The multiplatform, multimedia extravaganza that was 2007’s Year Zero Alternate Reality Game brought a new creative medium to the attention of thousands, perhaps millions—people who, by and large, had no previous experience with such things. Alternate Reality Games are curious things: interactive, but largely constructed as a vector to deliver an already composed narrative to a passive and receptive audience; malleable yet rigidly planned and structured; artistic, but not the product of any one artist. Though they are known by several names (“immersive gaming,” “unfiction” and “collective detecting,” are all mentioned by theorist Janet McGonigal), all of these names are, in the right light, misleading (2). Thus, an ontological question of classification arises for more serious-minded participants and outsiders. To wit, what exactly are Alternate Reality Games? Are they art? Are they simply clever marketing campaigns? Are they an evolved and participatory version of video games? Are they theatre, literature? There are proponents and detractors of the genre who might argue for or against any of the above classifications. However, Alternate Reality Games are best viewed and understood as especially complex texts, literary, theatrical and, to some degree, participatory or interactive. Their nature as one of the literary arts (film, theatre, literature) is perhaps best conveyed when one pays close attention to their very deliberate, intricate and aggressive maintenance of what philosopher Denis Diderot called the fourth wall.
Perhaps it is best to begin with a very brief overview of at least the broad strokes which comprise the average Alternate Reality Game (ARG). Using Year Zero as a representative example (which it is: it is neither the most complex nor simplest ARG designed by 42 Entertainment, the corporation responsible for the very first and, by popular consensus, best ARGs), one begins to see the sprawling and problematic nature of the phenomenon. Lasting about four months, Year Zero involved integrated merchandise which advanced the plot (which, in fact, began the game and served as a sort of prologue to the story); interactive scavenger hunts for trinkets and technology which did the same (advanced the plot); actors and live musicians; short film; short, recorded voice acting sessions like Depression-era radio plays or War of the Worlds-style news bulletins; flash fictions; more elaborate short stories; and thirty websites—all of which were possessed of half a dozen or more embedded links. The game spanned no less than six media platforms: internet (flash pages), email (specific player-addressed communiqués), telephone, video, written text, music. Aforementioned theorist Jane McGonigal, in her address at the 2003 Digital Arts Conference, entitled “This Is Not A Game,” describes the nature of The Beast: the first ARG-proper, unveiled in the spring of 2001. She explains, “three core mysteries and a dozen rich subplots [tell the story of] about nearly 150 characters—and for navigating the game’s vast Web presence, nearly 4000 digital texts, images, flash files and Quick Time videos” were created and presented (2). Larval ARG-like experiences had previously existed, but The Beast is the prototype or template for the genre. This description of the component parts of The Beast is also fairly accurate where Year Zero is concerned—if anything, Year Zero is more refined and complex.
David Szulborski, leading theorist in the field and author of many of its most influential texts, summarizes the ARG experience in his article “Alternate Reality Game.” He provides an outsider with a fair glimpse behind the scenes, into the structure and processes of ARGs, from the perspective of someone who, first, understands the medium thoroughly and, second, appreciates them as a viable art form. Szulborski explains that the way those thousands of digital texts, videos and characters interact with the participating audience is unique. “[T]hey use the world around you,” he explains, “advertising hoardings, telephone lines, websites, fake companies, actors and actresses you can meet in real life—to deliver the game experience” (2). But the “game experience,” as he calls it, is really just a vector, a vessel built for delivery of a story. Just as a movie uses cellulose, light projectors and special reflective screens to deliver the illusion of a three-dimensional audiovisual experience; just as a book uses an elaborate chiaroscuro of dots and dashes, whorls and flourishes of ink in very specific sequence to deliver an imaginary experience; the ARG uses complex and innovative electronic technologies to deliver an experience which is less about the experience itself, and more about the story that experience slowly unveils. Movies are not about pictures; books are not about letters or words or even paragraphs; ARGs are not about websites or email or puzzles. Szulborski calls ARGs “the latest innovation in storytelling” (2). The difference between films and books and ARGs is that, in the latter case, the general public is not yet comfortable with the technology which enables the art form to exist in the first place. Szulborski again: “Alternate Reality Games take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world…the enabling condition is technology” (3). The skeptic or critic of ARGs as an art form must remember that once upon a time moving pictures and movable type were foreign and unsettling, too. And both were declaimed as either vulgar pulp or witchcraft.
The precise mechanism of action by which ARGs operate also causes some confusion among critics, who end up lost in the surface details and unable or unwilling to perceive their inherently narrative, literary nature. ARGs, using more than one technological medium simultaneously, function primarily by “the insertion of additional slices of reality into our own”—hence the phrase alternate reality (Szulborski 6). This, admittedly, is an odd practice, one which is, more or less, completely unprecedented except, perhaps, by performance art (though, as discussed later, there are any number of literary antecedents which predict its eventual existence). But ARGs are only makebelieve as much as films and books are; they are not, like their closest gaming analogue, live-action roleplaying adventures; “the only demand” of the ARG, Szulborski continues, “is that you interact with [the story elements] as yourself” (6). In their jarring, yet delicate manipulation of our reality, ARGs “clearly challenge the distinction between fiction and nonfiction” in a manner perhaps best illuminated by analogy with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: it takes extensive and exhausting effort to distill the unlikely nuggets of truth from the network of fabrications that comprise the novel (9). Similarly, it takes patience, skill and exhausting effort to solve the puzzles presented by an ARG, and, even more so, to decide what is and what is not part of the game—imagine a novel that was also essentially a word search, one would have to separate the meaningful lines of text from the meaningless jumble of letters which surround it before one could understand the story. Some avant garde educators have noticed that basic literary criticism and moderate investigative academic research skills are required to actively participate in an ARG and, as such, have embraced them, ARGs, as a tool. The Educause Learning Initiative, an organization of teachers and other academics “suggest that ARGs constitute a new form of literary expression in their presentation of participatory fiction” (7 Things 2). Participatory fiction itself, however, is not an entirely new idea.
Perhaps best and most familiarly depicted by 1997s film The Game, the notion of participatory or play-based narratives is not a new one. There is, Szulborski notes, a “thin but important tradition of play-based, or ‘ludic’ texts” (8). Such texts may also be called ergodic literature: “requiring work (“erg”) to read” (8).As far back as 1905, G.K. Chesterton predicted the possibility of such endeavors in his collection of short stories, The Club of Queer Trades. Within, his characters discover the Adventure and Romance Agency, which provides for the bored and exceptionally wealthy, interactive adventures with exciting plots. John Fowles’ The Magus describes a similar situation, except it is the bored elite who pull the strings for their own amusement. In director David Fincher’s The Game, an embittered and bored multimillionaire, Nicholas Van Orton, is profoundly changed by his experience interacting with a play-based narrative. “As with any ludic text, Van Orton must play the game for its plot to advance,” Szulborski points out (10). Admittedly, The Game’s titular game is thin on plot, heavy on action. But ARGs are more complicated than that game (if much, much less dangerous). What is primarily important in ARGs in general is not the play, but the story revealed by the play.
The phrase “storytelling as archaeology” is a common one in ARG internet hubs, and it is a revealing analogy. A player must infer the storyline of any given ARG as he or she discovers it, unearths it. All texts, as aptly demonstrated by the essays and texts of the reader-response school of literary critics (i.e.: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Why Write?’ and Wolfgang Iser’s seminal “Interaction Between Text and Reader”) function by implicitly directing a reader to fill in gaps in what is perforce not exhaustive prose description of a given situation or story element. “To be sure,” says Sartre of the author of any text, the narrator “guides [his reader], but all he does is guide him…reading is directed creation” (1339). More plainly put, in the description of a main character, no author can describe him so completely, so exhaustively, that his reader is not left with work to do: embellishing the descriptive elements provided, filling in the gaps to create some semblance of a realistic being. In the ARG, these gaps are not only embraced, but taken to the extreme.
This level of reader participation, says film critic Ben Walters, in his analysis of 2007’s Cloverfield ARG, is “a new model for cultivating narrative and emotional engagement” (67). Indeed, active players of a well-crafted ARG, like good readers and attentive film audiences, become deeply embroiled in the fiction they are helping to create. Walters’ theory, however suggests that the emotional engagement/investment made by players of ARGs is more analogous to the emotional engagement an audience has with, for instance, a sequel to a well-received book or film. “Such a head-start of imaginative investment is normally available only to spin-off projects,” he explains (67). In the case of Year Zero, by the time the album at the center of the game was released, the music was a multilayered, multireferential experience for a listener who had actively participated in the associated ARG. For one who was involved with the ARG from beginning to end, Year Zero is undeniably a richer experience. The wordless synthesizer and piano track, “Another Version of the Truth,” for instance, becomes laden with meaning, having been the name of a particularly clever and significant website, found early in the ARG. The song, comprises two distinct sections. In the first, a series of notes are arranged and presented with no scale, in what is called chromatic melody—something most composers have long derided, as certain note progressions possible without a scale seem to naturally unsettle listeners, sounding eerie or mournful. In the song’s second section, the same notes are present, but they are drastically rearranged, and take the shape of an almost relieved, relaxed melody. This mirrors the website, where an unsettling cover page can be metaphorically scratched away with the cursor to reveal an entirely different, more earnest image underneath. By the time an ARG participant hears this wordless song, he or she is already deeply invested in it, and is able to appreciate wholly the gesture made by the rearranging of notes. Walters summarizes this neatly, by saying in reference to a similar phenomenon involved in the relationship between the film Cloverfield and its ARG, that “in this sense, the movie becomes a spin-off of its own publicity” (67). As did the album at the center of the Year Zero ARG.
What allows this sort of emotional immersion and immediacy is, ironically, the way the multiple texts of an ARG keep their participating audience out. The fourth wall, as a literary convention, is a construct perforce maintained to prevent drama from being recognized for what it is: occasionally thinly veiled rhetoric, often absurdity, always makebelieve. This imaginary barrier between action and audience is present in stage, of course, but in film and literary fiction, it is a far firmer partition; the divisions between artist and audience, character and reader are perceptually greater and more stark because, in such a case, the players (that is, the players in the story) are no more tangible, substantial, than the imagination of the reader/audience can make them. Regardless of dramatic format (stage, film, literature), breaking the fourth wall is always an inherently risky act—tinkering with an audience’s perpetually tenuous suspension of disbelief is crossing a metaphoric Rubicon—potentially as deleterious as the touch of human fingertips to the wings of a butterfly. Breaking the fourth wall in an ARG, however, would be fatal to the immersive experience and deleteriously transformative to the ARG itself.
In his analysis of Cloverfield, Walters decides that there is a specific reason that the ARG is so engaging and conducive to compulsive exploration. “The ARG,” he claims, “is effective because it repeatedly achieves an illusion of authenticity” (67). McGonigal concurs. ARGs are typified by what is commonly called the “This Is Not a Game” aesthetic and, presented as additional slices of realty intercalated into our own, they are immediate—completely immersive. “This kind of immersion [makes] the game world less of a ‘virtual’ (simulated) reality or an ‘augmented’ (enhanced) reality, and more of an ‘alternate’ (layered) reality (McGonigal 3). McGonigal, in her exploration of the archived websites associated with The Beast notes that, significantly, “[n]owhere did these pages admit to being part of a game…there was no difference at all between the look, function or accessibility of the in-game sites and non-game sites… [i]n fact, not once, throughout all of this, did the game ever admit that it was a game” (3). The same is true of Year Zero. There was never any announcement that a game was beginning; there was never any delineation of rules; 42 Entertainment’s involvement was only confirmed near the very end of the ARG. It is entirely up to the participants in an ARG to discover the game and propel its action. In the unlikely event that all of the participants stopped playing an ARG simultaneously, it would cease progression. The ARG presents itself as our own reality and much like our own reality, we ourselves are the motive power behind it (if one does not leave bed in the morning, the day does not unfold—at least not eventfully); though we are aware it is not our own reality, the ARG never once falters in its presentation of a slightly altered reality, an alternate, but equally real reality in which we suspend a proportionately tiny amount of disbelief—inherently smaller than the disbelief one must suspend while watching a film or reading a book. As such “nothing about this virtual play [is] simulated,” explains McGonigal. “The computer-driven alternate reality The Beast created was make-believe, but every aspect of the player’s experience was, phenomenologically speaking, real (3). Had the game broken the fourth wall and acknowledged its existence as mere makebelieve, as a game, it would have been no more immersive than, at worst, Pac-Man or Clue; at best, a good book.
As explained in McGonegal’s text, ARGs succeed because they have, to a limited degree, actually established what computer science theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Crusin term “an ‘interfaceless interface’” (4). There is no way for a film or book to eliminate the interfacing devices which allow the story to be delivered—this is why the disbelief suspended in reading or watching a movie is inherently greater than that suspended in the case of ludic/ergodic texts such as ARGs; this is why it is sometimes effective and intriguing technique to break the fourth wall and acknowledge the existence of the interface itself. Breaking the fourth wall in an immersive, ludic text would be turning something immersive into something non-immersive, something which the participating audience can stand outside of. Breaking the fourth wall, the This Is Not a Game aesthetic of an ARG would be transforming a ludic text into a mere video game. ARGs are possessed of an interfacing device which “seeks to ‘erase itself so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium,’” explains McGonigal of Bolter and Crusin’s theory (4). Successfully executed ARGs, then, are the experiential equivalent of Jacques Derrida’s well-known axiom, “there is nothing outside the text.” Even I was not outside the text: I was “Prototype”; one of fifty-two participants marked as “soft-targets” of the military enemy created by the game.
So, why is the ARG not yet taken seriously as a literary art form? There may be several reasons. First, as noted by Educause Learning Initiative, “notable examples of the genre continue to be linked with marketing” (7 Things 2). Some critics of the genre see ARGs as nothing but extended commercials—the latest innovation in advertising, sometimes called “viral marketing,” and a natural extension of the infomercial for the Hypertext Age. Trent Reznor, the singer/songwriter/pan-instrumentalist behind Nine Inch Nails and co-writer of the Year Zero ARG, argued in defense of his ARG, “[t]his is not some gimmick to get you to buy something. This IS the art form” (1). Some detractors, however, either cannot or choose not to understand this—despite the overwhelming evidence that, in the case of Year Zero, at least, the album is a far more complex work of art, a far more complex text, if one also reads the associated text of the ARG.
Additionally and disastrously problematic is the one-performance-only nature of every ARG. “The preservation of ARG content and play remains an open, unsolved, and tragic problem, “ says Szulborski (16). One either plays the game as it develops, reading its text as it becomes available, or one loses the immersive experience and the ARG becomes just an aggregation of loosely related images, texts, videos, websites, &c. The gaps which before promoted participation, may seem, at that point, simply unbridgeable chasms. “ARGs,” admits Szulborski, “are at worst as evanescent as…dance performance” (17). At one point in Fincher’s Game, another multimillionaire speaks with protagonist Van Orton about the titular game. He expresses envy, wishing he could go back and play again (although it’s strongly suggested that one can play again, the fourth wall of the game, at that point, is broken and, in concordance with the hypothesis of this essay, the ludic text loses a certain essential element: to wit, immersiveness). The ARG is, in this respect, like Fincher’s game. Though new ARGs are produced and unveiled frequently, any given alternate reality is essentially an ephemeral experience. Those who discover the ludic or ergodic text too late find instead a static text, one not at all ludic and only relatively ergodic (as compared to, say, a traditionally written novel). The associated elements of the ARG, like satires, speak “to two audiences: those who get the joke, and those who do not” (Szulborski 15). Those who “get” the joke experienced the text as a ludic or ergodic one; those who do not, experience it as static. The ARG, upon completion—even if successfully and exhaustively archived—is very much like a wildly entertaining experience one relates to a friend and, when that friend does not react in the expected manner, the raconteur is forced to admit, “Well, I guess you had to be there.”
Perhaps the issue which is simultaneously most and least problematic, as mentioned above, is that the world is not yet comfortable enough with the technology that makes an ARG possible to allow complete immersion. The internet is still frightening or, at least intimidating to many; most if not all ARGs, in their multimedia format, become at some point invasive—a participant receives phone calls or emails and a person “unfamiliar with the ARG format can become upset” (7 Things 2). As an extension of this first idea, it is perhaps the case that the creators of ARGs aren’t themselves entirely comfortable yet. In Janet Murray’s 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck (which long predates Alternate Reality Games and speaks mostly of the potential of internet/hypertext platforms to someday become a medium for literary art), the author describes the evolution of any new innovation in storytelling. Chapter three of her text, “From Additive to Expressive Form” explains the process; Szulborski summarizes it: “Every new technology-based medium…evolves in two early stages. The first sees the porting over of forms from other media, as when early movies relied upon theatrical conventions. During the second stage creators pick up on the intrinsic elements of a new medium, and create new forms” (7). Videlicet, the first written literature—and the only written literature for quite some time—was poetry, verse, the physical transcription of the preexisting, mutable and intangible oral tradition; the first films attempted to approximate stage plays. But eventually, a Miguel de Cervantes came along with an innovation like Quixote; an Orson Welles came along and filmed Citizen Kane. Similarly, 42 Entertainment has come along to take multimedia, immersive literary experience, ludic/ergodic texts—the internet/hypertext medium, via the ARG—from additive to expressive form. “The genre,” elaborate Szulborski, “is…part of the more general evolution of media and creative narrative, and a reaction to our increasing ability and willingness as consumers to accept and explore many media in parallel, simultaneously” (3). The ARG is, then, nothing new, it is merely the expressive form of the latest innovation in storytelling; a ludic text which would falter if its fourth wall were broken, because it requires wholly immersive play to reveal itself; an ergodic text which would lose luster if its fourth wall were broken, because it requires the work motivated by complete immersion to reveal itself, to overcome the exaggerated gaps which comprise its bulk.
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