for Bogost–what games do. His seminal book, Persuasive Games, details a theory of procedural rhetoric–a third form of rhetoric. We have oral/written rhetoric (words that affect us, move us, challenge us). We have visual rhetoric (images that affect us, move, us, challenge us). Bogost sees video games as more than just an amalgam of the two: they present us with choices/mechanics/rules that affect us, move us, or challenge us. We aren’t necessarily consciously aware of how the “choices” do this. Take the game Sim City. I like Sim City. Sim City includes a mechanic through which you set your taxes. The game proceduralizes a neoliberal/fiscal conservative logic of taxation: if you raise taxes, then businesses will suffer and your commercial districts will diminish. Less commercial districts means less job opportunities and more unemployment. Now some of you might say “yeah, that sounds right, that’s how the world works.” You likely wouldn’t experience any cognitive dissonance playing SimCity since it matches your ideology. Some of you might be of a different ideological bent and challenge the assumption that lower taxes creates jobs. In that case, the game would fail to be procedurally persuasive, since the rules of the game contradict your ideological frame. Many of you might not even think about this. It just passes through you–but that’s Bogost’s exactly point about the persuasive power of simulations: you play the game, you tacitly (unconsciously) accept the rules, you interiorize the principles, those interiorized principles shape the way you navigate the real world. This is what Bogost means by interactions that have “interactions with behavioral complexity.”
I fear I have gotten off track a bit here–but I thought it important to give you a sense of procedural rhetoric and the ways that it gets discussed/applied in scholarship. Because at its core, SuperBetter is McGonigal’s attempt to “gamify” or “proceduralize” positive psychology.
All of this is meant to provide some context and backdrop for your final project this semester. Let me first layout the requirements of the project. Your final paper should be 1800-2500 words (roughly 7-10 pages double-spaced). The final paper must contain at least 8 sources. 5 of these sources need to be academic, peer-reviewed journal articles. The final paper must be written in a format suitable to your major.
In terms of subject, I leave you room to design your own research question. But let me offer a few suggestions. The default option is to compose a paper that centers around evaluating SuperBetter. Such a paper would need to begin by exploring the secondary literature on the game, and using that literature to evaluate your own and the class’s experience.
- Roepke et al.”Randomized controlled trial of SuperBetter, a smartphone-based/internet-based self-help tool to reduce depressive symptoms“
- Chou et al. Multimedia Field Test: Evaluating the Creative Ambitions of SuperBetter and Its Quest to Gamify Mental Health
- Want and Singhal. Digital Games: The SECRET of Alternative Health Realities
Another possibility might concern looking into the critiques of wearable devices and fitness tracking apps (as ARGs(?)). Another possibility might be designing a game to help freshmen learn their way around UNC and Greeley. Another paper might explore and argue for adopting HumansvsZombies at UNC (as far as I know, we don’t currently play this?). You might also have an interesting question about gamification and education. Or perhaps you are interested in procedural rhetoric.
Homework
Re-submit a link to your gaming journal (Gaming Journal ReSubmission
). I will use this space to check in on reading responses and to see research progress.
Create an account with SuperBetter if you haven’t already.
Read McGonigal 29-52
Reading Questions (address 2 of these in your gaming journal):
- How/why can games help block pain or anxiety? What scientific concept does McGonigal introduce to support this claim?
- What is flow? What conditions have to be in place to achieve it?
- Why are games “better” at managing pain/anxiety than books or movies?
- What is the relation between casual games and mindfulness?
Read McGonigal 77-130; address 4 of these in your gaming journal:
- What happens when we play together?
- What is “theory of mind”?
- Tell me about social empathy
- What is the “equalizing nature of games”?
- What are the 3 dimensions of social online games?
- What should we know about First-person shooters?
