2007 Serious Games Summit GDC
Stage 2 – Cooperation / Meaning Making The problem that the ilovebees players believed they had at this time was the meaning behind the table of numbers and times. Their other problem was time. One of the web pages in the ilovebees online universe contained a clock, and it was counting down. McGonigal explained that the players self organized into three groups, each of which collected their hypotheses under different ‘interpretive frames,’ in this case: Literal, Relative and Numerical. Each group then created their own thread on a message board that had started to attract a lot of game related traffic. The groups even crafted mission statements. The solution that finally emerged from all of this activity was that the numbers were the GPS coordinates for pay phones. As there was a single correct interpretation of the data within the game world, as is typical with this type of game, this meant that only a small set of the players were right. The worry here is that the ARGs alienates the majority of the player base. McGonigal explained that in the case of ilovebees this did not happen, for these players “failing to solve does not mean failing to make a contribution” as such ilovebees was, for McGonigal, a truly “inclusive” game where every participant felt they had played a part. A critical part of ARG design that supports this type of inclusive behavior is what McGonigal termed “meaningful ambiguity,” which was archived in ilovebees with data that had “specificity, order and volume.” This is suggestive of meaning but there is no ostensible limits placed on meaning or the forms of feedback.
Here McGonigal drew parallels with the way that we work with technology today. “Ambiguity,” she stated, “forms a critical relationship with digital media.” What’s more, borrowing from Vinge, McGonigal noted that a “plausibility of interpretations empowered a wide range of players.” This was an ethos that the ilovebees team brought not only to the game but to the design process also. This meant that the full solution of ilovebees could not be designed when the game started. “[The] designer through ambiguity cedes control to the player,” said McGonigal, adding that “comprehensibility belongs to the audience.” One of the ways the design team implemented this approach was to create end-game puzzles based on some of the “failed” interpretive frameworks. These were designed to reward early work that the community engaged in. Stage 3 – Coordination / formation For McGonigal, running the ilovebees ARG was unlike traditional game design. “Usually there is a formal line between formation of the game and use of the game,” McGongial said, contrasting this approach with ilovebees which “had to support real-time re-design.” During the end-game phase, game designers almost become co-players of the game. An example of this was during the early stages of the game one of the designers created a fictional object orientated language fragments of which were spread around the ARG world. Players collected the code, created a wiki about it and called it ‘flee++.’ The game designers then used the player wiki in end-game design. Referencing the code designer’s take on the fictional language, McGonigal said that they were “not sure if it actually made sense, it was the players that made sense of it.” Conclusion In conclusion, McGonigal argued that that ARGs are one of the best tools for engaging with as many and as wide a group as possible for collective intelligence tasks. The form of a game makes the stakes appear low and engagement fun. But ARGs help people “gain confidence and fluency” in digital media and aids with “mastering modes of problems solving.” More than this, ARGs as serious games can be employed for both skill acquisition and to produce useful outcomes – as an example McGonigal directed the audience to the launch of World Without Oil that launches on April 30, 2007.
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