Hi, I’m getting near a release point and trying to figure out if contests will accept such a massive complex game
On Mastodon the hashtag is #WakeIndra and #PaleBlueDotARG
It is more non-fiction than fiction too, Media Ecology is a huge topic of it, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, etc I used to work with Microsoft founder Paull Allen before Y2K, created social media sites in 1985, traveled to North Africa after predicting the Arab Spring a year before… wild stuff.
I think it is going to take me 40 years in total to finish, I’m not even half way, it is “Rolling Release”
Basically I am targeting player with 18 months of 40 hour weeks… this is intended to replace years of USA style high school.
HUGE: www. WWWOpera .org ///\\ I am even using domain names like www. ⵠ .net - bigger than the Mr Robot ARG
Just spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out what you mean, what your project is, and if it’s even a game.
After visiting multiple websites looking for a place to start, I’m still not sure what you’re up to. Could be I’m missing it, but if you want this to be accessible to the masses, you may need to be more clear with your messaging, or at least about where to begin.
Cool. I looked up the hashtags on Mastodon but didn’t find anything, and I’m a little wary of assembling urls. (the forum will prevent new accounts from posting multiple links) I get the impression this is intended as an ARG but is it in the process of being built or conceptual?
I don’t use Mastodon, so I have no idea what this is about, other than it’s a “massive complex game”. Excuse my ignorance, but what’s an ARG? Some sort of role-playing game?
An ARG is an “alternate reality game” - they’re typically set up as sequences of clues leading to fake websites that in turn provide more puzzles and clues that lead to the next link in the chain. They’re often used to promote video games, and typically solving them involves stuff like finding data embedded in image or audio files or correlating a large number of vague clues - they’re meant to be solved by large numbers of people working together, so the difficulty is usually set way too high for any individual solver.
The Mastodon account here mostly seems to just point to the websites, so you can get a flavor from looking at them (I confess I also couldn’t make hide nor hair of things, though I’ve never played an ARG so quite possibly I’m missing something obvious. But reads as a whole lot of related posts on Joyce, McLuhan, Joseph Campbell, etc., with a bunch of YouTube playlists and other stuff running through - so I’d definitely agree that a more direct entry point and prompt would be needed for this to appeal to an IF audience).
EDIT: actually, so long as I’m posting – Stephen, it’s nice to see a newcomer to the boards, but since you are new it might be helpful to say that this is generally a pretty friendly, polite community; asking for someone’s credentials after they’ve given (requested) feedback can come off as dismissing their input, so it’s not typically how we do things around here.
If you expect me to spend 18 months of my life, 40 hours a week, reading your work, your work better be really good.
After taking a cursory glance, I also don’t think this is going to replace the high school system any time soon. Sorry.
In general, there’s absolutely no compelling hook anywhere, no reason why I should keep going past clicking around for five minutes on one of your websites. And your initial post honestly doesn’t give me any compelling reason to start reading in the first place.
I looked at this, but what is it? What are all those links? You can’t expect random strangers to click on a couple of dozen unexplained links. Do you have one specific thing for us to look at? That you can describe so we know what we are supposed to be looking at?
I think everyone here would like to help, but your posts and your links are very vague, and I doubt anyone here is going to sift through all of that.
So try another post that’s very clear, and leads to a single place with something you’d like us to look at.
In a thread you start in certain categories that might involve asking a question, you’re allowed to mark a reply as “Solved” which is featured and linked in the original post if people are just looking for the Q and the A.
There are multiple IF contests that occur throughout the year. Each has a website with the entry process and rules.
ARGs are their own unusual kind of beast that don’t fit well into competitions. This is due to:
ARGs often are a mystery and people often have to make the choice to dig based on initial clues to even discover if they are following an ARG. By nature these games masquerade as “reality” per the R in the acronym. Often the entry point is “stumbled upon” either by a hidden URL or hints on something like a movie poster or a regular website. The whole point is to blur the line between reality and fiction.
ARGs often are an “event” puzzle that requires multiple people working together to solve, sometimes over months and years; often once solved the game is over. They are not solitary confined stories that one person can judge, which makes it difficult to review and vote on in a competition.
ARGs may not be available all at once, and often can change based on the speed and methods that people solve the puzzles. Often specific clues may be provided to one participant or a select group of participants. It’s a living “alternate reality” and doesn’t slot neatly as a story you put between “once upon a time” and “the end”. Some elements of ARGs may not be accessible to all players - like a physical geocache someone must find, or a YouTube video someone might not have access to.
I think that’s the confusion people are having with your posting. Usually an ARG has all of its components in place, then are hinted to start people along the trail. While ARGs overlap in the Venn diagram of Interactive Fiction, they are (again) enormous beasts that require community play. ARGs are likely very hard to “beta test” if you don’t have your plot elements in place for people to search for.
That’s cool. As I said; ARGs are weird beasts. Some of them are just YouTube videos with codes and puzzles embedded that might lead to extra lore. Some are actually a point-to-point puzzle that can be followed. Some have episodic content that gradually is revealed, some may have all the elements in place from the start.
The thing about ARGs is the entire conceit that it is not a game, so there’s a weird line about letting people “stumble into” the game, and directly telling people “hey, there’s an online alternate reality game…to start go to [this website].”
Many of us aren’t experienced with building these things, and by nature the ARG is “there MIGHT be something interesting here or there MAY NOT BE you need to decide…” which makes them difficult to get started.
You said that you’ve been building this for over a decade and it may not be finished for over a decade. That makes it a little difficult for those of us who also write to commit to. Are you needing help with creating the ARG or are you trying to encourage people to play? We can probably help, but just tossing up some weird broken URLs here is a unique and possibly not fruitful way to get people started. We’re a tech website for IF - so we are players, but the kind of random cryptic postings that are the starting point of many ARGs might just seem like unrelated spam, unlike if you start your threads from YouTube with a video or some other social media websites where you might get noticed by “civilians” instead of people who are like “what’s this guy on about?”