The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has put out a challenge. Try to find ten 8-foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States and then report their locations. This challenge has started a bit of a buzz in the ARG community and has led a number of influential figures to call for the gathering of the kinds of collective problem solving groups that appeared during The Beast and ilovebees. Groups, like The Cloudmakers, who solved the ARG The Beast, were able to sift through clues located throughout the web, solve puzzles presented in those clues and ultimately finish the game. The ARG community has long believed that they could deal with real world problems and approach them in ways that were quicker and more innovative than traditional approaches. If this latest call to action is taken up they might finally have a chance to prove it.
The idea that ARG players could deal with real-world problems isn’t new. The things that happened during game play started to get a few people interested in what an organized and motivated group of people could do with a real world problem. The Rand Corporation was just one of many who speculated about what could happen. Their 2004 report, Out of the Ordinary: Finding Hidden Threats by Analyzing Unusual Behavior, examined how a dynamic network of information in the hands of an ARG-like group could be used to identify a threat. They believed the same behaviour used by self-organizing ARG players could be used to sift through real information. The result would be patterns and meaning that would not be readily apparent otherwise.
I’ll be watching the chatter back on forth in the community to see where this goes in the next few weeks. It would be very interesting if the community took up the challenge and were able to step out of the world of alternate and into the pure reality.
We have a winner! And it is MIT so they are the ones that end up holding a giant $40,000 cheque. It appears that a formally organized institution was the most successful in taking up the challenge. There were some smaller groups that got up to 7 balloons and even some individuals who took on the challenge by themselves. It would have been nice to see a de-brief about HOW they actually found all those balloons but perhaps they are hanging onto those secrets for next time.
So I finally sat down and worked through Halo 3: ODST on friday night in co-op mode. The ODST stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troops and it is the latest in the Halo series of games. I’ve been playing the Halo series since Halo: Combat evolved came out for the xBox in 2001. Bungie Studios created the game and they had always been one of my favourite studios before they were purchased by Microsoft. I was eager to see what they had created. I wasn’t disappointed with the original game but I’ve been less than impressed with the sequels. ODST tried to do a few things a bit differently though. There was an attempt to weave a side-story into the gameplay in a way that hasn’t been done in previous games. It seemed to be an attempt to bring in outside narratives that were developed through the Halo book series and the ARG ilovebees, done for the release of Halo 2.
Anyone not familiar with the ad campaign or the ODST game itself can see the live action promotion that builds the back story for one of the main characters in the game.
Using real characters and a cinematic styles similar to Saving Private Ryan was perhaps an attempt to move towards a more realistic game that was less like the Hollywood-style science fiction of the first games in the series. It was certainly a departure from the previous marketing done for the Halo franchise.
The gameplay begins in the year 2552, in the Kenyan city of New Mombasa. The main goal is to fight your way through the city which is full of The Covenant, an alien race who have invaded Earth. You play the role of a rookie soldier who moves through the city, finding fragments of the story of his squad-mates left behind in their equipment. He has become separated from them during the drop from orbit and the flashes of video he finds tells their story in the now deserted landscape of the city.
Another character in the game is the AI that controls the entire city. This AI has been damaged in the attack but still attempts to help the character in two ways. It provides clues and hints that are communicated through traffic signals and signs. It also provides pieces of a side story about a young woman, named Sadie, who is trying to get out of the city before the attack begins. These segments of story come through telephone booths around the city. They contain voice clips, traffic camera and security camera footage. The AI is trying to tell the story so it can explain why The Covenant have come to earth, specifically the Rift Valley part of eastern Africa. This clip shows the AI going through the attack and coming back to life as the ODST drop into the city.
It might seem that a side story within a game is nothing special but ODST has some interesting DNA. There were six novels written in the Halo universe that provide a greater level of depth to the universe and the characters in the game. These novels have received enough critical acclaim and sales that they continue to be published. The other interesting bit of history is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) ilovebees that was created to promote Halo 2 before its release. The story in ilovebees revolved around a shipboard AI that had been damaged and was trying to re-integrate itself. It communicated through hacked websites and telephone lines as it tried to figure out why it had been damaged and why The Covenant was headed to earth. The ilovebees story begins to identify an artifact, buried on Earth, that The Covenant is trying to recover. The story ends with the realization that the artifact is designed to activate the Halo ring worlds located throughout the galaxy. If these are activated they will kill every sentient creature within the galaxy. The end of this story is where the game Halo 2 begins.
This apparently was no accident as Curtis Creamer, the executive producer on Halo 3: ODST tells that they were on a very tight development schedule (article). They were looking for story elements and they thought they could scavenge their earlier efforts in ilovebees to provide a vehicle for that story.
What is interesting is the tension between a game like Halo trying to be an epic and complex science fiction narrative and a fast moving first person shooter/ twitch game at the same time. The reviews so far would indicate that the side story has been received as an hour long distraction that slowed down players from moving through the game even faster. Most regard it as weak story that doesn’t add much to the game play. I think it is likely that most players really haven’t engaged in the Halo franchise for the story. The first copy of Halo sold over 10 million copies while only 100,000 copies of the first novel were sold. The ARG ilovebees was a complex and challenging game that involved solving very difficult puzzles and figuring out the sequence of hundreds of fragments of a radio play before the real story could be put together. It would seem that neither the novel or the ilovebees ARG really appealed to the hardcore gamers that were just looking to engage in another first person shooter that they could dominate and finish as quickly as possible.
This recent attempt by ODST to add in ARG-like elements into the game and build on the larger narrative on the novels was a great idea. I think what was missing was some way to allow those elements to remain separate from actual game play. They essentially forced the game player to deal with those elements even if they weren’t interested. It was critical to actually get through to the end of the game. Perhaps with the time and effort to build these side stories it was considered necessary to force the players to actually consume them. The design decisions may some day come out with a postmortem from the Microsoft development team. Regardless, I hope this will be the start of some consideration to allowing a more in-depth kind of experience to come out of a first-person shooter. If book sales are any indication, that might appeal to only 1% of the players of this kind of game. This might seem like a good argument to never even attempt this kind of design. It might also be a argument that the kinds of players who are interested in more in-depth narrative might actually be attracted to first person shooters rather than just dismissing them as linear, shallow experiences that quickly grow boring.
Whatever does happen next in the Halo franchise it will be interesting to see how much experimentation they are willing to allow. They are driven by profit like any other company but hopefully there will be some room to allow for some of the interactive elements of narrative to grow. The advances in physics engines and graphics rendering have overshadowed most game development so it is time for some of that creative energy to be channeled into creating an interactive narrative that goes beyond the typical cut scenes. Halo 3: ODST has tried and I’d like to see these kinds of attempts at new design approaches continue. Having a full ARG integrated into a first person shooter would be be one of those experiments. Obviously some people at Microsoft are thinking this way or ODST would have been the same disappointing re-mix of Halo that showed up in Halo 2 and Halo 3. A creative approach might take games like Halo 3:ODST to a memorable place where the story holds the player beyond the four hours it apparently takes them to blast through the entire experience.
