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Elan Lee's Alternate Reality
EL: I think maybe I should find a better word than “heroes.” With heroes, everyone imagines someone wearing a cape, and that’s so not what I mean. Anyway, most games are all about pushing a message, pushing a fiction, pushing a set of characters. It’s very aggressive. That sense of discovery is so important for ARG’s because if, instead of shouting, instead of pushing our message at people, if we whisper it, if we just embed a small flash of imagery in a TV commercial, if we do something subtle, it could be so much more powerful. You, who discovers that bizarre frame that’s out of place on the TV, suddenly you own that experience. It’s yours. You feel this tremendous sense of pride, because you found it. And you’re so much more encouraged to tell your friends about this, because it isn’t something someone threw at you. This is something you pulled.
GS: When you first got started, before there was really any precedent for this kind of game, how did you know people would play it? For example, The Beast kicked off with notches in a date on an AI movie poster. How could you be sure anyone would catch on? EL: Absolute luck. I wish I could say there was this science, this beautifully formulated equation, but, no, we just guessed, and we got lucky. There’s a lot of psychology involved in games like this. No one’s done this before, so we can’t go the library and check out a book or find a reference on the internet, we just have to say, I would think that’s cool. GS: Have there ever been symbols that the players totally missed? EL: We’ve had tons. On the AI project, we wanted to embed a puzzle inside a map, and so we said, all of the physical locations of everything we do in The Beast, if you blocked those out on a map, it would spell a word across the United States, and that would be really cool... Yeah, no one ever saw it. We had such high hopes. You know, I say whispering is more powerful than shouting. Well, sometimes it’s too quiet of a whisper. GS: Are there certain kinds of messages that get picked up and kinds that go under the radar? EL: We’re sort of learning as we go. I wish I could plot out this graph, because the way it actually works is the more subtle the message the longer it takes for people to discover it. So it all really depends on your time frame. If you have a year-long entertainment experience, then you can afford to be really subtle, because there’s this wonderful “a-hah” moment when somebody says, oh my god, this has been in front of us all along. If your project is two months long, two weeks long, you’ve got to a lot more obvious. It’s a balancing act. GS: Playing your games often requires a lot of hard work and searching, but people seem more than willing. What do you think makes players so dedicated? EL: When the Cloud Makers, the number one fan group for AI, formed, their mantra was “Lowering the productivity of the American workforce, one person at a time.” When you say people are constantly devoted though, you have to be really careful, because 95% of our players are not that way. They check in on the games very rarely. What we’ve found is that, there are too really appealing factors to immersive games, something that takes over your life. One is... that it takes over your life. The other way is, with the fanatics, their activities are almost more entertaining than the game itself. So it’s a circle of people who are willing to throw themselves at the experience and then the people who just like to watch. GS: In the case of I Love Bees, players were getting phone calls from the game in the middle of the night. Especially for the fanatics, where do you draw the line between game and life? EL: The last thing we want to do is to make an experience that’s indistinguishable from real life, because while it seems like that would be a good goal, it’s actually so scary that it becomes really unattractive. We’re very careful to always insert a small element of the fantastical into our games, because we want people to be able to make that distinction. You don’t want a game that takes over your life. You want to be able to opt into the experience, and control how much of your life is devoted to that game. It’s a fine line, and we’re very conscious of it. |
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