Abstract
The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over 3 months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third-party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design.
Highlights
Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a term often used to describe a game, or narrative, that is delivered to players and participants via a variety of different forms of media, for example via the Internet, social media, newspapers and physical artefacts or telephony, using voice or SMS, with the aim that this mixed use of media allows story, characters and interaction to develop to an extent that would not be possible in a mono-media context
This paper presents a study of The Malthusian Paradox (TMP), an ARG developed and deployed in September 2012 by the artists group Urban Angel, which is directed by Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne
While Boal suggests that giving players agency within a game may give them political agency outside of the magic circle, and McGonigal describes players’ unspoken awareness of their defined agency within the magic circle, we argue that Montola’s metaphor of breaking and blurring the magic circle is applicable to the framing of player agency when contrasted with the agency of an ARG’s producers in collectively shaping the boundaries of an unfolding game
Summary
Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a term often used to describe a game, or narrative, that is delivered to players and participants via a variety of different forms of media, for example via the Internet, social media, newspapers and physical artefacts or telephony, using voice or SMS, with the aim that this mixed use of media allows story, characters and interaction to develop to an extent that would not be possible in a mono-media context. TMP offered players a narrative experience that explored and experimented with multiple dimensions of transmedia storytelling: information was presented, and had to be sought out; a mixture of individual and group interactions with the game took place in public and in private and blended fact with fiction; the substance of interactions was both physical and digital, both live and recorded; content was sometimes authored and sometimes improvised; the production created original material and appropriated existing resources; parts of the player experience were personalised and parts were generic.
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