News

The creative force behind various pen-and-paper, role-playing, and video games has embraced an alternate reality.

These days, Jordan Weisman, who created such games as Shadowrun, Crimson Skies and MechWarrior, is being lauded for having conceived of a completely new type of game — the ARG.

Alternate reality games blend elements of computer and role-playing but which take place in the real world. Participants use their PCs to scour the web for clues, conduct research, and interact with other players, and sometimes find themselves answering pay phones or finding artifacts hidden in the bathrooms of nightclubs. All of these tasks are done to solve challenges that eventually resolve a final puzzle., But the only way you can win an ARG is through some kind of collaborative effort with other players.

Mr. Weisman adhered to that design philosophy while creating the first ARG, The Beast, explaining that the game was always meant to be developed for the hive mind. "That meant we were going to demand collaboration through the only mechanism we could, which is to make it impossible for an individual [to win]," he said on the phone from Seattle.

The Beast, which was created as an interactive experience to promote Steven Spielberg's film, A.I., was so named because the original design plan called for 666 pieces to the puzzle. As the game got under way, though, Mr. Weisman explained that the name took on a different meaning. It came to refer to "that voracious appetite that could consume anything."

Those working on the game's design were concerned about creating puzzles that were impossible to solve, but Mr. Weisman believed that with only a couple of hundred thousand players, collectively they would have access to every skill base and knowledge base in existence. With the players working together, they'd be able to solve the impossible.

Among the tricks players had to use in solving The Beast were finding clues hidden in the source code of web pages, applying colour filters to image files to reveal information and deciphering chess positions encoded in ads taken out in the NY Times and LA Times.

What Mr. Weisman and his design team underestimated was that collectively, players would also have unlimited resources: time, money, technology, and access. "That meant that not only could they solve anything, but they could solve it instantly."

That asset list of 666 items was off by several orders of magnitude. The game designers found themselves working around the clock creating new websites, audio clips, and mysteries, just to stay ahead of the players.

Mr. Weisman created The Beast while he was a creative director for Microsoft's entertainment business. His company, FASA Interactive, had been acquired by Redmond as it ramped up development of the Xbox. Mr. Weisman had a hand in all the PC and Xbox games developed at Microsoft until he left to found 42 Entertainment in the fall of 2002.

42 Entertainment was established to make ARGs. In the past five years, the company has created the popular ARGs I Love Bees (for Microsoft Game Studios' Halo 2), Last Call Poker (for Activision's video game Gun), Dead Man's Tale (for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest), Year Zero (for the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name), and is in the middle of presenting Why So Serious?, an ARG tied to the release of The Dark Knight.

Other successful ARGs include the currently running The Lost Ring, created by Jane McGonigal for McDonald's and the International Olympic Committee.

While the community of ARG players have worked to create their own games, those haven't been nearly as successful as ARGs funded as part of a marketing plan. Mr. Weisman said that another design tenet established in the beginning was that the game should completely envelop the audience. The content that makes up the game, he said, should be all around and in every medium. "That pervasiveness requires a certain sense of scale," he said. "And there's a certain expectation that there is a certain amount of spectacle. And those things aren't cheap."

Compared to media budgets overall, though, Mr. Weisman says ARGs are not very expensive. "On a price basis they are very effective marketing."

Mr. Weisman, for his part, believes that the success of ARGs should be measured in terms of the number of marriages they inspire. He's only half-joking. While the typical marketing metrics such as impressions, coverage, and trickle contact measure the reach and breadth of the ARG experience, there is no measure, he said, of its depth.

"Whatever it was, 6 or 8 marriages that came out of The Beast are, in some respect, just as important as the 350 million media impressions from thinking about it as a experience."

When asked which type of game — pencil-and-paper, board, video, alternate reality — he finds most interesting, Mr. Weisman says the question is tantamount to asking which child is a parent's favourite. "For me it's just one long continuum of exploring new ways of interacting with each other through the mechanism of games and storytelling."

He's reduced his role at 42 Entertainment to that of principal creative adviser, and has formed a new company, Smith & Tinker, where he is the CEO. He's secured the rights from Microsoft to three properties he created years ago at FASA: Shadowrun, Crimson Skies, and MechWarrior.

He isn't talking about what, exactly, his new company is going to be doing, but its website gives us a clue: "Smith & Tinker is creating connected entertainment products that move seamlessly back and forth from online to offline and immerse the audience in a community of fellow participants from around the world."

Mr. Weisman said that the future of ARGs lies in getting past the novelty factor. In the beginning, the methodology of the storytelling was most important, but he believes tomorrow's ARGs will focus on the quality of the story being told. Equally important, he said, is for game designers to find ways to involve all tiers of the audience, instead of simply appealing to the fanatics.

Mr. Weisman's involvement in game design has been about trying to break down barriers to communication and encourage new forms of communication. It's not about the game; it's about the people. "I've always believed that there is nothing on the planet that is entertaining except each other."