c. billadeau

Holy hell, this has been an interesting five months.

“I’m Sorry” is over. The credits are rolling. The game that has occupied much of my free time over the past five months has come to a close. And I’m still trying to figure out what made this really click for me.

Part of it was getting my attention at first, but what kept me going for this whole time? I mean, when it began–it was little more than a couple of vague emails and a handful of blog posts that made little sense at the time. Was it the mystery? Was it the vague conspiracy aspect? Was it the hype?

See, I usually get bored of these sorts of things a week or two in and then wander off to find another game to lurk. I had a brief infatuation with “This Is My Milwaukee” until the shit hit the fan there. But in my love affair with that game, I’ve also realized something–it’s the characters.

The major difference between this ARG and any other I’ve attempted to get involved in was the interaction, I think: there was a lot of one-on-one character interaction. Even if I wasn’t directly involved in a conversation, the nature of our small group and the way we communicated with each other kept us tied in. More often than not, we’d be in the iRC channel or watching the thread while someone else updated us with the live feed of a chat they were having with a character. We’d dicuss and pick apart emails people received, trying to not just understand the insane story swirling around us, but also the characters involved in it.

It was all about the character. And well, if you know me, then it’s predictable: no wonder I got sucked into this like I did.

Characters will make or break a film/book/game/whathaveyou for me. For this exact reason, I could never get into things like Dune or FFX. The main characters were so poorly written and flat that my interest puttered out within the first chapter or two and I quickly moved onto a better use (waste) of my time.

It’s reasons like this that explain why I love roleplaying the way I do. ARG takes roleplay to another level and makes all the stuff I used to do look like Roleplay Lite.

However, like I’ve said many times before–”I’m Sorry” is different. It has been from the beginning. It’s still ending differently than any other ARG I’ve seen has before.

The difference lies in the construct of the ARG itself: most ARGs appeal to is large crowds–masses of people they are trying to get interested in their story (or, in many cases, the story they’re trying to sell). So there are a lot of players, and only so many puppetmasters. There is not a lot of room for personal, one-on-one interaction with a character–if there is, it’s sparingly at best. Half of the time, it’s as interpersonal as spam mail–like they’re just erasing the name out and putting in someone else’s and hitting ‘send’.

So, instead, puppetmasters pad the game with puzzles, codes, mysteries that groups of people can solve. A good team-building activity, but it personally leaves me feeling distanced from the game and the people involved in the story. I gain no empathy for the story or the characters by plugging a string of letters into a ROT rotator.

But “I’m Sorry” attracted the right number of people to create a small, close-knit group of players that facilitated this one-on-one interaction with not just the characters, but the other players. And as I sit here, browsing ARG hubs and glancing disinterestly at other games, I’m thinking that there needs to be more of this out there that I’m just not seeing.

I’ve been really interested in this medium of interactive storytelling for a while, and while playing this game, I’ve slowly been developing an idea of my own with the intent of basing it around character interaction and building trust between players and characters. The only way this game of mine would work is if the players treat the characters like actual people and NOT some machine that spits out answers if you bump it with the right question… like way too many players do.

Some say that puppetmasters are at the mercy of their players. I remember a lurker telling me that “I’m Sorry” was a poor example of ARG because it forced players down one path, rather than allowing free exploration. Which is absolute bullshit, because it was totally reliant on player-character interaction. Whatever we did always impacted the direction the game went. There was an end to reach, as written by our writer, but how we got there was completely up to the players.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to get to about my own plans is that there would be complete flexibility, but it requires giving up a little bit of disbelief in the beginning. Modeling it a bit on my own experience with the characters in “I’m Sorry”, really. I’m completely ready to accept that if no one befriends the characters, then the game will simply not go on.

Back in Portland, there was another guy named Steve on the panel with Bricker, talking about his fictional character Martin Aggett. He managed to cause a lot of grief there, too. I’m gonna dig up what I wrote about him elsewhere, because if you don’t know who he is, then this whole thing won’t make much sense:

“Martin Aggett appeared to be like any internet-savvy person, really. He had a Facebook, a couple of blogs he posted to actively about his job in journalism, a Flickr photostream he’d update frequently with images from his trips, all these connections in various social sites. He talked to people daily through instant messaging, email, whathaveyou. He developed friendships with people. He posted on unFiction as a player, was involved in several ARGs, and even said he was going to attend ARGFest.

“Which is where it all fell apart, because Martin Aggett is completely fictional.

“As the PM behind Martin Aggett explained, he did this solely to build up Martin’s internet footprint. This was actually not a ‘game’, per se, as much as it was ‘pre-game’. So when the game actually started later on, people could Google his name and find over a year’s worth of background and history behind the guy. Which is 99% more substance than most characters in ARGs, because many have only a couple of months of history at best. Most homebrews don’t even try at all.

“But he’s unlikely to run this game now, because of the fallout. So many people got pissed when he came out clean, stating that Martin Aggett didn’t really exist and that he was just apart of a game.

“And I’m sitting here thinking, ‘… really?’

“I mean, when hasn’t this happened to you before? If not in just regular internet relationships, it happens all the fucking time when ARGs are just beginning. You’re chatting with some stranger via AIM or whatever about, I dunno, the weather until they start dropping the ‘needs’–like the classic ‘Timmy fell down the well, can you help him?’ scenario. And then you realize that it’s all ‘in game’.

“The major problem is that PMs often don’t extend this character personality any farther. They fall incredibly, horribly flat most of the time–they basically do everything that I was taught to do in roleplay wrong. I mean, sure the PM has other things to worry about, but when most ARGs are entirely character-based, it’s crucial to have good character.
“But, because of this flattening of affect response in many characters, many veterans can spot them from a mile away. They’re used to that–they’re used to the one-dimensional, straightforward puppets that have less personality than a wet blanket.

“So the one time that someone changes it up, everyone gets pissed.

“Maybe it feels kind of like when you realized that sixteen-year-old girl you’ve been chatting up happens to be a forty-year-old male. But if you step back from how personally “betrayed” you feel and think about it: how is a fictional character on the internet any different from your own internet persona?

“There is only so much you can convey with text, and yet so much you can also mask with it. I am certain than who I appear as online is wildly different from who I am in reality. And… I’ve just had too many experiences of meeting people online and taking that impression of them with me when I go to meet them and then being sorely disappointed that I just don’t do that anymore.”

Martin–the character–started following me on Twitter a couple of weeks back, so I went and really investigated what this character was involved in for the first time and… I’m in love with this guy’s brain. I really am.

David Flor talks about Martin Aggett and his own experience in running an ARG. There’s this one quote in particular that has stuck to my mind like glue:

“In a sense, we’re all roleplaying. I think someone said at one point that an ARG is a roleplaying game in which you play yourself; that’s kinda true of the Internet as a whole.”

And I could not have said it better.

During “I’m Sorry”, I “played” myself. I was not “honest” in my depiction of who I was all the time. The major point was the fact that I distanced myself from the fact that I knew all these characters were a fictional construct and did not actually have a physical form in real life. They existed solely in emails and photographs and book pages–like memories, expect more alive.

It was maybe not expected that I play this role, but it got me more places than it would have if I hadn’t. I have a feeling, though, that I appeared more than a little crazy to outsiders–more or less because I had to pretend that this was real for the game to actually work.

This whole thing really came full circle in Portland. There, I met and talked to Bricker, our writer, in real life–who I knew was completely aware of everything that was going on–yet he played only a character of himself, the one that was unaware of what we were playing out in the forums. And goddamn, was he good at it.
The kicker is that I had to do the same thing there, too. I had to lay down my disbelief and play the role of the believer, with the little voice in the back of my head screaming “IT’S A GAME, DAMNIT” all the while. I mean, really, I could’ve pulled a Syn and called him out on his bullshit right there and then–I mean, what would he have done? I really don’t know. But I guess I was more interested in getting to the end of this story rather than pulling away the curtains on the great and the terrible Oz. (For the millionth time.)

So that’s what kept me playing my part.

Despite my conscious attempts at keeping the separation between the reality and the fiction, it didn’t work. It’s hard to, in a game that so casually crosses the line between them at every given turn. I still got emotionally attatched to this game, and emotionally attached to the characters. I mean, sure, it happens all the time in books and films–you get really involved in some character’s life, for whatever reason, and feel strongly for them and their story. This is why fanbases and ridiculous amounts of fanfiction and fanart exist.

But this was different. It’s more on par with the attachment I get to characters I roleplay with, but even then there’s separation–I like them because the character I’m playing gets along with them (or, in some cases, don’t and make for a hilarious rivalry).

This time, though… not only was I sharing personal things with these characters, the characters responded to what I was saying to them. I talked to characters about dreams I’ve had and films I love. I had pieces of my life–little pieces, mind you–incorporated into this game. The puppetmaster made a riddle out of my home address and posted my train schedules all over the board. I lovingly made a book for the writer and it sits next to me now, with the Curran ticket and a signature inside.

“All signs point to you,” Rage once wrote in a text to me.

This game could’ve ended very differently for me (and everyone, maybe) if I hadn’t made the “friendship” I made with the character Port. To be honest, if I hadn’t picked up on emailing the guy the moment he emerged from the underground of DC, I don’t think I would’ve been in Portland. I don’t think I would’ve seen this game all the way through. I was INSANELY frustrated at that point (here’s where we had lost our thread and much wank was happening). Despite my attempts to keep the game afloat by running the secret Bat Cave, my interest was starting to wan in favor of dropping this hot mess.

And then Port suddenly came back into the picture, and I suddenly saw something in this that I could do.

A lot of work goes into having someone trust you completely, which I put in. In the end, though, it required me to give up a lot of my own trust–not just to this character, but to the puppetmaster behind him. Especially during a time when we were just beginning to learn to trust that our puppetmaster was not actually out to get us.

Yet, somehow, the fact that I knew the words he wrote to me were written by someone else entirely never bothered me… maybe because I’ve had too many experiences with this divide. Too many people I’ve gotten to know online and then later realize they’re someone entirely different. One of my closest friends is someone I knew solely over the internet for almost six years before we actually met–only to be mildly disillusioned with each other when it happened.

So, perhaps, being friends with this fictional character was just like another internet friend to me. Somehow that meant that I felt like I could share my interests and my empathy with Port with no more restraint than I would normally give to a friend over the internet. I knew completely that he was fictional, but he’s just as fictional as the friends that I’ve made over the internet before.

But there was just a slight difference, just like there always is.

To him, I was Court–the only person who believed in him. One of my favorite films is Blade Runner, just like him. So is Court’s. I go to art school and have a general disdain for the people around me. So does Court. I knew Port was fictional. Court believed that Port was real.

And yet I still cried like a goddamn child when he died.

More links for the interested:
They’re Here. They’re Fake. Get used to it.
Imaginary Friend
Minds Of Their Own
(by the way, the last blog is kept by a fictional character!)