Connected Immersion in Games
November 2, 2011, International Game Innovation Conference, Orange, CA–Susan Bonds from 42 Entertainment talked about gameplay, participation, and storylines in her keynote talk.
The world of entertainment is changing as seen in alternate reality games. Here, the participants are changing their expectations of boundaries. They are changing consumption patterns and increasing group participation in these events. Players can enter and leave the world and makes real and alternate realities in their gameplay.
These new types of games are very immersive and are a result of natural evolution. The games are moving from single platforms into cross-platform, multimedia experiences. One facet of this new breed of games is a distributed narrative that blends storytelling and game theory. The combination increases engagement and transfers ownership for the story from the developers to the players.
These games depend upon some level of collective intelligence, so the story helps to develop a community which creates buzz. These factors increase loyalty. This new style of game requires very different game design. Level design must consider varying time frames and differences in involvement from the players. The game has to provide clues for players to follow so both casual and dedicated players can be involved and entertained.
An example of this new game style was the Year Zero campaign with the group Nine Inch Nails. This game eventually involved over 129 million people and created benefits and social and societal areas. The concept was to look at possible futures and build a world from fragments. These fragments were snapshots of a future web, some T-shirts with embedded messages that led to a website “Iamtryingtobelieve.com” which then linked to other sites.
Across all the different sites was a common theme, the distorted image of a hand. A challenge for the developers was aiding discovery. A USB thumb drive with new material was placed at a concert venue in Portugal. This material was posted by the fans on the Web and one other fan ran the music through spectrographic analysis. The image of the hand was in the spectrograph.
Their next concert was in Paris where are they added a movement around “artis resistance.com” as another thread in the storyline. As the game and story developed they added us to other distribution channels. All these channels provided glimpses of slices into the future.
Fans spread the word and 10 weeks before the album over 3 million people were following the activities and another 10 million people were watching what was going on. The whole process occurred two to five months before the release of the album.
The audience became a part of year zero and created open-source resistance. Now there are 37 active chapters of part is resistance and their goal is to make people see the world through different eyes. Almost 3,000,000 people moved to the 9 inch nails website and collectively created a 128 page graphic novel.
The core focus in games is to create a form of entertainment. The challenge for players is to eventually connect all the pieces. This new mode of interactive gameplay changes game design, because some parts of the story have to be created by the players who are following in real time. Designers need a central concept and must mix the art of storytelling in the art of immersion. The game must be developed to help people stay in the experience by keeping accurate control of all the details.
Games like this can immerse people in the story that seems to run in real time. Most of the people know that it’s a game and have no problem separating real and artificial realities. Even with obtuse clues and minimal direction, the par of the community and the collective intelligence keep the entire spectrum of players involved. These alternate reality games will move into mainstream applications and will reach tens of millions of people. It’s part of the evolution of entertainment.
