Trout Hammer

I am freshly back from ARGfest 2009 (in Portland, OR), where I met a bunch of great people and learned so much fascinating stuff.  Undoubtedly, ARGfest was a positive experience for both Tanner and myself. We were invited to speak on an Indie Game panel, which I will try post about later, but also to run a live event.  While we had never run a live event of this magnitude before, I was super excited to give it a chance. I believe my design and our execution was pretty good, but I want to take a moment to reflect on it as to better future live game designs.

My main inspiration for the design of this game is a game called “Heartbreaker, The Lover’s Dilemma,” which was designed by Charley Miller and run at this year’s Come Out and Play NYC festival. I not only liked how the game was easily understood and fun to play, but I also enjoyed how the game encouraged out of game conversation and icebreaking.

Heartbreaker

“Built on a prisoner’s dilemma construct, Heartbreak challenges players to develop a strategy that involves elements of trust, backstabbing, and/or a mix of the two. Throughout the game, players will approach one another in front of a judge and they can do one of two things: find out if the other is the their true love match OR they can break the other’s heart. The player who breaks the most hearts AND finds their true love wins the game.” (Come Out and Play Website)

Since Must Love Robots’ Speed Dating event was to be held the first night of the conference I wanted to make a game that was highly social and not very competitive.  The incentive of the game was to win by getting the most “Love Points”, but the embedded design was to lower your ambitions and to do goofy things with newly met strangers.  To accomplish this game there were two separate levels of play.

LOVE.exe

This “program” was run on every robot/player as they entered the game. Each piece contained a puzzle or “encryption” that when solved earned the solving player a Love Point, meaning that they figured out the key to the other bot’s heart.  The puzzles were specifically chosen to be simple and to cover many different types such as visual, rebus, word, logic, and abstract puzzles.  In this way making it easy for everyone to solve.  The goal was not to trick people, but to get them to simulate speed dating.  However, rather than awkwardly talking to a stranger about during a dating session, the puzzle gave the players’ incentives and encouragement to interact. 

Sub-Routine

Each player was also given two envelopes that contained mini challenges for him or her to complete with the date of their choice.  These “sub-routines” could be opened at anytime and used once.  The mini challenges were themed around possible character traits including nerdy, sweetie, conversational, or deep.  The players were able select one of their choosing and then one randomly to spark spontaneity.  I wanted to use the sub-routines to make the game have more narrative than the LOVE.exe would have alone and I feel that this was the most successful part of the game.  The sub-routines were also a way to increase the player’s Love Points depending on how successfully the sub-routines were completed.

Lessons Learned
I think the game was overall a success.  Although there are certainly a couple things that could be changed in order to make it work better in the future.  Since there are two different types of play happening at the same time it makes it slightly difficult to explain.  Although once people started playing they figured it out rather quickly.  I also think it would have been more fun if each person had been able to create or select an individual puzzle for their LOVE.exe, this would have increased the player’s agency and immersion in the game.  However, this would have further added to the difficulty of the games explanation.  I had also originally thought that it would be a timed event and the player’s would switch after being signaled, but on the fly we changed the rules so that the players could move around as soon as they were done interacting with the pervious player.  This increased the speed of the game and stops awkward encounters that could go on too long. 

Maybe next time, I would like to try having a narrative structure set up in the envelopes and include times on the outside that would cue the player when to open it.  This way the narrative could be told in a linear manner and possible create a grand narrative rather than a bunch of single ones.

This past Halloween night, I was member of a group of elite investigators that brought down an evil cult mastermind and his super genetic computer.  Yep, a first for me, but just another night for Prototype 161.  The event had an online pre-game that Prototype assured us was not necessary for the game and which I enjoyed.  The pre-game even had clue drops in five cities across the country.

At 7pm the event started in New York City’s Central Park and us Investigators were all handed a folded piece of paper that was sealed with wax (a nice touch in my book).  The first part of the night was a foot race around central park solving simple clues in order to build a map that would come in handy later when we moved over to Roosevelt Island.  For those of you that have never been, Roosevelt island is accessible by means of a Tramway and was also the home of New York’s abandoned mental institutions.  The tramway offers an excellent view of the city and was my favorite part of the night, I am glad that the Puppet Masters included this is in the game.  Roosevelt island offered an excellent backdrop for the rest of the night, because of its size roughly .3 square miles.  However, despite the amazing setting of the game the night quickly hit some snags.

We were met on the island by a “professor” giving a lector on the occult at the local youth center.  The youth center would become our home base for the rest of the evening and into the morning, which was decent enough until the soda machine ran out.  Most if not all of the teams became stuck on the first puzzle (my own team was out of commission for 2 hours).  The puzzles were difficult and fun if not entirely related to the premise of the event.  One of the major problems I have with the game was after the first clue was finally solved; it provided an answer with which we didn’t know what to do. We were supposed to be looking for a six-letter word, but there were not hints to this effect.

Finally, my team was on track and we split up to get the rest of the clues.  The island was used to full advantage by the PMs.  They had us running up and down it from a Chinese restaurant to get puzzle containing fortune cookie, to a garden that was totally creepy and dark at night.  I am pretty sure that the drunken guys outside the garden were OOG, nevertheless they provided a nice atmospheric element. Other snags included, one of the puzzles being vandalized (pumpkins smashed), in game restaurants closing because it was too late, and the police breaking up the big groups of people.

However, my team was determined not to give up, but we far too frustrated and tired to put in the needed effort to finish with a bang.  We all got text messages informing us to stop what we were doing and see the finale.  We had lost, but everyone did get to see the end acted out.  The problem here was that the finale only made sense to those that had played the online pre-game, but was interesting enough even if a little anti-climatic.

I was excited to try my hand at an ARG and I thought Prototype 161 would provide a good crash course in the genre, and while it did provide me with a feel of ARGs I wish it had been a little smoother.