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Reality ends here: environmental game design and participatory spectacle
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Content
REALITY ENDS HERE:
ENVIRONMENTAL GAME DESIGN AND PARTICIPATORY SPECTACLE
by
Jeff Watson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Jeff Watson
Acknowledgements
A project of this kind is inherently collaborative. It takes many hands to design and test a
game, and many more to implement it in the wild. But it is impossible to separate the
dancers from the dance. A game does not exist without its players. And so I would like to
begin by thanking all those who participated in any way in the playing of the 2011
version of Reality Ends Here. Each of you constantly surprise me with your enthusiasm,
trust, and ingenuity. You made this happen, and I can’t wait to see what you do next.
My primary design partner for this project was Simon Wiscombe. Simon’s fingerprints
are all over this game, and it would not have taken the form it did without his
involvement. Simon is a unique kind of triple-threat--artist, performer, and engineer--and
each of those qualities were invaluable in the rapid prototyping and implementation of
the game. I sincerely hope I am lucky enough to collaborate with Simon again.
Three members of the faculty at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) were
especially instrumental in making this project happen. Professor Holly Willis initiated the
project in her capacity as head of the Envisioning the Future Group at the SCA. Holly’s
vision and dedication are the foundations upon which this effort is built. I will be forever
grateful for the trust she placed in me to design and execute this project. Professor Tracy
Fullerton worked tirelessly to push me as an artist and designer. Tracy was deeply
involved and invested in the design and implementation of the game. Like Simon, her
ii
fingerprints can be found everywhere on this project. Without her energy and wisdom,
this project may well have died in childbirth. Professor Tara McPherson is the chair of
my dissertation committee. Tara’s guidance, support, and involvement in this project
helped me to understand how I could use design to articulate an argument about the role
of games and new media in the generation of culture and the remaking of lived
environments. Tara’s role as instructor of the class which ran in parallel to the game
augmented the project in ways impossible to enumerate here. That both Tara and Tracy
took on this effort during their sabbaticals is a testament to the dedication and passion
they bring to all their work.
The SCA administration was a crucial partner and patron in bringing Reality Ends Here
to fruition. In particular, Dean Elizabeth Daley had the wisdom to convene the
Envisioning the Future Group which ultimately commissioned this project. Without her
ongoing and enthusiastic support for the game, not only would it not have happened--it
wouldn’t have been nearly as good. Associate Dean Michael Renov was another early
supporter of the game, and has been an important communicator of the aims of the
project to the SCA faculty at large. Finally, the Envisioning the Future Group itself,
consisting of progressive faculty members from across the divisions of the SCA, laid
much of the groundwork for this project over the two years of their research into
innovative approaches to post-secondary media arts education.
iii
The design, implementation, and analysis of Reality Ends Here involved many graduate
students donating hours of their time, often based solely on the belief that this was a
worthy endeavor. Communications PhD student Benjamin Stokes contributed in a wide
variety of ways, from providing initial design suggestions to independently conducting
interviews and assessment data analyses, some of which appear in this document. First-
year Interactive Media MFA student Anna Lotko stepped in to assist as a Game Runner
and ended up taking on a leadership role in the execution of the game, despite having
only recently arrived at the SCA. Fellow IMAP PhD students Rosemary Comella, Jeanne
Jo, Susana Ruiz, and Laila Sakr worked as assistant Game Runners in their capacities as
teaching assistants. IMAP PhD students Gabriel Peters-Lazaro and Joshua McVeigh-
Shultz provided important design insights, feedback, and logistical assistance in the run-
up to the game; and recently-graduated IMAP PhD student Jen Stein provided feedback,
support, and advice throughout the process of both designing the game and preparing this
document.
Many people participated in the preparation of the physical and digital assets required to
run Reality Ends Here. Freelance designers Matt Manos and Haley Moore were
responsible for implementing much of the look and feel of the project. The quality of
their graphic design and fabrication work set a high bar for the rest of the game to live up
to. Graduate student Elizabeth Swensen and undergraduate students Maddie Renov and
Carly Kuhn spent countless hours gathering images and laying out content in InDesign
templates as we “crunched” on preparing game cards for printing. Undergraduate writing
iv
student Jeremy Novick also assisted in this process, and in addition developed creative
social media assets such as the mysterious fake student Samantha LaFontaine. Quebec-
based printer PDI turned around our print order in record time, going beyond the call of
duty to make sure that we received the game cards before the start of the semester.
In addition to Professors Tara McPherson and Tracy Fullerton, my dissertation committee
consists of Professors Steve Anderson, Scott Fisher, and Henry Jenkins. All three of these
professors have been important advisors to me over the years, and their influence is
deeply felt throughout this work. Steve Anderson was the first person I met when I
applied to IMAP. His commitment to exploring new modes of scholarship and art practice
inspired me to embark on the path that led here, and he remains a constant source of
guidance and wisdom. Scott Fisher mentored me for several years while I worked with
him on a dizzying array of projects associated with the Mobile and Environmental Media
Lab (MEML). Insofar as this is a project about telling the story of a place, it is a direct
descendent of that mentorship and those projects. The work of Henry Jenkins has inspired
me since before I arrived at USC. His insights into the nature of participatory culture and
transmedia storytelling underwrite much of the thinking behind this project. His support
both behind the scenes and in public fora has helped in advancing the discussion of this
project and the questions it raises.
Many other individuals and groups helped in the development, testing, and promotion of
this project and its underlying concepts. Sarah Brin was an important sounding board and
v
provided playtesting facilities in partnership with Pervasive and Environmental Gaming
LA (PEG-LA); Jim Babb (Socks, Inc.) and Sam Lavigne (SFZero) both designed projects
that directly informed the development of this game, and took the time to talk with me
about them; Lance Weiler at DIY Days and Celia Pearce at IndieCade helped arrange
demos of the game to spread word among the transmedia and independent game design
communities, respectively; Michael Andersen and Nathan Maton of Wired and ARGNet
kept tabs on the project, interviewed me about it, and helped spread the word. Many
others inspired me, pushed me to do better, and shared with me their wisdom.
This project was an experiment. By stepping into unknown territory, I opened myself to
the risk of failure. But the finite nature of our existence, and the infinite nature of the
unknown, moots success or failure in any professional domain. What really matters are
our relationships to the people who are closest to us with whom we share our brief
journey through this wilderness. Kiki Benzon’s love, humor, editing prowess, and advice
have long sustained me in this regard. My appreciation for her goes far beyond the limits
of this project.
Finally, this project would not have happened without the lifelong support of my family,
who let me know from an early age that I could (and should) chase my dreams wherever
they led. Bob and Joyce and Heather, thank you.
vi
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures ix
Abstract xiii
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
1.1 About This Document 4
1.2 Background 10
1.3 Research Trajectory 14
1.4 Critique of Alternate Reality Games 20
1.4.1 ARGs ≠ Games 21
1.4.2 Promise and Potential 22
1.4.3 Shortfalls 24
1.4.4 Limits on Accessibility, Replayability, and Sustainability 25
1.4.5 Data Intensity and Process Intensity 30
1.4.6 Beyond the ARG: “Story Facilitating” Instead of Storytelling 33
1.5 Introduction to Environmental Game Design 35
1.6 Dramaturgy, Space, and the Construction of Reality 39
Chapter 2: Reality Ends Here Design Philosophy and Selected Documentation 51
2.1 Thesis I: Dramaturgy of the Local 54
2.1.1 Mandate Development 55
2.1.2 Craft, Literacy, and Social 59
2.1.3 Mandates of Reality Ends Here 62
2.1.4 Physical Constraints 66
2.2 Thesis II: Action, Not Simulation 76
2.2.1 Contrast: Simulation Games and Impact 77
2.2.2 Actualization 83
2.3 Thesis III: The Social is the Medium 90
2.4 Thesis IV: Leverage Motivation, Optimize for Agency 96
2.4.1 Agency and the Invitation to Play 97
2.4.2 Process Intensity 101
2.4.3 Additional Remarks Regarding Agency 111
2.5 Thesis V: Iterative and Permeable 112
vii
Chapter 3: Technical Description 114
3.1 Overview 114
3.2 Cycle of Play 115
3.3 Players 120
3.4 Temporal Structure 122
3.5 Space 125
3.6 Interaction Patterns 126
3.7 First Contact Campaign 127
3.8 Induction 135
3.9 Collectible Card Game (CCG) 142
3.9.1 Objective 144
3.9.2 Acquiring Cards 144
3.9.3 Combining Cards 145
3.9.4 Connectivity Schema 149
3.9.5 Point System 150
3.9.6 Card Packet Ratios 151
3.10 Game Identity System 152
3.10.1 Graphic Identity System 153
3.11 Website 159
Chapter 4: Reflections 169
4.1 Impact Analysis 169
4.1 Contrast: Gamification 182
4.2 Surveillance and Control: @EndReality 195
Bibliography 204
Appendix A: Additional Documentation and Player Interviews 209
Appendix B: Interview with Nathan Maton 210
Appendix C: Interview with Henry Jenkins 228
viii
List of Figures
Figure 1: “Reality Ends Here” graffiti, unofficial and official. 13
Figure 2: Screenshots from The Black Sea Tapes. 17
Figure 3: The five undergraduate Divisions of the SCA. 58
Figure 4: Partial whiteboard capture, Envisioning the Future Group
meeting, March 2011.
62
Figure 5: Flyer for Reality Starts Here. 64
Figure 6: Wireframe for drag-and-drop “challenge builder” interface. 69
Figure 7: Geographical constraints. 71
Figure 8: Gameplay in a recent version of Steve Jackson’s Illuminati. 72
Figure 9: Prototyping card-based procedural creative prompting system. 73
Figure 10: Reality Ends Here card game play observed in SCA hallway. 74
Figure 11: A sampling of student-organized events, productions, and
online spaces produced as a result of playing Reality Ends Here.
76
Figure 12: Reality Ends Here, various play contexts. 85
Figure 13: Bullpen posts regarding core game mandates. 87
Figure 14: Poster for The Game. 89
Figure 15: Bullpen post regarding search for collaborative partnerships. 92
Figure 16: Bullpen post regarding “art vs. commerce” debate. 93
ix
Figure 17: Player-submitted photographs of mentorship encounters. 94
Figure 18: CCG play in student dormitory. 95
Figure 19: Team MARRA, striking a variety of mock-serious poses. 107
Figure 20: Members of The Tribe, posing in a tree. 109
Figure 21: Card bank for the Tribe. 110
Figure 22: Gameplay overview. 115
Figure 23: Environmental Play Dynamo. 117
Figure 24: Environmental play dynamo. 119
Figure 25: First contact campaign postcards. 132
Figure 26: Clue card and player-submitted response. 135
Figure 27: Students arriving for induction at the Game Office, August,
2011.
137
Figure 28: Card packet (#3 Coin Envelope containing CCG cards and
instructions).
140
Figure 29: A selection of CCG cards from Reality Ends Here. 143
Figure 30: Sample CCG card. 144
Figure 31: A minimally-valid card combination. 146
Figure 32: Deal containing two Property cards. 147
x
Figure 33: Card-based procedural prompting system. 149
Figure 34: Logo implementation prototypes. 158
Figure 35: Player profile. 160
Figure 36: The Bullpen. 161
Figure 37: Members directory. 162
Figure 38: Deal archive. 163
Figure 39: Deal page, part 1. 164
Figure 40: Deal page, part 2. 165
Figure 41: Submission tool. 166
Figure 42: Card page. 167
Figure 43: Photoblog. 168
Figure 44: Divisional participation chart. 170
Figure 45: A student’s Tesla coil in action. 174
Figure 46: Data visualization of player clusters. 176
Figure 47: Group logos: MARRA and The Tribe. 177
Figure 48: Letters of My Lai. 181
xi
Figure 49: Nike FuelBand Homepage. 186
Figure 50: Just Press Play promotional video. 188
Figure 51: OpenBadges Project. 190
Figure 52: Flag Advisory. 197
Figure 53: Twitter: @endreality. 200
xii
Abstract
This document defines the emerging practice of “environmental game design.” This
practice is contextualized within a body of theory regarding the production of space and
the changing nature of spectacle. Within this context, five interrelated theses regarding
environmental game design are presented. These theses are illustrated through discussion
and documentation of the central practical component of my doctoral research: Reality
Ends Here, an environmental game designed to effect immediate change in the
community of learners at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA). Drawing on the
research and methodology underlying the design and implementation of Reality Ends
Here, this document argues for the transformative potential of environmental game
interventions across a range of domains.
xiii
Chapter 1: Introduction
For those who would like to see change, the price of inaction will be to see the least
desirable features of the status quo exaggerated and even more firmly entrenched.
- Seymour Paper, Mindstorms
Over the course of 122 days during of the Fall of 2011, a group of about 100 students at
the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, California sacrificed weekends,
evenings, and other moments of spare time to plan and create media projects, stage
special events, critique one another’s work, and share their creations with the world. They
extensively documented their experiences with hours of video footage, hundreds of
photos and blog posts, and thousands of status updates. They formed into groups of
varying size and aesthetic disposition, came up with their own ideas, and produced their
work using their own “DIY” equipment. The often elaborate artworks they produced
included short films, animations, video games, board games, screenplays, live events,
websites, installations, documentaries, transmedia hoaxes, plays, and more. Friendships
were made, reputations were forged, blood, sweat, and tears were shed, an environment
was transformed, and stories were told. This collaboration, creation, and reflection was
not a part of the students’ coursework.
Few of the students involved in this creative social activity knew each other prior to the
fall of 2011. Nearly all were “freshmen” undergraduates beginning their first year of post-
secondary education in one of the five Divisions at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. As
they arrived, the University made efforts to introduce them to one another, using
orientation sessions and other communications to promote a culture of intellectual
1
diversity, collaboration, and creativity. In addition to these traditional methods, the
University also provided the students with a game to play. Some of the students referred
to this game as “Reality”; others simply called it, “The Game.” They were not told to
play it, nor were they directly told that it existed. It was a secret game they discovered on
their own. Many of the students, upon learning of the secret, kept it so; others spread
whispers, online and off. But as the game unfolded, it became difficult to ignore. It
became a spectacle.
This spectacle was not made for the students as much as it was made by them. It played
out online on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms; and offline, in student
dormitories, campus spaces, and the streets of Los Angeles. It told the story of the
friendships, partnerships, rivalries, and dreams forged through the situations of the game.
It was more than just a spectacle. It was a participatory spectacle.
This document is about the process of engineering participatory spectacle through
environmental game design. Environmental game design is the practice of designing
games with and around the physical, digital, social, and emotional environment of players
so as to manifest an impact on the way in which that environment is used. This
terminology is drawn from the domains of urban planning and architecture. David
Mocarski, Chair of the Environmental Design program at the Art Center College of
Design, describes environmental design as “a human-centered discipline that is focused
on the design of a user’s total experience,” involving “spatial, object and emotional
2
communication.” Designers working in environmental design “plan, design, and
implement systems . . . that are added to or overlaid onto and into existing or planned
places and spaces” in order to enable “wayfinding,” “interpretation,” and
“placemaking” (Calori). Environmental game design is the application of game
mechanics to these ends.
Insofar as the experiment in informal learning conducted at USC is its centerpiece, this
document is specifically concerned with how environmental game design can impact
communities of learners. In this sense, the discussion contained herein speaks to what
John Dewey identifies as the “intimate and necessary relation between the processes of
actual experience and education.” This relationship has long been understood as being
crucial. As Socrates suggests in Meno, teaching is distinct from the mere transfer of facts:
rather, it entails creating the conditions necessary to assist learners in their own
“discovery of truth.” The contours of a given educational environment can vary widely,
from the contained experience of home schooling, to the explosive bustle of a major
urban university, but the primary responsibility of educators is always and most
essentially to give structure to this environment so as to make it conducive to intellectual
and moral development. As Dewey notes, writing in 1938, “it is the task of the educator
to recognize surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all
that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worth while.” This
document is intended to shine a light on the role of environmental game design in the
3
processes of “recognition” and “extraction” that are required to create meaningful and
social experiential learning systems in the present day.
Our capacity to learn and unlearn, both as individuals and as communities, is
fundamental to our civilization. This document is therefore also about the role of
environmental game design in impacting all manner of lived environments. While the
project presented herein is designed to impact a very specific group of often
economically-privileged young people at an expensive post-secondary media arts school,
the principles underlying its development do not require any specific arrangements of
capital or demography, nor are they strictly linked to educational contexts. This document
is intended to show how spectacle can be oriented toward and directed by real
participation through environmental game design, and how this kind of play can be a
positive force in many corners of our civilization. It is about how artists, entertainers,
educators, and activists can use this form of design to embolden and empower
communities to actively engage in the construction of their realities. This is not a survey
or a blueprint or a proof. Rather, it is a provocation.
1.1 About This Document
This document is intended to capture the thinking underlying the design of Reality Ends
Here as a means of provoking further investigation into the application of environmental
game design and participatory spectacle across a range of domains, from education to
activism to entertainment and beyond.
4
The first chapter of this document begins with a brief “Background” section. This section
positions Reality Ends Here within the history of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and
introduces the metaphors of dream and spectacle which will be returned to throughout
this document. The second section of the introductory chapter, “Research Trajectory,”
traces the evolution of my art and design practice as it moved away from linear cinematic
storytelling and toward nonlinear and spatialized forms of narrative and interactivity. This
trajectory frames the third section of the introduction, wherein I present a critique of
alternate reality games (ARGs). This discussion is intended to reveal the ARG as a very
specific form of puzzle- and event-driven interactive transmedia storytelling. While a
crucial influence on the emerging practice of environmental game design, the specific
nature of the ARG excludes games such as Reality Ends Here from being defined as such,
necessitating the invention of a new term of art. The rationale underlying this term of art
will be discussed through a brief examination of the limits of related terms.
Chapter One will conclude with a presentation of the theoretical groundwork for
environmental game design and participatory spectacle. This presentation is intended to
surface five main ideas. First, that the foundational interactions between individuals
within a given environment constitute a performance or spectacle, and that this
performance or spectacle in turn shapes and constrains possibility within the
environment; second, that designing a sustainable and meaningful intervention into this
process necessarily entails both activating the agency of the inhabitants of the
5
environment, and systematizing the process of reflecting this agency back upon them in
the form of narrative; third, that preparing such interventions requires a deep analysis of
the affordances and limitations present in the social environment; fourth, that conducting
this analysis entails reconsidering what we mean by space and place in the context of
mobile and social media and other forms of ubiquitous computing; and fifth, that any
design process of this sort is inherently iterative and must be permeable to the input of
participants. These core ideas weave together interrelated strands of theory and practice
drawn from the urban interventionist art practice of Situationism; the learning theories of
John Dewey, Seymour Papert, and others; the sociological investigations into
performance and social establishments conducted by Erving Goffman; and the
contemporary practice of mobile and environmental game design, among other sources.
This section will also include an exploration of the notion of the spectacle from the point
of view of participation. This discussion, informed by the writings of Stephen Duncombe,
Henry Giroux, and others, will surface the democratic affordances of the spectacle and
position it as a tool for community transformation. This perspective will be contrasted
with more traditional views that conceive of the spectacle solely as a mechanism for
domination. The notion that a generative text is required to structure and sustain
participation in the spectacle will be central to this discussion. Game mechanics will be
proposed as a fruitful source for this generativity.
In Chapter Two, I will present the design philosophy underlying Reality Ends Here. This
presentation will identify five key theses regarding environmental game design and
6
“impact.” This chapter is most relevant to game designers and the range of communities
invested in the notion of “games for change” or “impact games,” but also has
implications that will be of interest to those who are thinking or working through the use
of games in fields such as entertainment, advertising, and community art practice.
1
The
theses presented in this chapter will be illustrated with documentation from the 2011
iteration of the game. This documentation is not presented in the form of scientific
assessment data, but rather through the narration of specific passages of play. To assess
the impact of Reality Ends Here with anything approximating scientific rigor would
involve a multi-year longitudinal study of participant outcomes.
2
Further, it is my
position that the impacts of this game are best demonstrated in terms of social and
cultural outcomes that are easily captured through narrative but elusive when approached
quantitatively.
Chapter Three contains a complete design breakdown of Reality Ends Here, illustrated
with additional documentation. In Chapter Four, I will close this document a discussion
of the key successes and failures of the game, and critical reflections on impact games,
“gamification,” and Reality Ends Here itself. Several Appendices are also included. These
Appendices contain additional documentation, interviews
3
regarding the design process,
and other materials.
7
1
Regardless of their provenance or purpose, all games seek to transform subjectivity through the procedures of play. In
this sense, there is no such thing as an “instrumental” or “applied” game; rather there are simply things that we can call
games, and then there is everything else.
2
Research collaborator Benjamin Stokes has already taken some significant steps toward producing this data.
3
Readers looking for a more informal discussion of the key principles, design elements, and outcomes of Reality Ends
Here may wish to begin by reading the interviews with Nathan Maton and Henry Jenkins included in the appendices.
These interviews cover much of the territory that is explored in depth in Chapters 2 and 3 of this document.
Readers are invited to use this document in whatever way suits their research interests.
While each chapter contributes important elements to the overall picture I am trying to
paint, I recognize that many readers will be primarily interested only in certain aspects of
this discussion. Due to the restrictive formatting requirements placed on doctoral
dissertations, I have found it necessary to sequence the arguments contained herein in a
somewhat artificial manner. The optimal form for a work such as this would be a website
or other interactive artifact. Such a form would enable navigation by keywords and
search terms, and would open new possibilities for dialogue. In lieu of such a form,
readers are advised that this text is designed to at least partially withstand a nonlinear
traversal: whenever possible, key terms are redefined in context so as to render individual
chapters legible independent of the rest of the text.
Finally, it should be noted that this document represents only a third of my dissertation
project. In keeping with the ethos of the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice (IMAP)
program, the scholarly contribution of which this document is a part is made through the
aggregate of theory and practice. Readers are thus invited to explore and reflect upon the
website for the current version of Reality Ends Here, which can be found at http://
reality.usc.edu.
4
Because Reality Ends Here is inherently about documenting and
narrating the activities of the community of learners at the SCA, the website that
8
4
Readers who wish to access certain non-public elements of the site will require a login. Please contact the author
directly at remotedevice@gmail.com to be emailed the appropriate credentials. Further, as with all forms of digital
media, the website that mediates gameplay for Reality Ends Here is a castle in the sand. Readers removed by posterity
are invited to download a static .zip archive of the 2011 game website from http://remotedevice.net/docs/
reality2011.zip.
mediates the game constitutes a far more complete exegesis of the project than could be
included here--indeed, it is the primary vehicle for the documentation of this project. This
document is intended to fill in the gaps between the manifestations of play and
participation visible on the game website and the lived experience of playing the game
itself. This experience is in many ways akin to a theatrical experience, albeit one wherein
there is something approximating an identity between the performers and the audience.
Such ephemeral performative elements find explication in these pages, and are integrated
into the discussion of the theory and design of Reality Ends Here. Further, readers who
examine the website and other game materials such as the complete card deck, the game
identity system, and the ruleset for Reality Ends Here will surface different meanings
contingent on their theoretical and practical perspectives.
5
With luck, these discoveries
will complement the concepts discussed in this document and will help to inform future
work in the domain of environmental game design, education, and impact game design.
Readers are invited to share their reflections at http://remotedevice.net/dissertation.
The final component of this dissertation is my personal portfolio and “research lifelog”
viewable at http://remotedevice.net. This website aggregates bibliographic citations, blog
posts, tweets, quotes, media sources, project documentation, and other artifacts gathered
and produced during the course of my research. As a searchable and metadata-rich
archive, remotedevice.net is designed to enable the visitor to enter into the matrix of ideas
and practice that find sequence in this document and expression in Reality Ends Here.
9
5
The ruleset and an extensive discussion of the game’s identity system are included in Chapter 3 below. The 2011 deck
of cards is available through the USC Library, attached to this text. The cards can be browsed virtually at http://
reality.usc.edu/cards.
1.2 Background
Reality ends here.
- motto of the USC School of Cinematic Arts
Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping quest for a
new way of life is the only thing that remains really exciting.
- Guy Debord, “Critique of Urban Geography”
The USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) was founded in 1929 at the initiative of
Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., a movie star of extraordinary fame, wealth, and influence. At the
time, Fairbanks was the president of the fledgling Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, which in 1927 had begun bestowing the awards later known as the
“Oscars” (Wiley 3). Eager to make the Academy as central as possible to the burgeoning
film industry, Fairbanks conceived of the organization as having an educational mission
to support its role as liaison between labor and the studio system. With a “training school
at its core,” Fairbanks and other members of the Academy envisioned the organization as
being the definitive “center of learning for future generations of motion picture
professionals” (Goldman 14). After a series of consultations with existing institutions
throughout the Los Angeles area, Fairbanks finally struck a deal with USC President and
fellow fencing enthusiast Rufus B. von KleinSmid, who agreed to house, support, and
partially fund what would be the nation’s first film school. In 2009, a statue depicting
Fairbanks holding a screenplay in one hand and a fencing foil in the other was erected in
the main courtyard of the school to commemorate the 80th anniversary of this agreement.
10
No post-secondary institution is as directly linked to Hollywood spectacle as is the SCA.
In addition to Fairbanks, the founding faculty of the SCA included directors such as D.W.
Griffith and Ernst Lubitsch, and seminal industry players such as William C. DeMille,
Irving Thalberg, and Darryl Zanuck, among many other luminaries. Since its inception,
the SCA has functioned as a talent funnel for Hollywood, training students in the style,
technique, business, and analysis of cinema, television, and, more recently, interactive
media and transmedia. Today, alumni are so prevalent and influential within the
entertainment industry that they are collectively referred to as the “USC Mafia.” In 2009,
the public relations machinery of the SCA proclaimed that seventeen of the top twenty
grossing films of all time were written, directed, or produced by graduates of the school.
6
In a speech delivered at the school’s 80th anniversary celebrations, Steven Spielberg
quipped, “if every SCA graduate working in the industry didn’t show up to work on
Monday morning . . . [this] town would grind to a halt” (Cowan).
Simply put, the SCA is more than just a place for the study of the theory and practice of
spectacle: it is a spectacle. Its state-of-the-art facilities, many of which bear the names of
famous alumni (“The Lucas Building,” “The Ron Howard Screening Hall,” “The
Zemeckis Center,” and so on), and whose halls are lined with autographed posters
cataloguing the extended canon of cinematic history, project onto the mind of the visitor a
powerful and idealized image of Hollywood. It is a place where students, as SCA Dean
11
6
This statistic is somewhat dubious, as it includes the work of Steven Spielberg, who is only an “honorary” alumnus.
See Cowan, “Cinematic Arts Celebrates 80th Anniversary With All New Campus.”
Elizabeth Daley states, come to “make their dreams a reality” (Goldman 8), but it is also
a dream unto itself.
The SCA has long been aware of its status as a dreamland. This awareness is captured in
its unofficial motto, “Reality Ends Here.” According to alumnus David L. Wolper,
sometime in the 1940s, the phrase first appeared as graffiti on a campus wall (Goldman
11).Twenty years later, the graffiti appeared again, this time on the wall of the “Bullpen,”
a heavily-trafficked student hangout and workspace. In the 1970s, a student scrawled the
phrase above the entrance to the “Stables,” at the time a main building for the film
school. When George Lucas donated his first set of buildings to the University in 1984,
the phrase was roughly carved into the wet pavement of the walkway to the complex. In
2008, when Lucas’ second set of buildings were being constructed, the motto was adapted
into latin (“Limes Regiones Rerum”)
7
and engraved in stone above the archway at the
back of the main courtyard. And in 2011, it made its most recent appearance, in the full
name of “the Game”: Reality Ends Here.
12
7
Google Translate renders this as “regions of the boundary.”
Figure 1: “Reality Ends Here” graffiti, unofficial and official.
Every dream has its own peculiar logic. In a dream of stillness, I cannot move. In a dream
of flight, I can do the impossible. And on those rare occasions where I recognize that I am
dreaming, I can do whatever I choose. What is the dream of a place? Who are its
dreamers? Is it a dream of stillness or of flight?
Ours is a society of overlapping and nested dreams, and it’s turtles all the way down. We
construct these dreams, and are constructed by them. This is our reality, and this is how
we change it. Perhaps there was some point in the distant past when this was not the case,
where we were well and truly “awake.” Or perhaps this fanciful paradise of the real lies
13
in the far future as the omega point of science, a utopia wherein all politics and culture
proceed without error or delusion from a basis in the complete understanding of the
fundamental interactions between matter, energy, and subjectivity. But such a future is
almost certainly impossible, and dubiously desirable; and we can never return to Eden.
Reality ends here, in the ever-present Now wherein the dream makes the dreamer and the
dreamer makes the dream.
Reality Ends Here is an intervention into the dream logic of the SCA. It did not emerge
by accident. It was designed in order to change the terms of the dream into which
students entered when they began their careers at the SCA. It aimed to reveal this dream
as a dream, and to empower its dreamers to construct it themselves. Over the course of
the project’s 120-day run, collectible cards, rumors, secret websites, and a mysterious
black flag drew students into an intense underground social game involving
collaboration, strategy, and artistic experimentation. By connecting students to one
another in unpredictable and serendipitous ways, and by providing a framework for
meaningful play and performance, the game superimposed a productively chaotic and
interdisciplinary community of practice onto a collection of heavily siloed academic
divisions.
1.3 Research Trajectory
I am a storyteller. My path as an artist and designer began in writing short fiction, plays,
and screenplays, and in making films. This practice gradually transformed into the kind
14
of work I am doing now, namely, environmental game design. I will define exactly what I
mean by environmental game design in the pages below. But first, I would like to briefly
outline my trajectory into the space of designing games and participatory systems. This
trajectory is presented in order to help the reader understand the relationship between
game design, participation, and storytelling which underwrites Reality Ends Here.
For me, this project begins at the turn of the century. At that time, I was working as the
membership coordinator at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), an
urban film co-op with somewhere around 1000 members. My responsibilities at LIFT
included teaching screenwriting, organizing classes on topics such as hand-processing
16mm film, and putting together festivals of artisanal works of cinema. But despite being
ensconced in this nostalgic temple of filmmaking, I was feeling restless about continuing
as a filmmaker. With the Web having ushered in a whole new range of affordances and
mentalities about how media can be produced, distributed, and discovered--along with
changing notions of what an author can be and what constitutes an audience--my mind
had begun to wander. The language of the cinema--the shot, the cut, the sequence--and
the process of production and distribution at the time--find some financing, get into
festivals, cross your fingers and hope for a distributor--seemed overly restrictive. With
the Web came so many new possibilities. It was an undiscovered country for storytelling,
and I was unable to resist the urge to explore.
15
What initially excited me was the idea of telling stories that went beyond the confines of
a single text and unfolded not just across multiple texts, but across multiple platforms. I
wanted to produce radically nonlinear work. Such work would go beyond the “database
cinema” of the 1990s, which merely presented new ways to contingently produce linear
sequences of images and other kinds of content. I wanted to dispense with the cinematic
frame entirely and tell stories in the ether. I wanted to take Kaprow’s notion of the
Happening and expand it to include the realm of the digital. In the words of kindred spirit
Jeff Hull, I wanted to “infuse variability and play into the workaday world by re-
engineering the way that people navigate and experience the space and the population
around them.”
This idea of breaking free of the boundaries of a single medium quickly put me on a
slippery slope. I found myself wanting to escape from all of the protocols that
traditionally define our engagement with story. I ultimately began to wonder what the
effect would be if I dropped the whole pretense of a story being a story at all. I began to
look for ways to blur the boundaries between what was real and what was fiction--and the
web with its capacity for anonymity made that tantalizingly possible.
In 2001, armed with a Canada Council for the Arts media arts grant, I began piecing
together a project (ultimately known as The Black Sea Tapes) comprised of fake websites,
a cycle of “lost” films by a dead filmmaker from the Caucasus named Janucz Hartl
(loosely, “split heart”), and a series of real-world events including screenings staged by
16
Hartl’s daughter, Krjstina. I planned to present these artifacts, events, and characters to
the world as if they were completely real. I even went so far as to make my collaborators
in the production swear oaths to never reveal the true provenance of the work we were
creating.
Figure 2: Screenshots from The Black Sea Tapes.
I thought of what we were doing as a kind of archaeological fiction. My task as creator
was to plant bits of story here and there and let my audience find them for themselves.
The footage we shot would be planted in public places on VHS tapes accompanied by
cryptic notes which would indirectly lead to the website run by the fictional artistic
collective to which Janucz Hartl belonged prior to his death. On this website, beneath
layers of other fictions, Hartl’s friends and family would lament his tragic suicide. They
17
would discuss the possibility that some of his work might have survived despite his own
terminal efforts to destroy every existing print of his films. As the tapes were discovered
in reality, these characters would communicate with the audience, and work with them to
reconstruct and interpret Hartl’s final mysterious film. Through this process, characters
and story worlds with uncertain ontologies would be revealed.
Of course, I wasn’t the only person thinking about this kind of storytelling at the turn of
the century. While I was working on The Black Sea Tapes, movie studios and game
companies were in the midst of unleashing the first wave of what would soon become
known as alternate reality games (ARGs). Like my little art project, these games
distributed mysterious narratives across the web and in physical space, blending them
into everyday content channels, all the while playfully maintaining the fiction that it was
all real. Early ARGs such as The Beast (2001) and I Love Bees (2004) engaged the
energies of sometimes quite large audiences in collective acts of narrative archaeology.
These projects were ultimately very complicated advertising experiments, designed to
“drive eyeballs” toward mass media products; but the outcomes they produced were
fascinating.
As I studied these first wave ARGs and toyed with further indie efforts of my own, I
came to an important realization. What was most interesting to me about this emerging
art form was not the way it allowed authors to cleverly deploy story materials, puzzles,
and “missions” under the winking guise of “this is not a game.” Rather, what struck me
18
(and others who have converged upon this space, such as McGonigal, Jenkins, and Dena)
as having the richest vein of artistic--and, ultimately, practical--potential was the way that
ARGs could transform audiences into engaged and creative communities.
The main thing I became interested in was the role the participants of ARGs played in the
creation of the experience itself. I wanted to go beyond relegating participation to the
ghetto of “user generated content.” I wanted participants to have more than just an impact
on the various elements of the story presented by the game: I wanted their participation to
be the story of the game. I wondered if the story of the players themselves and the
communities they formed could be the focus rather than a side-effect of the experience.
In the end, I realized that the design approach of the ARG was simply incapable of
producing the kind of system I wanted to create. Uncovering what such a system might
look like was the primary objective of the research into play, performance, and public
space which I embarked upon as I commenced my studies at IMAP in 2008. The
following section is a critique of the design practices associated with the vast majority of
experiences classified as ARGs. This critique is an essential precursor to the design
thinking underlying Reality Ends Here, and serves as a point of departure for the
theoretical discussions found in subsequent sections.
19
1.4 Critique of Alternate Reality Games
In contrast to more capacious terms such as “environmental game” or “pervasive game,”
the term, “alternate reality game,” (ARG) refers to a very specific and well-defined form
of interactive transmedia storytelling that “[takes] the substance of everyday life and
[weaves] it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the
real world” (IGDA ARG SIG). In this section, I will critique this kind of experience
design, focusing on its emphasis on “top-down” transmedia storytelling, and the effects
this emphasis has on limiting replayability, accessibility, and sustainability. Such limits
are not always a concern to designers. Indeed, for those interested in telling stories, these
limits can in fact be strengths. But Reality Ends Here and games like it are not about
telling stories from the top down; rather, they are about empowering participants to tell
their own stories and construct their own environments from the “bottom up.” From this
perspective, the limitations the ARG imposes on replayability, accessibility, and
sustainability are critical. This section will explore these limits in depth, and will propose
a more systems-centric (or “high process intensity”) “story facilitation” approach.
To be clear, some experiences colloquially classified as ARGs minimize or eschew top-
down storytelling in favor of more deeply participatory and procedural modes of player
engagement and narration. As I will discuss in the section titled, “Introduction to
Environmental Game Design,” it is important to distinguish these kinds of systems from
ARGs on the basis of the fundamentally different approaches they take to participation
and the generation of narrative. In the context of the present discussion, the primary
20
distinction to make in this regard is the curious fact that the majority of the most
prominent and widely-discussed Alternate Reality Games are not in fact games at all.
1.4.1 ARGs ≠ Games
To understand this position, consider a few of the canonical definitions of games. Katie
Salen and Eric Zimmerman define games as “[systems] in which players engage in an
artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (96). Roger
Caillois defines games as free activities “governed by rules [and] make-believe” (10-11).
Avedon and Sutton-Smith define games as “an exercise of voluntary control systems in
which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order
to produce a disequilibrial outcome” (7). Despite the variations in nuance between these
definitions, all emphasize the central role of rules in governing the flow of the
experience. Simply put, the experience of playing a game is an emergent expression of
the interaction between players, game resources, and rules.
The experience of an ARG is not governed by rules and procedures in the manner of a
“true” game, but rather by the strategic and responsive curation of narrative materials by
producers (or “puppet masters”). In an ARG, players discover narrative figures through
an encounter with one or more access points embedded in real world contexts. These
access points, known in the parlance of ARGs as “rabbit holes,” lead players into a
dynamic matrix of story components distributed across various kinds of digital and
physical media. By exploring these components, players discover discrete and linked
21
puzzles and challenges that serve both as impetus to connect with other players, and as
time- and context-sensitive content bottlenecks.
In order to advance the narrative of an ARG, players typically find it necessary to work
together, first by assembling into affinity groups via both official (i.e., game-sanctioned)
and unofficial (i.e., player-created) social media structures; then by tackling puzzles and
challenges collectively, leveraging the range of competencies, geographies, and
biographies present in the player population. As puzzles are solved, the ARG’s puppet
masters release successive cycles of story and interactivity, tweaking their approach along
the way based on the observed behaviors and emerging collective intelligence capabilities
of the players.
8
This process repeats itself until the narrative concludes, typically with the
launch of a product or service. At this point, official support for the player community is
usually terminated, primary online game assets are deleted or otherwise rendered
inactive, and the ARG ends.
1.4.2 Promise and Potential
Early participants and producers of ARGs compared their emergence to watershed
moments in pop music (Phillips, “Taking risks”) and cinema, with some going so far as to
suggest that the ARG was the defining narrative mode of the turn of the century (The
Cloudmakers). Indeed, especially in the context of the early 2000s, ARGs represented a
uniquely transmedial mode of interactive storytelling. When playing an ARG,
22
8
See McGonigal, “This is Not a Game,” and Phillips, “Taking risks.”
participants consume story in a variety of modes, via a range of devices, channels,
settings, and practices. This nonlinear and fragmentary or distributed consumption-
participation pattern was seen as a logical outcome of millennial shifts in media habits,
and was used by some futurists as a model for how stories would be created and
consumed in the coming era of ubiquitous computing and social media.
Other observers, invested in visions of participatory and collaborative storytelling, noted
that, unlike typical consumers of cinema, television and other few-to-many media forms,
the players of ARGs are necessary and constitutive elements of the work. That is, in an
ARG, audience participation is ideally an essential and formative component of the text.
To practitioners and theorists with a stake in participatory culture, the notion of an
interactive storytelling form conceived from the ground up as a means of facilitating the
collaborative production of media artifacts provided a “perfect illustration of all of the
principles . . . shaping the media landscape at the present time” (Jenkins).
Further, ARGs were viewed as fitting into a long tradition of spatially- and temporally-
distributed narrative forms, and for some, their emergence indicated the arrival into the
mainstream of practices that had hitherto been relegated to fan subcultures and marginal
art movements. Like the critical interventions of Situationism, which sought to
reconfigure public space as a “new arena for creation” wherein “unforeseen games will
become possible through the inventive use of material conditions” (Nieuwenhuys), the
ambiguously-bounded play of ARGs has the ability to produce dramatic shifts in
23
subjectivity that “[sensitize] participants to affordances, real or imagined,” “[make] all
data seem connected, or at least plausibly connected,” and “make surfaces less
convincing” (McGonigal, “This is Not a Game” 43-44). Similarly, ARGs promised to do
to mainstream storytelling what “distributed narratives”--experimental narratives spread
out across “time, space, and the network” (Walker 1)--had done to avant garde and
electronic literature:
Distributed narratives break down the aesthetics of unity we have followed for
millennia. They take this disunity a step further than the bricolage of
postmodernism, by collapsing the unity of form as well as that of content and
concept. Yet perhaps they also point to a new kind of unity: a unity where the time
and space of the narrative are in sync with the time and space of the reader. (11)
Finally, by bringing together once disparate practices such as puzzle design, performance
art, and cinematic narrative, ARGs were seen as being on the cutting edge of
interdisciplinary new media thinking. Great things were forecast, including the use of
ARGs in establishing and leveraging collective intelligences in order to solve real-world
problems.
9
1.4.3 Shortfalls
While ARGs have proven that they have the potential to mobilize elite groups of “lead
users” who can co-create content and evangelize for a brand or cause
10
--and that they can
quickly generate alarmingly efficient collective intelligences
11
--they have, perhaps
24
9
See McGonigal, “This is Not a Game,” and Jenkins, “Chasing Bees.”
10
See McGonigal, “Why I Love Bees,” IGDA ARG SIG, and Dena, “ARG Stats.”
11
See DARPA.
understandably, failed to live up to some of the high expectations set out for them at the
turn of the century. ARGs have not seen the kinds of growth in popularity that other
forms of interactive media have seen over the past decade;
12
they have not proven to be a
particularly effective way of building lasting communities or collaborative practices,
especially when compared to more systems-oriented approaches to organizing and
maintaining collective action;
13
and they have failed to maintain the same kind of
relevance to contemporary media habits and technologies that they arguably held in the
early 2000s, ceding this territory to other kinds of asynchronous interactivity such as that
found in mobile and social media games, casual games, and collaborative production
games.
14
1.4.4 Limits on Accessibility, Replayability, and Sustainability
This failure of the ARG to live up to the high expectations that attended its emergence
can be attributed to three interrelated design practices, namely: 1) that ARGs are
constructed as linear event-driven experiences; 2) that ARGs treat their core audiences as
monadic “collective detectives” rather than groups of diversely-motivated living and
breathing individuals; and, 3) that despite the decidedly playful and improvisatory
character of the relationship between puppet masters and players, ARGs are ultimately
not deeply generative textual systems, but rather vehicles for delivering curated story
materials.
25
12
See Dena, “ARG Stats,” and Schell.
13
See Shirky.
14
See Montola, et al.
Many of the problems associated with ARGs can be traced back to their status as
temporally-bounded and linearly-unfolding experiences. As Jim Stewartson of Fourth
Wall Studios puts it, “[ARGs have historically been] essentially rock concerts. Very large,
real-time, elaborate experiences that were really cool and really fun for the people who
were involved with them” (Morris et al.). This event-like design clearly eliminates much
of the potential for replayability, and it exacts almost equally dire consequences on
accessibility and sustainability.
The preponderance of the accessibility limitations of the ARG are related to its temporal
structure. In a typical ARG, players who don’t have the time at the right time to
participate can find their experience “spoiled” by those who do. Even players with high
levels of interest in the activity and a strong desire to participate in the ARG’s challenges
can be reduced to lurking on message boards or merely following along with puppet
master- or player-created story summaries if they don’t have the time required to keep up
with the more hard-core players. Consequently, the vast majority of the players of
traditional ARGs aren’t “players” at all, but are rather more like spectators, albeit very
multi-modal ones:
Of the millions of people who ‘experience’ an ARG only tens of thousands
actually play them, the rest read the texts created by players. Now, as I have stated
many times before, this is a very interesting model of audience tiering and shows
a preference for player-created narratives above producer-created ones (indeed,
the desire for a linear narrative above a fragmented one)…but the large numbers
often claimed . . . are not indicative of the people who actually play these forms.
They are hardcore games that only a (relatively) small amount of players can
actually play directly (due to skill, time and access obstacles). I don’t see how a
26
form with such accessibility issues is the ultimate form. (Dena, “Discover
Manoa!”)
Marcus Montola et al. points out that this “pyramid of participation” enables transmedial
designs wherein “different play modes contribute to each other and support an experience
that is larger than its parts” (121). In such an arrangement, spectators co-exist with
variously-engaged players, with the hard-core participants effectively acting as “stars” of
the ARG’s narrative; puppet masters and serious players document the actions of the
hard-core in real- or near-real-time; and the rest of the player base consumes this
documentation serially. This kind of structure has been experimented with to varying
degrees of success. However, since this and other kinds of “tiering” (Dena, “Emerging
Participatory Culture Practices”) demand the production and management of numerous
additional layers of content, any benefits in terms of accessibility are outweighed in terms
of additional limitations on sustainability. For example, in order to achieve a tiered
design, a puppet master might create very difficult puzzles and extremely obtuse narrative
content for hard-core players, somewhat easier puzzles and relatively comprehensible
narrative content for casual players, and easy-to-solve puzzles with highly legible
narrative content for neophyte and incidental players. The result is that the more that the
designers shift an ARG toward a tiered design, the more work they have to do to initiate
and support the overall system. As will be discussed below, this problem can be mitigated
by moving away from the “curated content” design mentality of the ARG and toward the
kinds of generativity offered by genuine game mechanics.
27
Additional sustainability and accessibility problems emerge from of the manner in which
ARG designers traditionally address their players. As Sean Stewart notes in an interview
with members of The Cloudmakers, “[the] premise from Day One was that the entire
Internet should be considered as a single player; that we could put an ad in a newspaper
in Osaka in the morning and have some kid in Iowa using that information by supper
time” (The Cloudmakers). That is, while individual players in an ARG are putatively free
to privately interact with characters or artifacts from the game, puzzles and challenges are
designed with such complexity that any information gathered from these interactions
often needs to be shared with and processed by a collective in order to be properly
contextualized and rendered sensible in a timely fashion. While this design has the effect
of encouraging the formation of collective intelligences–and clearly satisfies Levy’s
notion of collective intelligence as being “the mutual recognition and enrichment of
individuals” (13), at least in terms of how individual players can contribute according to
uniquely held competencies--in the context of a time-based, event-driven, relatively
closed information system such as an ARG, it also results in an increasing diminishment
of the degree to which new players can easily access and enter into the activity. That is,
once a functioning “collective detective” (The Cloudmakers) has been established, it will
tackle the challenges presented by puppet masters with a self-refining efficiency that will
largely discount the need for new members. Knowledge production structures populated
by elite players with available time, an appropriate range of competencies, and relevant
social and economic capital will gather, process, and analyze data faster and more
thoroughly than a non-integrated outsider ever could. Further, as the ARG progresses,
28
prospective members without adequate reputation within the player community and in-
depth knowledge of “the story so far” (Dena, “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices”
41) will naturally find it increasingly difficult to find a role within the collective.
To illustrate this problem, consider the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge crowdsourcing
experiment. In this experiment, ten red weather balloons were placed in visible locations
around the United States, and the public was challenged to find the balloons using any
legal means whatsoever. Nine hours after the event commenced, all ten balloons had been
found by a team from MIT. In this instance, the team, which had conscripted around
5,400 balloon spotters via social media and various public entreaties, served its purpose
and was quickly dissolved. But what if the DARPA Network Challenge had been only the
first of many challenges in a long-term experience--that is, if it was merely the first
puzzle of a three month-long ARG? How would this emerging collective intelligence
have evolved? Would it have become more broad-based like Wikipedia, exploring the
diverse interests and passions of its user base, or would it have gravitated toward greater
efficiencies, tighter working groups, task-oriented committees, and editorial sub-teams?
According to fieldwork conducted by McGonigal (“Why I Love Bees”), the latter is more
likely: rather than becoming more inclusive or expansive, the group might in fact become
increasingly specialized along particular “threads of investigation” tied to the core
problems with which it was presented. The puzzles in ARGs are ultimately very specific:
unlike Wikipedia, which is almost completely open-ended, the knowledge production
29
demanded by an ARG is focused on a particular story world and an associated set of
puzzles with clearly-defined solutions--much like the narrow-but-complex balloon-
finding task of the DARPA experiment. Further, since the puzzles in ARGs are often
cumulative and informed by the solutions to earlier puzzles, those who were on board for
the first discoveries--in the DARPA analogy, these individuals would be those who
understood the MIT methodology by which the original 5,400 balloon spotters were
coordinated and the information they provided was processed--would arguably be more
valuable and acceptable assets to the team than newcomers unaware of those practices
and procedures. Somewhat ironically, then, this kind of collective intelligence design,
when applied to closed information systems such as ARGs, has steeply diminishing
returns in terms of community building. Further, as soon as the producers of the ARG
stop delivering fresh content, the increasingly tight-knit collective intelligence will no
longer have anything to be “collectively intelligent” about, and as with the 2009 DARPA
experiment, will rapidly dissolve.
1.4.5 Data Intensity and Process Intensity
What these problems have in common is an origin in the “non-gameness” of ARGs. As
mentioned in the introduction to this section, ARGs, despite their name, are not, in fact,
games; rather, they are ergodic (Aarseth) transmedia texts that, structurally speaking, are
much more akin to scavenger hunts or group puzzle-solving activities like the annual
MIT Mystery Hunt. Rarely in ARG design do we see the generativity, rulesets, and
procedural constructions that characterize games. This is fine; not everything has to be a
30
game. But for activists, educators, independent artists, and other designers looking to
effect a sustained activation of the participatory energies of specific populations, to not
use game mechanics or other procedural approaches to generate and manage interactivity
is to invite rapidly ballooning content-curation and community management problems.
Such problems will quickly overwhelm all but the most well-funded of projects. Indeed,
it is not happenstance that the ARG began as a big-budget Hollywood advertising
technique; its very structure demands a high level of production capability, particularly
when the design objective is sustained and intensive player engagement.
In this regard, much of ARG design is reminiscent of early experiments in electronic
literature and interactive cinema. These experiments initially sought to create vast
explorable narratives via branching story trees. However, artists who took that approach
quickly discovered that to do so meant writing or shooting orders of magnitude more
material (or “lexia”) than is required in the creation of a standard linear novel or film. To
create even the faintest illusion of player agency, the creators of branching narratives
needed to develop so much content that in some cases it exceeded the limits of the
storage media they had at their disposal. For example, the interactive movie-game
Dragon’ s Lair (1983) needed a total of 27 minutes of animation stored on multiple
laserdiscs to provide an interactive experience that lasted for a maximum of 6 minutes
(Hunter)--and even then, the gameplay consisted of little more than making a handful of
left-or-right decisions about which direction the protagonist should move. Games like
Dragon’ s Lair can be described as high data intensity, low process intensity games: they
31
shuffle around a lot of data (the animated video clips that the player triggers through
making choices), but don’t have very complex procedures of play or rulesets (the only
“rules” involved are those that determine what video clips are played when the player
moves the joystick).
15
Compare this outcome to an even older video game, Rogue (1980), a procedurally-
generated dungeon-crawler that remains popular to this day.
16
Rogue is a “low data
intensity, high process intensity” game. In Rogue, the virtual world is generated on the fly
at runtime via an algorithm. Instead of devoting limited computational resources to
storing and displaying pre-rendered content (as in Dragon’ s Lair), the programmers of
Rogue used a compact ruleset to create their game world, producing an expansive and
endlessly replayable world of fantasy adventure and tabletop RPG-style interactivity that
would have been technically impossible to produce using pre-made dungeon scenarios
given the limited storage resources of early 1980s home computers. Despite being made
for free by hobbyist programmers, the parsimonious use of algorithms rather than
branching content trees resulted in Rogue having much more interactivity and depth than
was presented three years later by the spectacular but simplistic and deterministic left-or-
right decision making interface of Dragon’ s Lair. This is the real power of games.
Regardless of whether they are computationally mediated, games create dynamic
interactive experiences through rules rather than archives of curated content. As we shall
32
15
See Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Process Intensity and Social Experimentation.”
16
For example, Diablo III, a game in which players hack and slash their way their procedurally-generated dungeons--
and one of the best selling games of 2012--is a direct descendent of Rogue.
see below, approaching environmental game design from this perspective opens a range
of new possibilities for producers.
1.4.6 Beyond the ARG: “Story Facilitating” Instead of Storytelling
Because ARGs are so expensive and labor-intensive to maintain, media companies and
institutions overwhelmingly abandon the communities they create once the putative
purpose for their creation has been satisfied (McGonigal, “This is Not a Game,” and
IGDA ARG SIG). While this instrumental view of community may have short-term
benefits to institutions, brands, and artists, and while many media companies are likely
comfortable with the risk of “blowback” from disaffected ARG fans (especially since said
fans will have long since served their marketing purpose by the time their complaints
come to the fore), in the long term, such a view effectively undermines one of alternate
reality gaming’s most important potentials for generating value: the creation and
transformation of communities.
[Studio] execs are mired in next-quarter earnings, and ARGs and other transmedia
extensions require time to take root and build active, invested communities. It is
decidedly a long-term investment, the fruits of which way not be fully realized
until a significant period of time post-launch. As such, most studios aren't willing
to make the investment needed to bake those components in from the beginning
or allocate the funds/resource necessary to ensure their ongoing success.
(Snowfield)
For media companies, educators, and activists alike, one way around this problem of
expense is to develop replayable games that engage participants in practices rather than
the consumption of additional layers of pre-curated narrative. Unlike the labor-intensive
PM-centric traditional ARG model, such solutions have the capacity to produce the
33
almost all of their content and interactivity--that is, the entire spectacle of the
experience--through the emergent effects of a ruleset. These kinds of games may not be
the future of storytelling; but perhaps they are the future of “story facilitating.”
In his seminal essay on Linux, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond notes that
“[it] may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will
be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.” By
providing players with a sandbox within which they can meaningfully engage with the
world of a cause or media franchise, game designers do more than just streamline the
production process. They also win hearts and minds. As veteran ARG writer and player
Andrea Phillips told me in a recent interview, “once you’ve given your audience official
permission to collaborate with you in any meaningful sense, they’re yours forever, hook,
line, and sinker” (“Taking risks”).
By moving away from the time-sensitive and event-driven structure of traditional ARGs,
designers can create more open-ended games that work better as engines for participation
and community building. Doing so ultimately means replacing a text-centric storytelling
mentality with a systems-centric story facilitating approach. This kind of approach is not
an abdication of authorship or aesthetic responsibility; rather, it is a shift from the domain
of literal content creation to that of procedural content creation. Such a shift has the
potential to break the designerly logjams that have afflicted ARGs since the early 2000s,
34
moving the form and its descendants toward more accessible, replayable, and sustainable
designs.
17
1.5 Introduction to Environmental Game Design
Environmental game design is the practice of designing games with and around the
physical, social, digital, and emotional environment
18
of players so as to manifest an
impact on the way in which that environment is used. By this definition, ARGs cannot be
considered environmental games, for the simple reason that they are not truly games.
Further, it should be emphasized that “environmental game,” unlike ARG, is not a genre
designation, but rather a category of design practice. An analogous terminological
relationship would be between the cinema as a whole and a specific genre: Slap Shot is a
work of cinema, belonging to the genres of the Sports Film and the Comedy. Reality Ends
Here is an environmental game because it is a game designed with, around, and for a
specific environment. In gameplay genre and platform terms, it is a collaborative
production game and a web-mediated collectible card game.
In addition to its utility as a descriptor for a specific kind of design practice, I also choose
the term, “environmental game” to describe Reality Ends Here in order to make a break
from the conceptual baggage associated with terms like “alternate reality games” and
“pervasive games,” among others. These terms entered into the design consciousness
35
17
It is important to note that, for some use cases, there is good reason to make ARGs less accessible and less
replayable, especially when engaging “hard-core” players is the objective, or when creating scarcity is fundamental to
the experience.
18
This multimodal conception of “environment” will be explored at length in the next section of this chapter.
during the first half of the first decade of the 21st century. In their initial formulations,
they referred to relatively specific domains of design. However, as the decade wore on,
the boundaries between these domains became increasingly fuzzy, resulting in
terminology with ambiguous and contested meanings.
As discussed in the previous section of this document, the term “alternate reality game”
refers to a very distinct kind of temporally-bounded puzzle- and event-driven interactive
transmedia scavenger hunt. However, over the past several years, the term “ARG” has
been used to describe numerous other kinds of practice, including some kinds of genuine
game design. For example, collaborative production games such as SFZero (Sam Lavigne
and Ian Kizu-Blair, 2006) and Reality Ends Here are routinely referred to as ARGs, even
though they are primarily driven by game mechanics rather than content curation. In spite
of their sensitivity to the interests and competencies of active audiences, classically-
structured ARGs such as the advertising projects produced by 42 Entertainment
(including I Love Bees (2004), Year Zero (2007), and Flynn Lives (2009), among others),
and independent educational projects such as Ghosts of a Chance (Smithsonian Institute,
2008), Find Chesia (Carroll County Public Library, 2009), and Skeleton Chase (Indiana
University, 2008), are effectively authored storytelling vehicles designed around a core
activity of “collective detection.” Collaborative production games like Reality Ends Here
work in a completely different way, largely eschewing top-down storytelling and instead
producing diffuse and improvisatory “bottom-up” narratives through media participation
structured by game mechanics. The simple fact that some ARGs are truly games, while
36
others are not, when considered in light of the growing interest in using real-world play to
bring about change in this reality rather than an alternate one, is more than enough reason
to reject “ARG” as a term.
Another term frequently used in this domain of practice is “pervasive game.” Marcus
Montola defines a pervasive game as “a game that has one or more salient features that
expand the contractual magic circle of play socially, spatially or temporally” (sec. 1).
While this definition is sufficiently broad so as to include the range of interaction designs
present in traditional ARGs, collaborative production games, location-based games, and
more, the term itself is wanting. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a
pervasive game would be a game that “[exists] in or [spreads] through every part of
something.” While ARGs, collaborative production games, and location-based games all
use everyday contexts as play spaces, it is hard to imagine any game meeting the high bar
of actually being “pervasive.” Further, the term “environmental game” has a specificity
that “pervasive game” lacks: as a designator of practice, “environmental game” refers
both to the setting and the purpose of the game, whereas “pervasive game” only indicates
a formal quality of the system (namely, its “pervasiveness”).
Other terminology is similarly either too specific or too vague. “Location-based games”
require “a link between locations in the physical world and game-play” and the use of
“location-aware technologies, often mobile phones, as a means of localization and/or
communication” (Ejsing-Duun 114). Environmental games need not use any kind of
37
digital technology, nor are they necessarily linked to physical locations. The
contemporary technosubject inhabits many kinds of environments, some physical, some
virtual, and some hybrid, and environmental games can take place in any or all of these
environments. Similarly, terms such as “big games” and “street games” evoke the urban
play activities on view at festivals such as Come Out and Play, but fail to account for
games that take place in other kinds of lived environments. “Situated gaming” is a term
with substantial appeal in this context, but in usage can refer to the role of digital games
in lived environments, which may cause confusion in light of various kinds non-digital
environmental gameplay. “Ambient games” comes closer to being a satisfactory
definition, but does not sufficiently evoke the active nature of play--an ambience is
something that happens in the background, whereas a game requires agency.
“Environmental interaction design” might have a slightly friendlier ring to those who are
put off by the notion of games, but the fact remains that games and interaction are distinct
from one another: an iPhone is an interactive device, but it is not a game.
“Environmental game design” describes a very specific use case for games. Like the
other terms on offer, this one has its share of problems--not least of which is its evocation
of environmentalism. Particularly in the North American context, the term “environment”
has been conflated with the political struggle around the conservation of natural
resources. However, just as “environmental design” in the context of urban planning and
architecture must be distinguished from “eco-design” or “green design,” so must
38
“environmental game design” as a category of practice be distinguished from genre
designations such as “eco-game design.”
The praxis of environmental game design will be explored in depth in the chapter titled,
“Reality Ends Here Design Philosophy,” below. However, while environmental game
design as a specific domain is defined here for the first time, it has deep roots in a variety
of forms of theory and practice that revolve around ideas about the production and use of
space. The following section explores these origins, beginning with an examination of the
crucial feedback relationships that exist between lived environments and human agency.
1.6 Dramaturgy, Space, and the Construction of Reality
Each one of us constructs our own reality just as it constructs us. This process occurs as
we experiment with and discover our world. From infancy, we construct a concept of
what the world is, then test that concept by taking action. The consequences of this action
then produce more insights into the limits and affordances of our slice of reality, guiding
further experimentation and discovery. The view of reality we construct in this manner is
inherently incomplete and noisy. As time goes on, this view becomes increasingly
determinative of the range of actions we can take, experiences we can have, and
conclusions we can draw. This positive feedback loop is observable in all intelligent
beings and systems bounded by temporality. It is the foundation of identity, knowledge,
and behavior.
39
But we are more than just wandering monads of perception and learning. We are social
animals. Our most powerful constructions of reality are built intersubjectively, and these
constructions have awesome power in our lives. They can elevate the human spirit -- or
break it down. A crucial mission of the artist, educator, and activist is to actively
participate in this process. To change the conditions of a social arrangement, we must
change the way that that arrangement is imagined. But since the way that people imagine
an environment is both determined by and determinative of the kinds of practices which
take place within that environment, this intervention on the imaginary must necessarily
also be an intervention on the real.
The feedback loop between the imaginary and the real is fundamental to the structure,
function, and evolution of human environments. Consider a familiar environment such as
a school, an airport, or a city. How do inhabitants know how to behave or “perform” in a
given environment? How do these performances contribute to the identity of that
environment? And how does that identity in turn shape and constrain future performance?
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sociologist Erving Goffman draws an
analogy between social environments (or “establishments”) and the theatre, positing that
every lived environment has overt and covert “dramaturgical” codes that determine what
should and should not take place within its boundaries. These codes manifest themselves
through the behavior (or “performance”) of the subjects who occupy and use the
40
environment--and this behavior in turn serves to replicate and reify the dramaturgical
codes themselves.
This idea of an identity between the performative structure of an environment and the
behaviors that occur within it is consistent with John Dewey’s notions about the
relationship between a learning environment and its learners. As Dewey notes in
Experience and Education, behavior and environment are inextricably linked:
[The] general conclusion I would draw is that control of individual actions is
effected by the whole situation in which individuals are involved, in which they
share and of which they are co-operative or interacting parts.
For Dewey, the structure of the traditional educational environment radically limits the
involvement students can have in the direction of their own learning.
19
To put this idea
into Goffman’s terminology, the dramaturgical codes of traditional educational
institutions establish fixed roles for students and teachers that at the very least dampen,
and in the worst cases preclude, anything beyond the performance of the teacher as the
source of knowledge and the student as the receptacle for this knowledge. In Dewey’s
view, these roles disconnected students both from each other as peer-to-peer learners and
from the “ultimate moving springs of action”--their own desires and interests. A better
role for the educator would be to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience
among students, and to do so by identifying and channeling their existing desires and
interests, rather than to attempt to impose new desires from above:
There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is
sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner
41
19
It is somewhat alarming to note that “traditional education” means much the same thing today as it did when Dewey
was writing about it in 1938.
in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process,
just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure
the active co-operation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his
studying.
For many decades, the fundamental structure of the educational environment, particularly
in US public education, has largely remained static. Despite many efforts to change the
dramaturgy of schools, the difficulty and expense associated with implementing “learner
centered” educational systems has prevented a broad-based transformation from taking
hold. To be sure, this is an enormous challenge, and there are many caveats that must be
attached to these calls for radical change in the educational system. Dewey himself was
careful to emphasize that the “progressive” vision for education was much more difficult
to construct than the traditional industrial model. However, as I will now discuss, a
wholesale “revolution” of education is not immediately necessary; rather, targeted
interventions such as Reality Ends Here and other forms of environmental games can
effect transformations in the environment while coexisting with traditional forms of post-
secondary classroom instruction. These transformations can cascade through the
performative system of the school as a whole, ultimately shifting the environment toward
being more permeable to the direction and desire of its learners.
To understand how this can happen, and how interventions like Reality Ends Here are
themselves deeply rooted in other traditions of intervening on lived environments, I will
now turn to a broader discussion of the tangled relationships among space, authority, and
individual desire. This discussion will begin by examining the way that physical spaces
impact behavior and agency. Much like the static structures of traditional education, the
42
built environment articulates power relations and hierarchies that shape and constrain the
behavior of inhabitants, thereby reifying those relations and hierarchies--and it is slow
and difficult to change. While every place and time is different, examples of this
relationship between power and the production of space can nevertheless be found
throughout history. In the European context, we can look back at least as far as the
Servitutes, a set of Roman laws pertaining to the division between public and private
property, to witness the deep connection between the systemization of environments and
the maintenance of economic and social boundaries (Roby 413). Indeed, one has only to
scan the word itself to realize that terms like servitude and service derive not only from
the same Latin root (a root which also underlies servitūs, or slave), but also from a
conception of the polis that remains largely unchanged to this day (Smith 1030-1034).
20
Emerging out of centuries of bloody struggle over human and material resources, this
legal framework was a codification of the core mechanisms by which the Roman Empire
transmitted and replicated itself.
To be clear, this relationship between space and power is not uniquely European. As
Foucault notes, the contestation of space, born of the struggle between hegemonies and
their incipient successors, is “a constant of every human group.” Crucially, there is “no
one absolutely universal form” of this contestation; rather, it emerges out of the particular
arrangements of power and resistance present in a given space and time. However, in
broad outline, the Romans provide us with a useful example of the inscription of power
43
20
It should also be noted here that polis and police share the same root, albeit in Greek rather than Latin.
and control through the production of space. Their roads, walls, public buildings, sacred
sites, monuments, and government installations constrained the behavior and world-view
of their subjects and imprinted upon their territories not only the markers of power, but
the pathways along which citizens and slaves were intended to move in the course of
everyday life. These pathways in turn gave rise to a reproduction of the core social and
economic practices necessary for the maintenance of the state--and, ironically, planted the
seeds for its eventual destruction.
In the centuries that followed the decline of the Roman Empire, power, space, and
resistance have continued to co-produce one another in a similar manner. William Penn
and Thomas Holme’s influential grid plan for the city of Philadelphia, Haussmann’s
“renovation” of Paris during the middle of the 19th century, and the planned “insta-cities”
of present-day China are just a few examples of this practice: in each of these cases, by
applying limits to urban space, state and economic hierarchs also apply limits to its use,
thereby preserving or amplifying existing power structures by advancing the aims of their
underwriting interests. This programmatic or procedural capacity of the urban is
succinctly captured by Walter Benjamin. Writing about Haussmann’s radical
transformation of Paris, Benjamin describes the very real military and economic concerns
behind the city’s “beautification”:
The real aim of Haussmann’s works was the securing of the city against
civil war. He wished to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible
for all time. With the same purpose, Louis Philippe had already introduced
wooden paving. Nonetheless, the barricades played a role in the February
Revolution. Engels gave some thought to the technique of barricade
fighting. Haussmann intended to put a stop to it in two ways. The breadth
44
of the streets was to make the erection of barricades impossible, and new
streets were to provide the shortest route between the barracks and the
working-class areas. Contemporaries christened the undertaking:
‘L’embellissement stratégique.‘ (87)
Crucially, the state and other authorities are not the only participants in this rather
massively multiplayer reality game. Revolutionaries, artists, conquerers, and terrorists
have long known that to make a real difference, one must intervene in real space. As
Henri Lefebvre puts it, any ideas regarding how we ought to change life or society “lose
completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space” (69). Haussmann’s
Paris lasted only about a decade before economic collapse and disastrous geopolitical
maneuvering by the state brought about a violent urban revolution “wrought in part out of
a nostalgia for the world that Haussmann had destroyed and the desire to take back the
city on the part of those dispossessed by his works” (Harvey).
Of course, this revolutionary action (and others like it, such as the events of May 1968, or
the more recent occupations in Egypt and on Wall Street) did not narrow Haussmann’s
wide boulevards or otherwise significantly change the physical infrastructure of the city.
But what they did change was the network of meanings associated with that
infrastructure. In the words of one writer, they “[exposed] the appalling contrast between
the potential constructions of life and the present poverty of life.” Situationist International Out
of this laying-bare emerged a new network of meanings, a new set of dramaturgical
codes--and a new city. Henri Lefebvre cites a more recent example of this process in The
Production of Space:
45
An existing space may outlive its original purpose and the raison d’etre
which determines its forms, functions, and structures; it may thus in a
sense become vacant, and susceptible of being diverted, reappropriated
and put to a use quite different from its initial one. A recent and well-
known case of this was the reappropriation of the Halles Centrales, Paris’s
former wholesale produce market, in 1969-71. For a brief period, the
urban centre, designed to facilitate the distribution of food, was
transformed into a gathering-place and a scene of permanent festival--in
short, into a centre of play rather than of work--for the youth of Paris.
(187)
This capacity of lived environments to be repurposed and to acquire new meanings is
what makes environmental games possible--and, perhaps, necessary. None of us can hope
to fundamentally reorganize the massive conglomerations of concrete, glass, rebar, and
asphalt that constitute the urban environments of our time. Nor can we hope to
reconfigure or “compete with” the satellite systems, information networks, mass media
outlets, and computational agencies that are just as thoroughly integrated into our
experience of life. The Web and the City are everywhere (everyware)
21
, and countless
Haussmanns have come and gone and left their mark. The expansion of communications
technologies (and their implicit urbanism) into every crease and corner of existence
produces new social relations at a ferocious pace; and since these new relations--these
new environments--are the product of a vast and interdependent technoindustrial
apparatus, they naturally tend to serve the interests of various concentrations of power
and authority.
46
21
See Greenfield.
A game can intervene on this arrangement without necessitating a wholesale change in
the structure of the environment. At the very least, it can awaken participants to the idea
that the environment they are in could be just about anything except what it is. Designer
and Games of Nonchalance creator Jeff Hull remarks:
[Our work] is in part a reaction to the narrow confines of sanctioned
activities in public space, which have been largely defined by commerce.
We can legally: commute, shop, and drink a latte. Walk or run in a park
between sun up and sun down. Otherwise you’re somehow suspect. People
feel isolated by that. I think we’re all trying to loosen those reins . . . My
name for it is Socio-Reengineering. That’s Jejune Institute terminology,
and in our story it has dubious connotations, but we’re actually quite
sincere about this aim. To infuse variability and play into the workaday
world by re-engineering the way that people navigate and experience the
space and the population around them.
This kind of practice has its roots in the project of the Situationist International, an
alliance of artistic collectives that assembled in July of 1957 with the intention of
bringing about a “liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves
confined” (Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations”). This artistic and political
movement, composed of activist artist-intellectuals such as Guy Debord, Constant
Nieuwenhuys, Raoul Vaneigem, and Asger Jorn, aimed to create disruptive “situations” in
lived environments as a means of interfering with the performance of “functionalist”
society. Through this disruption, the artists of the SI believed they could surface hitherto
suppressed meanings and uses for public spaces, paving the way to a “city of the
future”
22
--and to a richer and more authentic kind of life.
Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete
construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a
47
22
See Nieuwenhuys.
superior passional quality.
For the SI, the “constructed situation” was a means of disrupting and contesting the
performative feedback loop between “the material environment of life and the behaviors
which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it.” From Debord’s
revolutionary perspective, the complex visual and environmental expressions of a society
built around commodity exchange and fetishism constituted a “Weltanschauung [or
‘world view’] which has become actual, materially translated” (Society of the Spectacle).
Debord called this manifestation of the world view of capitalism “the spectacle,” and
argued that it served to render subjects “passive to societal manipulation” (Best and
Kellner). Indeed, as Stephen Duncombe writes in Dream: Re-imagining Progressive
Politics in an Age of Fantasy, “spectacle, by tradition, is antidemocratic”:
It is created by the few to be followed by the many, and while it can make the
promise of inclusion . . . it actually reinforces the reality of hierarchy. The
‘participation’ it encourages is a tightly choreographed sham.
23
There are some
who direct and others (most of us) who are directed. (133)
However, as Duncombe goes on to discuss at length, participation in the creation of the
spectacle does not necessarily have to be a “sham.” We can insist on “popular
participation in both the production and consumption of the spectacle,” and thereby
“transform a political and aesthetic form used to control and channel popular desire into
one that can express it.”
48
23
Duncombe provides a particularly chilling example of “sham” participation by quoting Siegfried Kracauer’s
comment regarding the Nazi rallies of the 1930s: “Although the masses give rise to the ornament [i.e., the rallies], they
are not involved in thinking it through.” (127)
This use of the spectacle is the fundamental objective of Reality Ends Here, and is a key
affordance of environmental game design. Because environmental games are played in
public spaces, they produce publicly-visible effects. These effects are the “spectacle” of
the game. And because environmental games are by definition designed around, with, and
for specific lived environments--and therefore are built from the ground up to be as
sensitive and permeable as possible to the motivations present in those environments--the
spectacle they produce is an expression of the desires of their players. It is something
players actively produce, rather than passively consume. Put differently, people only play
environmental games because they want to. If they don’t play, no spectacle is produced.
If they do, the spectacle belongs to them. The ideal participatory spectacle produced by
environmental games is thus not exclusively an expression of external forces of
domination and control, but rather of the aggregate of the intimate and personal
relationships between players as mediated by the game system.
24
Environmental games can enable us to open new channels for individual agency in the
creation and maintenance of the performative codes of a given environment, thereby
realigning that environment with the needs and desires of its inhabitants. To a certain
extent, the emergence of new media forms underwrites our ability to bring about this kind
of transformation. As Douglas Kellner and Stephen Best note, “[the web] enables
ordinary individuals to make their everyday life a spectacle.” But even without the web,
such participation is possible. The key difference between a participatory spectacle and
49
24
For a graphical representation of the kind of spectacle produced through the play of environmental games such as
Reality Ends Here, see “Cycle of Play,” in Chapter 3.
the anesthetizing spectacle as critiqued by Debord and others is that the participatory
spectacle is “collectivized.” This kind of spectacle, alluded to by Henry Giroux,
“mediates among different stories, contexts, and relations that can address a public rather
than a merely private sensibility” (41).
Participatory spectacle creates pathways through which audiences can exercise agency
and control. The more integral the participant becomes to the spectacle, the more their
individual agency is reflected across the system, and therefore the more relevant to their
desire the spectacle becomes, reinforcing and expanding the motivations that brought
them into participation in the first place. This feedback loop also sets the stage for
contestation and intervention, continually destabilizing, diversifying, and reshaping the
spectacle, and opening it to new intersubjectively-constructed meanings and modes of
engagement. It transforms spectacle from a pseudo-interactive “world fabricated by
others” to a genuinely interactive space where the meaning, purpose, and construction of
the spectacle can be debated and changed.
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Chapter 2: Reality Ends Here Design Philosophy and Selected
Documentation
This chapter presents the design philosophy of Reality Ends Here, illustrated with
selected documentation from the 2011 implementation of the game. Through this
presentation, I will surface five interrelated “theses” of environmental game design.
These theses are:
1. Dramaturgy of the Local: The impact of an environmental game is directly
proportional to the degree to which the game is sensitive to local conditions.
The mandates and design strategies underlying any environmental game must
thus be derived from a careful analysis of the target environment. While
environmental games may or may not be “high tech,” they must always be
“high touch.”
2. Action, not simulation: Environmental games are not only calls to action.
Rather, they are substantially the action itself, articulated through the
procedures of play as they are manifested in the lived environment.
3. Leverage motivation, optimize for agency: Environmental games activate
player agency and create new social and learning motivations by providing
channels for the expression of existing motivations. In this manner,
environmental games link community engagement and learning to “the direct
and vital appeal” (Dewey) of individual desire. This emphasis on agency results
51
in game designs that emphasize “high process intensity” over the delivery of
pre-curated multimedia assets.
4. The social is the medium: Learning, community-building, and environmental
transformation are inherently social operations. The primary “medium” of the
environmental game is thus the network of social relations, both potential and
real, that exists among its players. In many contemporary environments, this
network exists in both physical and digital spaces.
5. Iterative and permeable: The design process of an environmental game is
inherently iterative and must be as permeable as possible to the input of its
players. This thesis is ultimately an extension of the first thesis: in order to be
sensitive to the shifting constraints of a given environment, the design of an
environmental game must be agile and adaptive.
Readers who would like to ground their reading of this chapter in a detailed
understanding of the rules, mechanics, resources, and procedures of the Reality Ends
Here game system may wish to skip ahead to Chapter 3, “Technical Description,” before
reading this discussion of design philosophy. To provide a baseline of context for readers
who would prefer to read this document in its present sequence, I have included the
following thumbnail description of the game, excerpted from my paper, “Reality Ends
Here Design Brief,” as presented at the 2012 Games, Learning, and Society Conference:
Reality Ends Here is an environmental game designed to accelerate serendipity,
social discovery, and collaboration among students in the disparate divisions of
the USC School of Cinematic Arts. It employs a wide range of technologies and
practices, from a game system driven by digitally-connected collectible cards to a
52
web interface integrated with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media
platforms.
Gameplay in Reality Ends Here takes place [as players] collect, share, trade, and
combine game cards in order to generate creative prompts which are then used
to guide the making of unique media artifacts and the staging of real-world
events. By sharing the resulting creative works through the social media platform
at the center of the game, players connect with one another across disciplinary and
institutional boundaries and unlock customized “trailheads” leading to intimate
and offbeat encounters with SCA alumni, artists, and other industry professionals.
The 2011 implementation of Reality Ends Here produced a tangible positive
impact on the culture of the SCA over its 120 day run, bridging the gaps between
traditionally siloed disciplines, generating a rich archive of creative works and
fresh assessment data for an entire cohort of freshmen, and creating an
atmosphere of intellectual and artistic experimentation. The second iteration of the
game is scheduled to launch in August of 2012.
Because a fundamental outcome of the play activity of Reality Ends Here is the
generation of publicly-visible documentation, readers are invited to keep the website for
the game open in a browser while reading this chapter. At the time of this writing, the
website is located at http://reality.usc.edu/ (a static archive is available at http://
remotedevice.net/docs/reality2011.zip). The bulk of the site is open to the public; readers
interested in full access can contact the author directly via remotedevice@gmail.com or
on Twitter via http://twitter.com/remotedevice in order to receive the appropriate login
credentials. While each thesis presented below will be illustrated with selected
documentation from the 2011 implementation of the game, the website for the game itself
provides far more extensive documentation than can be included in these pages.
53
2.1 Thesis I: Dramaturgy of the Local
Orson Welles’ famous maxim, “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations,”
25
is one
of the central rhetorical positions of Reality Ends Here. This position is expressed
through the mechanics of gameplay, both in terms of how players construct creative
prompts, and in terms of how they must learn to work within the limitations of DIY
production processes and available social and economic capital. But this position is also
central to the design philosophy of this project as a whole. Limitations don’t just inspire
creative solutions to problems: rather, they are necessary to them. Money and time are
only two of the limitations a given project will come up against. It is the task of the
designer become as familiar as possible with the totality of the limitations that are present
in a given possibility space in order to clearly define the problem at hand. Only then can
design begin.
As with all environmental design, the creation of an environmental game entails a design
approach that is supremely sensitive to local conditions. This idea is the crux of the first
thesis underlying the design Reality Ends Here and other environmental games, namely
that such games must be designed for and around the specific and constrained situations
and conditions that define the topology of the target environment. This thesis may
initially seem self-evident; indeed, as Charles Eames has said, the task of the designer is
always to take into account “the sum of all constraints” and act accordingly (Amic).
54
25
See Jaglom.
However, designers do not always have the loudest voices in certain contexts, and this
insight can sometimes be buried beneath other concerns. For example, funding bodies
who turn to games for solutions to educational, social, and economic problems may be
tempted to exclusively support designs that are immediately transferable to the state or
national scale in the interest of maximizing the efficiency of their investment. This in fact
can undermine efficiency and impact, producing games that, while widely distributable,
are inattentive to the unique constraints and motivations of the local. In their effort to
create an experience for everyone, such games in effect produce an experience for no
one.
2.1.1 Mandate Development
Good design briefs begin with a clear and specific mandate. This mandate is best
expressed as a set of constraints that defines a problem in terms of limitations and
objectives. As the design process continues, this constraints-based mandate becomes
increasingly granular. However, to begin any design process, a simple and easy-to-grasp
“macro” mandate is essential. For example, the SpaceX Corporation began their
development of orbital resupply systems by recognizing a need for private space
transportation services in the wake of the decommissioning of NASA’s Space Shuttle
program. This objective, combined with the fundamental limitations of capital and
physics, began the design process which ultimately led to the 2012 docking of the Dragon
spacecraft with the International Space Station. The original mandate of SpaceX did not
encode all of the myriad decisions that were necessary to finance and implement the
55
Dragon spacecraft; but without this initial mandate, those decisions would never have
been made, and Dragon would not exist.
The mandate for Reality Ends Here was generated through a multi-year investigation by
the Envisioning the Future Group (EFG) at the SCA. This group of faculty and staff was
tasked in 2009 by Dean Elizabeth Daley to imagine what the future of media arts
education at the SCA should look like. Led by Professor Steve Anderson, the EFG
developed a set of proposals which included the concept of a "gateway experience" for
incoming students. These proposals received unanimous approval by the SCA faculty at
the end of the Spring of 2010. Later that year, Professor Holly Willis assumed the role of
Chair of the EFG and began the effort to operationalize these proposals, expanding the
number of participating faculty from across the divisions of SCA and bringing the
resources of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy to bear on the project.
Over the preceding two decades, the landscape of the media industries had undergone a
series of radical transformations. Digital technology had opened up entirely new kinds of
practice in entertainment and art making, and had fundamentally changed the
development, production, distribution, and exhibition processes associated with older
forms of practice. This rapidly unfolding change demanded an equally dynamic learning
environment. To a certain extent, the SCA had already addressed this demand by
aggressively embracing new technologies and founding programs such as the Interactive
Media Division and the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice Ph.D. program. However,
56
the convergence of once-distinct media forms and the growing importance of transmedia
across the media industries was not as central to the curricular structure of the SCA as it
was to the world beyond.
To fully embrace this change, the SCA needed to confront the “silos” that separated its
five undergraduate disciplinary Divisions. These divisions--Animation, Critical Studies,
Interactive Media, Production, and Writing--were each relatively disconnected from one
another. Unlike media arts schools which offer a “foundation” year during which students
can select their disciplinary focus,
26
the curriculum at the SCA is designed such that the
majority of incoming students arrive having declared their concentration in advance.
Until 2011, there was no single “intake” class that all new SCA students took together.
Further, the classes that students can take outside of their home Divisions are mostly
electives designed to satisfy the breadth requirements of baccalaureate education.
Because these electives also include courses offered by other schools and departments at
USC, many students can go through their entire undergraduate careers having only very
incidental educational contact with SCA students from other Divisions. This problem is
exacerbated by the fact that all but the most basic courses in each of the SCA’s five
Divisions often have prerequisites and strict caps on class size -- indeed, many courses
are simply “off limits” to students from outside their home Division.
57
26
Examples of this kind of curriculum can be seen in institutions that subscribe to variants of the “Ulm Model” of
design education, such as Parsons the New School for Design, which offers a year-long “Foundation Program” for
incoming students.
Figure 3: The five undergraduate Divisions of the SCA. Dotted line circumscribing the Divisions indicates
the aegis of Reality Ends Here.
Despite these and other limitations, this curricular design was also very effective in
serving many of the fundamental learning objectives of the SCA. For decades, this
approach has provided students with deep practical and theoretical literacies within the
context of their individual specializations. This is considered a valuable outcome. It was
thus important not to entirely do away with the existing system, but rather to exist
alongside it.
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Not all of the problems and objectives identified by the EFG related to the changes
wrought upon the media industries by new and emerging technologies. Insofar as it
limited the degree to which students could discover one another and form into functional
collaborative groups, the school’s rigorous Divisional structure had significant impacts on
the community independent of the external technological regime. The aggregate effect of
these impacts was a kind of generalized absence of discoverability in the environment of
the SCA. As I worked with the EFG to crystallize a specific mandate for this project, we
identified three interrelated dimensions to this discoverability problem, which we named
craft, literacy, and social.
2.1.2 Craft, Literacy, and Social
The craft dimension identified gaps in the degree to which students--particularly
freshman students -- could discover and experiment with media-making practices both
within and beyond their Divisional specializations. Such discovery enables students to
grow as artists, designers, collaborators, and thinkers through practice. The more students
experience the various kinds of practice taking place at the SCA, the broader their
understanding of the processes of media arts--and, crucially, their relationship to those
processes--becomes. These kind of experiences can also provide students with an
opportunity to transition or expand laterally across the school’s Divisions, but only if they
occur early enough in their progression through their degrees.
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The literacy dimension addressed systemic limitations related to the discoverability of
various kinds of knowledge, including such things as key ideas about media theory and
history that “every media arts student should know”; awareness of and contact with the
SCA’s faculty, resources, and alumni; understanding of the kinds of theory and practice
that are taught in each of the five Divisions of the SCA; relevant lore about Los Angeles
and Southern California; and the identification of interest and affinity groups within the
student body, among many other concepts and awarenesses. Traditional methods for
disseminating this knowledge, such as special seminars, email blasts about visiting
speakers, student art shows, orientation materials, community web portals, and passes to
screenings for films made by alumni were on offer, but did not seem to penetrate the
consciousness of students as quickly or deeply as they otherwise could. In the most
general sense, this lack of penetration was a result of this knowledge not being strongly
connected to the individual purposes and objectives of the students in a strategic and
integrated manner. As will be discussed in the section on motivation below, the degree to
which a given piece of information can be retained and put to use is directly proportional
to the degree to which that information is perceived as being personally meaningful and
relevant. The literacy dimension of the discoverability problem thus related to a systemic
failure to render the rich and varied kinds of knowledge and mentorship available through
extracurricular programming at the SCA into terms that would expose the personal use
value of this knowledge to individual students, particularly those in the freshman cohort.
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The social dimension of the discoverability problem underwrites the issues present in the
craft and literacy dimensions. Largely because of the Divisional silos, student-originated
interdivisional knowledge production and transmission structures were slow to emerge.
Such structures are ultimately the most powerful means for bringing about the kinds of
theoretical comprehension, media making experiences, and environmental awarenesses
that can enable students to get the most out of their formal education at the SCA.
Examples of these kinds of structures would include student-run online knowledge bases
and social networking platforms; interdivisional student associations; and self-directed
media production teams composed of students from across the Divisions of the SCA,
among other such structures.
The general position of the EFG was that the more that students can be directly connected
to one another, the more they can get involved in practice-based learning, and the more
that they can feel connected to the institution and its extended community of faculty and
alumni, the faster individual processes of discovery--and therefore intellectual, personal,
and artistic growth--can occur. Further, since career advancement in academia, industry,
and art practice is in no small part dependent on being comfortable with and skilled in
engagement with social activities, providing students with avenues for experimentation in
this sphere was deemed essential.
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Figure 4: Partial whiteboard capture, Envisioning the Future Group meeting, March 2011.
2.1.3 Mandates of Reality Ends Here
By April of 2011, a concise set of mandates had emerged out of this multi-dimensional
analysis. These mandates would serve as the foundational objectives for the design of
Reality Ends Here. Each of these objectives involves different aspects of helping students
to become more engaged with the direction of their own learning and development as
artists, designers, and researchers. The mandates in specific were:
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1. Jump-start interdivisional peer discovery and collaboration;
2. Provide students with opportunities to experiment with media making across
the domains of practice represented by the five undergraduate Divisions of the
SCA;
3. Connect students to alumni, faculty, and the broader community of the SCA;
and,
4. Provide students with an awareness of the history of the institution, reveal to
them that they are writing the next chapter, and facilitate their telling of that
story.
As discussed above, changing the entire curriculum at the SCA was not an option in the
effort to fulfill these mandates, both because of the valuable outcomes produced by the
existing curricular structure, and because of the bureaucratic complexity of implementing
changes to the core curriculum at a nearly 100 year-old educational institution. Indeed,
the EFG had relatively lean resources at their command to tackle these mandates. As
constraints, these limitations were as important to the design process as were the
objectives contained in the mandates. For example, after a lengthy proposal process
spearheaded by Dr. Holly Willis, the administration made a single once-a-week “499”
27
class available for use as an experimental intake experience for freshmen students. This
class, ultimately called, Reality Starts Here, and taught by Professor Tara McPherson,
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27
At the SCA, the “499” course identifier is used to designate a test-bed course that is not yet part of the official
curriculum.
would provide students with a lively and social experience geared around the mandates
listed above.
Figure 5: Flyer for Reality Starts Here. Imagery and graphic design reference assets from Reality Ends
Here (see “Graphic Identity System”)
However, even prior to the development of these mandates and the origination of this
class, the EFG had recognized that some kind of force-multiplier would be necessary to
create the desired impact. A single course could have an effect on its own, but a broad-
based systemic change would require more time and a more thorough integration of the
above-mentioned mandates into the lives of students. This constraint demanded some
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kind of informal or extra-curricular augmentation or complement to the class, and was a
key reason why Dr. Willis proposed bringing me in to design an environmental game.
The core design challenge of Reality Ends Here was to work with and around these and
other environmental constraints so as to engineer an informal learning system that could
enable students to take charge of their own learning and build useful and personally-
relevant social arrangements for experimentation and knowledge production.
Environmental games, like all forms of environmental design, serve wayfinding,
interpretation, and placemaking purposes through the mediation of interactions with and
within lived environments.
28
In the context of the SCA, these purposes can be directly
mapped onto the problem and possibility space identified by the EFG. For example,
“wayfinding” can be thought of in terms of both how an environmental game can assist
individuals in navigating through the many kinds of media arts theories and practices that
exist across the five undergraduate Divisions at the SCA, and how such a game can
reveal the geography of personalities present within the student population; the
“interpretation” function of an environmental game in the SCA context relates to its
capacity to frame and narrate these practical and social experiences within both the
broader context of the history of media theory and practice, and within the more local
context of the history and current organization of the SCA itself; finally, the
“placemaking” affordances of an environmental game as applied to the SCA relate to its
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28
See Calori.
ability to foster the creation of an environment conducive to peer discovery, creative
experimentation, and exploration. The twin constraints of the mandates generated through
the research activities of the EFG and the limitations on funding and available resources
imposed by the administration thus made an environmental game the best candidate for
this kind of intervention.
2.1.4 Physical Constraints
Mobile and social media technologies offer environmental game designers powerful new
methods for constructing play situations. However, in environmental game design, it is
important to resist the temptation to experiment with new technologies simply because
such experimentation is possible. At every stage in the design process, the designer must
ask: what am I trying to achieve, and what is the most parsimonious means of achieving
that end? In many cases, new media technologies will indeed provide the optimal
solutions to environmental game design problems. But these solutions must emerge out
of an honest analysis of the target environment, rather than from a survey of emerging
technology. Indeed, especially in games which are intended to bring about interaction in
physical space, analog methods can often be more effective than digital methods in terms
of bringing players into face-to-face contact and setting the stage for the construction of
lasting social arrangements. In the contemporary US context, most environmental game
designs will ultimately resolve into hybrid constructions that intelligently leverage both
analog and digital assets and play mechanics. What must be emphasized is that these
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constructions should always be rooted in the specific constraints and affordances of the
target environment.
Consider the following example from the prototyping process for Reality Ends Here. The
initial concept for Reality Ends Here envisioned a heavily-mediated experience that relied
on a smartphone-enabled web application. This prototype was the first step in the design
process that led to the 2011 iteration of the game. This early version was in many ways a
“remix” of the seminal collaborative production game, SFZero,
29
tweaked to suit the
population at SCA and to reflect the near ubiquity of smartphone devices.
In SFZero, players earn points by producing media artifacts based on creative prompts
submitted to the game system by other players. Players of SFZero can also earn points
when any prompts they have created are used by other players in the production of media
artifacts, or by having their projects rated by others. All of this activity is tracked and
mediated by a website. By earning points, players of SFZero advance on various kinds of
leaderboards, acquiring different markers of status within the game system. However, this
points system is ultimately less important to players than is the experience of playful
public performance and “culture jamming” that SFZero offers. Simply put, SFZero is a
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29
SFZero is a collaborative production game created by Sam Lavigne and Ian Kizu-Blair. In collaborative production
games, participants engage in the co-creation of narrative content. This co-creation is structured and guided by a ruleset
positioned within a loose narrative context. Players are given enough structure such that they know generally what they
are supposed to do; and enough freedom such that they can approach gameplay in a manner that best suits their own
interests and competencies. Unlike other approaches to “user-submitted content,” which simply offer players a chance
to upload their own media artifacts as a kind of bonus activity or contest, in collaborative production games, players
have no other option--collaborative production is the primary activity of the game. Content players submit to a
collaborative production game is shared to the community via a website or other portal, thereby becoming incorporated
into the evolving narrative. The producers of collaborative production games do not need to create enormous amounts
of narrative content in order to generate a rich and dynamic experience; rather, their creative role is in the construction
of rules and other conditions that lead to the emergence of narrative content from the ranks of the player population.
simple game structure through which DIY enthusiasts and other kinds of “makers” can
socialize and stage disruptive pseudo-Situationist performances in urban space. SFZero
began as a highly localized game, played primarily in San Francisco and Oakland, but has
since expanded to include cities around the world.
Like SFZero, the initial prototype for Reality Ends Here planned to use a web portal as
the primary structure through which the actions of creating and responding to media-
making challenges would be mediated. But in contrast to SFZero, which leaves the
challenge of structuring creative prompts more or less entirely up to its players, the game
we envisioned would have a play mechanic that guided and constrained the process of
prompt generation. In this conception of Reality Ends Here, players would use a drag-
and-drop interface to assemble prompts on their mobile devices by combining actions and
other elements into a sequence (see Figure 6).
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Figure 6: Wireframe for drag-and-drop “challenge builder” interface. This digital interface was later
reduced to serve primarily as a feedback system, with the prompt generation mechanic being transferred to
an analog collectible card game.
In this prototype, once players had come up with a prompt they were happy with, they
would give it a name and submit it to the system. Players would then earn points
whenever any prompt they created was tackled by another player, and they would also
earn points for tackling prompts created by others. All of this would be trackable and
manageable via a smartphone-enabled web application, which would augment media
submissions with location and other contextual data. Snazzy features, such as the ability
for the application to sense other nearby players, and deliver push notifications
accordingly, were planned from the beginning.
This first pass at the game captured the spirit of what we wanted to do: a prompt-based
media-making game, wherein the constituent challenges of the game were not created
“from on high” but rather were generated by the players themselves. But it quickly
69
dawned on us that we weren’t taking the totality of the constraints of our design problem
into account. Techno-fetishism had blinded us. A game driven by virtual interactions on
mobile devices might sound exciting--and, indeed, might be the kind of thing that one
could use to attract funders keen to get on board with the Next Big Thing--but was it
appropriate to this design challenge?
Unlike the players of a hypothetical location-based game that could be played anywhere
and at any time, our player base was largely concentrated in an extremely small
geographic region. For example, the majority of the incoming freshmen at SCA reside in
on-campus dormitories. Most of these dormitories are less than three football fields (a
popular unit of measurement at USC) away from the main SCA buildings, where almost
all freshman students attend classes each and every day (see Figure 7). Since one of our
key mandates for the game was to jump-start collaboration and peer discovery, it seemed
absurd not to leverage these physical affordances toward those ends. With our potential
players already crammed into extremely close proximity with one another, was an
exclusively web-based game system the best way to accelerate their social interaction?
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Figure 7: Geographical constraints. Arrow at left indicates the School of Cinematic Arts; arrow at right
indicates dormitory complex housing the majority of freshman students.
For several years before tackling this project, I had been working on prototypes for a
connectivity-based card game inspired in part by Steve Jackson’s wonderful 1981
conspiracy game, Illuminati. Beyond the hilarious narrative framework and compelling
strategic play of Jackson’s game, I found the emergent arrangements of cards the game
generated to be beautiful on their own. I had prototyped several abstract games based on
linking cards together, drawing on Illuminati and other sources such as the Tarot and
Dominos. Remnants of these prototypes were scattered on the floor of my apartment as it
71
became apparent to me--thanks in no small measure to the feedback of my design
advisor, Tracy Fullerton--that I had stumbled into the trap of techno-fetishism.
30
Figure 8: Gameplay in a recent version of Steve Jackson’s Illuminati.
The breakthrough came when we combined those card prototypes with the mechanics
underlying our early smartphone app wireframes. Instead of using a drag-and-drop web
interface to generate prompts, we began exploring ways to use physical playing cards to
generate creative prompts.
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30
This is what differentiates the true media artist from the techno-fetishist: the former adopts whatever medium or
combination of media that suits the needs of their project and maximizes impact. The latter always adopts the highest-
tech solution, regardless of other options.
Figure 9: Prototyping card-based procedural creative prompting system. June, 2011. At left, co-conspirators
Tracy Fullerton and Simon Wiscombe. Top right: playtest at PEG-LA meetup. Middle- and bottom-right:
early card system prototypes.
In this version of the game, which would ultimately evolve into the “final” version played
during the 2011 implementation, the web would still play an important role, but at the
base of the interaction would be an analog game that required players to be in physical
proximity to one another in order to play. This requirement alone would satisfy some of
our key mandates about peer discovery and collaboration. Further, even if the cards
weren’t used to actually play the game, their mere physical presence could serve as a
conversational icebreaker, accelerating the process of social discovery for incoming
students. For example, as early-adopting students would take up playing the game in
73
dorm rooms and hallways, their play would be noticeable by students who had yet to
discover the experience, opening new vectors for player induction.
31
Figure 10: Reality Ends Here card game play observed in SCA hallway.
A complete description of the mechanics of the collectible card game (CCG) component
of Reality Ends Here can be found in Chapter 3 of this document. What is most important
in the context of the present design philosophy thesis is that the decision to use a CCG as
a primary component of gameplay is rooted in an overarching emphasis on designing for
and around the specific constraints of the local environment. Indeed, the CCG is only one
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31
For more on the role the CCG plays in the induction of new players, see the sections titled “First Contact Campaign”
and “Player Induction” in Chapter 3.
example of many such locally-tuned elements present in the design of Reality Ends Here.
In this and myriad other ways, Reality Ends Here is a “bespoke” project designed to
address the specific constraints of the environment of the SCA. These constraints
ultimately came to include the varied interests, tastes, habits, and competencies of the
incoming students; the history, curriculum, and institutional structure of the SCA; the
school’s buildings and outdoor environments; the social media spaces inhabited by the
students and faculty; the range of housing situations among freshmen; the proximity of
alumni to the campus; the near ubiquity of smartphone devices and/or laptop computers
among students; the changing landscape of media arts production, and the new demands
this places on media arts education; the city of Los Angeles; the nostalgia associated with
collectible card games such as Pokémon; a very tight budget; a desire to experiment; and
many other factors.
This sensitivity to local constraints and affordances underwrites each of the subsequent
theses in the design philosophy of Reality Ends Here in specific and environmental
games in general. Simply put, such sensitivity is the defining element of environmental
game design. Just as a bridge must be constructed around the specific terrain it is
intended to traverse, so must an environmental game be constructed around the unique
topology of the environment it is intended to transform. The less sensitive an
environmental game is to its environment, the more likely it is to collapse.
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2.2 Thesis II: Action, Not Simulation
Environmental games by definition take place--and have their primary impact--not in
simulated worlds, but in the real worlds of their players. Since any kind of transformation
of the use of space inherently entails the production of changes in behavior, games
intended to effect such transformations will have their greatest impact when they are
designed to substantially enact these behaviors through the play of the game itself, rather
than exclusively through second-order effects brought about by rhetorical arguments
calling for the desired changes. Put differently, environmental games create new spaces
of possibility within lived environments by opening pathways for players to directly
engage in the construction of their own realities rather than an externally-authored or
simulated reality. Such games go beyond merely calling for change by “producing an
appropriate space” (Lefebvre 69) that can both embody and enable that change.
Figure 11: A sampling of student-organized events, productions, and online spaces produced as a result of
playing Reality Ends Here. See also http://reality.usc.edu.
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This is not to say that environmental games do not make use of the “procedural
rhetoric”
32
found in other games in the manifestation of their impact. Indeed, as will be
discussed below, all games make value statements about the world through the
procedures of play. However, it is important to briefly consider the relationship between
what I will call “simulation games” and impact in order to understand the other kinds of
transformational potential offered by environmental games.
33
2.2.1 Contrast: Simulation Games and Impact
Games that model real-world systems in the form of simulations can persuade us to adopt
certain points of view which in turn give rise to various actions and postures. When
individuals engage with a simulation game, they can come away with a clearer sense of
the systemic underpinnings of a problem space. A canonical example of this process is
the SimCity series of games, which makes arguments about the relationships between
governance, commercial and industrial growth, land use, public works, and education,
among many other things. These arguments gradually become apparent to players as they
experiment in the “sandbox” of the SimCity simulation: lower taxes mean more
commercial growth; more commercial growth means more jobs; less unemployment
means higher residential housing values; higher housing values means more tax revenue;
and so on.
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32
See Bogost, Persuasive Games.
33
For the purposes of this discussion, I will be using the term, “simulation game” to denote any game that represents a
real-world system through interactive models and other abstractions. In the domains of video game design and game
studies, among others, “simulation games” are a very specific genre and are attended by various subgenres (sandbox
games, sports sims, “god games,” and so forth). In this discussion, I am using the term to refer to a much broader range
of representational game systems--both analog and digital--that are distinguished by their emphasis on the use of
simulation and the procedures of play as a form of rhetoric.
Many game designers would prefer to call SimCity a “toy,” rather than a game, and others
would argue that it was not consciously designed to agitate for any specific political
position. Nevertheless, SimCity makes a series of decidedly neoliberal points about the
proper and improper development of urban space through its rules and procedures.
Insofar as games or toys like SimCity can inform the world view of their players, they can
have value-charged impacts.
A somewhat less obvious example is Unmanned, a 2012 game by Molleindustria and No
Media Kings which places players into the existentially absurd and sometimes tormented
life of a US drone pilot. In Unmanned, players experience the strange contrast between
the pilot’s mundane daily activities (shaving, playing video games, driving) and the
disembodied ultraviolence (tracking and blowing up “terrorists” with remote-controlled
UA Vs) that characterizes his work life. Unmanned is a beautiful work of art and worthy
of the reader’s attention. It provides players with dark and often uncomfortable insights
into the nature of contemporary warfare and its imbrication in our alienated consumer
culture. These insights can have real-world impact: for example, having experienced an
abstract representational simulation of the physical and psychological effects of UA V
warfare “up close,” players of Unmanned may be less likely to support political
candidates and other actors that support such tactics, or may seek involvement with
veteran groups or foreign aid agencies. Further, many simulation-based impact games,
such as Susana Ruiz’s seminal political action game, Darfur is Dying (Take Action
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Games, 2006), provide their players with clear routes through which to take action:
websites to visit, organizations to support, concrete steps to take in everyday life, and so
on.
In this sense, simulation games stimulate change in their players and their environments
in a manner analogous to other rhetorical media forms like books, films, or television.
Players play the game, are affected, and if they are affected powerfully enough, change
the way they look at and and engage with the world accordingly. SimCity endorses a
particular view of urban planning, and provides an experience of “the management of
complex systems based on ‘intelligent scanning’ of streams of constantly changing
information.” (Starr 10). Unmanned shows its players the inhumanity of warfare, and
gives them contact with the sublime. These are powerful calls to action, but the actual
taking of action is a kind of consequence or side-effect of playing the game, something
that happens outside of the "magic circle" of play.
Further, because the rules and procedures of simulation games such as SimCity and
Unmanned are executed computationally, they are typically not visible to (or deeply
modifiable by) players. How are we to know the algorithms of SimCity are rooted in
sound principles of urban planning and economics? Since any simulation is inevitably an
approximation, how far can we trust SimCity’s accuracy as a model of the world? The
rhetorical position taken by Unmanned is something we can all get behind, but how
would we feel about an equally compelling and beautiful simulation espousing a cause
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we despise? Viewed in this light, simulation games can be recognized as a form of
spectacle. That is, they are a means of “[concentrating] all gazing” (Debord, Society of
the Spectacle Thesis 3) upon a world (or system) created by others rather than a channel
through which players can remake the worlds (or systems) in which they live. While
digital technology clearly offers the promise of democratizing spectacle, simulation
games on their own do not achieve this end. Douglas Kellner and Stephen Best describe
such systems as “pseudo-interactive”:
We would distinguish therefore between a genuine interactive spectacle and
pseudo-interaction. Using Debord's conception of the construction of situations,
we would suggest that a creatively interactive spectacle is one that the individual
herself has created, whether it be one's website, computer-mediated space such as
chat room, or discussion group. In these self or group-constructed environments,
individuals themselves create both form and content, using the site and
technology to advance their own interests and projects, to express their own views
and to interact in the ways that they themselves decide. In [pseudo-interactive
spectacle], by contrast, one is limited by the structures and power of the [forces]
that themselves construct the spectacle in which one is merely a part.
Put differently, while simulation games are much lauded for their “do” capacity, they
ultimately resolve into a “show” medium. Both SimCity and Unmanned are single-player
games wherein the player makes choices and experiences consequences based on “black-
box” code. In playing the game, the player is neither modifying the real world nor the
game itself; rather, she is playing in the system. Through this play, she both consciously
and unconsciously receives the various value statements and philosophical positions
encoded (again both consciously and unconsciously) in the system by its authors. These
statements and positions can be remixed, repurposed, and reinterpreted by the player in
myriad and often highly social ways--and herein lies what is arguably their greatest
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interest to the educator and activist. However, this again is a second-order exercising of
agency, and such activity is all too often no more central a part of a simulation game’s
design than the remixing of Star Trek episodes was of Gene Roddenberry’s original
project. While simulation games taken in isolation may have the appearance of being
agency-rich activities--and, to be sure, they are a much more “active” kind of spectacle
than older media forms such as film or television--they are ultimately closed systems
“imposed from above.”
To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality;
to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers,
learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by
drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct
vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the
most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed
acquaintance with a changing world. (Dewey)
Simulation games are prepared abstractions. Like novels or films, they are connected to
the lives of players and the dynamics of their lived environments through intertextuality
and the operations of apprehension and interpretation. In learning contexts, such artifacts
have obvious utility; but ultimately they function more like textbooks than like the truly
experiential learning systems imagined by Dewey and others. This can be a difficult
argument to make, especially in light of the many game designers and educators invested
in the design and application of simulation games. I do not wish to suggest that
simulation games are without merit, nor that they are monolithic: indeed, what is at issue
here is ultimately a spectrum rather than a dichotomy. Rather, I am trying to establish a
baseline for what experiential learning really is, and what kinds of roles games can play
in that kind of learning.
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If we are to say that simulations provide their players with “real experiences” and
therefore represent an approach to experiential learning, then I would suggest that the
entire category of experiential learning collapses. As I have attempted to indicate in this
section, simulation games are a form of interactive rhetoric that, broadly speaking,
operate on subjectivity in a similar manner as other forms of rhetoric such as lectures,
textbooks, and films. While it is true that players actively “have an experience” when
they play a simulation game, the same can be said for the readers of books, the attendees
of lectures, or the viewers of films. Indeed, many filmgoers refer to favorite films as
“amazing experiences.” If this definition of experience is to be the basis for our
conception of experiential learning systems, then all learning systems are experiential
learning systems.
As Dewey notes, the determinative factor is not whether an experience is being had, but
rather what the “quality” of a particular experience is. “[People] in traditional schools do
have experiences,” he writes. “The trouble is not the absence of experiences, but their
defective and wrong character--wrong and defective from the standpoint of connection
with further experience.” The central challenge in developing an experiential learning
system is thus to find ways “to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully
and creatively in subsequent experiences” (Dewey).
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2.2.2 Actualization
In environmental games, the experience of play centers not on simulation but on
actualization. Such games are played within specific lived environments, and real people,
places, and actions are their constituent elements. When a player takes an action in an
environmental game, the consequences of that action are felt in real life. Since these
actions are taken within a system that is directly connected to an environment, they de
facto engage with and alter what Erving Goffman would call the “dramaturgy” of the
environment. In this sense, games like Reality Ends Here constitute pathways through
which players effect real change in their everyday lives. Such games directly convert the
energy of play into tangible situations in lived environments. To use an engineering
analogy, environmental games like Reality Ends Here are much more efficient in terms of
throughput than simulation games. Rather than behavioral impact in the real world being
a second-order consequence of play, impact is inseparable from play. The game is not
only a call to action: it also meaningfully is the action.
Consider the following thought experiment. What if, instead of an environmental game,
Reality Ends Here was a video game? Instead of being played in the real world, this
virtual version of Reality Ends Here would provide players with a simulation of a
fictional student at a fictional media arts school. In this game, the relative success or
failure of the fictional student controlled by the player would be determined by the degree
to which she did (or failed to do) the kinds of things set forth in the mandates of the EFG.
For example, the simulation could be programmed to reward the player with points,
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badges, and “level-ups” if the fictional student they controlled collaborated with other
fictional students, experimented with fictional media making in a variety of fictional
disciplines, and expanded her horizons through meetings with fictional alumni. In the
best-case outcome, players would draw an analogy between their own real lives as
students and the life of the fictional student they controlled in the game. Based on this
analogy, they would then begin to do the kinds of things their fictional student did in the
game in their real lives.
To be sure, this is something of a caricature of simulation games, and does not address
the role such games can play in the sparking of real-world discussions and interactions
revolving around the rhetoric they contain. But the criticism here is a serious one: if it is
possible to design a game that brings about change directly through play, why would we
design a game for impact that works as indirectly as the simulation described above?
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In
Reality Ends Here, players aren’t just “shown” the value of peer discovery and
collaboration: they live it. In order to play the game at all, they must at the very least pay
close enough attention to their peers and their surroundings to notice that it exists. To
score points in the game, they must get involved in social activity, either by participating
in the online discussion or by collaborating and making media. Further, to score more
than a few points, players must get involved in media making. Since players only receive
a limited number of cards at the outset of the game, and since the cards they receive
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34
In some cases, the use of a simulation may be the only available option. For example, video games like America’ s
Army or military exercises such as the massive Valiant Shield US Navy war game provide players with an experience of
combat environments without necessitating violence. However, it should be emphasized that the experience gained
through such simulations is qualitatively different from the experience gained through actual combat. One cannot
become “battle-hardened” in the absence of the real existential and moral threats presented by warfare.
degrade in value with each use,
35
they must either collaborate with other players or
engage in trade and barter in order to continue playing. The rewards players receive
through play of the game are not points or badges enclosed in a simulation, but rather are
real-world rewards such as mentorship encounters, usable portfolio items, and potentially
life-long friendships. Simply put, there is no way to play Reality Ends Here that does not
in one way or another enact the very outcomes the game is designed to produce.
Figure 12: Reality Ends Here, various play contexts.
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35
This is a crucial rule in the CCG system. To encourage players to interact with other players, each card can only be
used three times before it loses its value in the game’s point system. This necessitates the acquisition of “fresh” cards,
which can only be achieved through deeper interaction with the game and with other players. This rule, and additional
notes regarding its role in the game system at large, is detailed in the section titled, “Collectible Card Game,” in
Chapter 3.
Crucially, this emphasis on “direct action” through game play does not eliminate the
rhetorical capacity of environmental games like Reality Ends Here. As a designer,
whether you intend to or not, you are always saying things about the world when you
make a game. The way your players play your game enacts those value statements. In the
case of Reality Ends Here, the mandates of the project are underwritten by very specific
values regarding collaboration, community, and initiative. As we iterated through play
mechanics that focused on these core values, we quickly realized that our system was
inevitably going to encode a multitude of other statements about things like
professionalism vs. amateurism, competition, cooperation, authority, authorship, and
inclusivity.
Take the issue of whether the Reality Ends Here should be mandatory. What would we be
saying to the students if we had made this experience something they “had to do” versus
something that they discovered and engaged in “of their own accord?” A big piece of
developing collaboration skills and learning about the value of community is realizing
that you have to take initiative in order to build relationships and expand your social and
professional horizons. Especially in the media industries, these things won't just be
handed to you on a platter. They take work and involve risk. Any game about
collaboration and community ought to communicate those basic facts, and if we had
made the game a mandatory part of the curriculum, we would have been compromising
some of that message. We would have been saying, “this is a part of your classwork. Do
this or your grades will suffer.” Regardless of whatever game we might have built atop
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that foundation, the base value would have always been the same: something like, “do as
you're told.” By making the game optional, we were able to say, “this is an opportunity.
It's up to you if you want to take it. Make of it what you will.” Associating the game with
the values of exploration, socialization, initiative, experimentation, and discovery seemed
much more in line with our overall mandates than was associating it with the inward-
facing and passive values of doing as one is told. In this manner, every design decision
made in the creation of Reality Ends Here asked a crucial value question, and in order to
answer each one, we needed to think about the value-rich real-world actions and social
arrangements the play of the game would inevitably create.
Figure 13: Bullpen posts regarding core game mandates.
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As illustrated in Figure 13, as the game went on, the rhetorical positions underlying these
design decisions became increasingly apparent to the players. Their reflections on these
positions gradually became an important impact of the game. Indeed, many of the
projects submitted to the game were about the game itself. Beginning in the mid-game
and continuing through to the end of the experience, several groups of players created
elaborate projects interrogating the structure and purpose of Reality Ends Here. Deals
such as The Game (http://reality.usc.edu/deals/the-game/), The Game: A Forbidden Deal
(http://reality.usc.edu/deals/the-game-a-forbidden-deal/), The Game: The Series (http://
reality.usc.edu/deals/the-game-the-series/), Epilogue (http://reality.usc.edu/deals/
epilogue/), The Bullpen (http://reality.usc.edu/deals/the-bullpen/), and The Justification
(http://reality.usc.edu/deals/the-justification/) all ask questions about the meaning and
impact of the game, and its role within the emerging community of the freshman cohort.
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Figure 14: Poster for The Game. This poster was created by players to promote their short film, The Game,
and was the first of several projects submitted to Reality Ends Here that was “about” Reality Ends Here.
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2.3 Thesis III: The Social is the Medium
As Seymour Papert notes in his discussion of his groundbreaking work on LOGO, the
optimal role a simulation can play in learning is not only in providing an interactive
representation or model of a given concept, but in mediating the way that learners can
connect with one another, share ideas, and have genuine social experiences linked to
intellectual and personal development. For Papert, LOGO, a simple programming
language for children, was only one piece of the puzzle. The real trick was in creating an
educational environment that would break LOGO free from being a private activity and
make the practice of programming into a social activity that had real relevance and
resonance in the social lives of the learners. This would create personally-meaningful
experiences, embodied and embedded in the social environment. Personal meaning of
this sort is the “vital appeal” Dewey speaks of. It is the wellspring of real agency -- and
agency in this sense is the most powerful mnemonic there is when it comes to acquiring
and retaining knowledge.
[This] environment is designed to foster richer and deeper interactions than are
commonly seen in schools today in connection with anything mathematical.
Children create programs that produce pleasing graphics, funny pictures, sound
effects, music, and computer jokes. They start interacting mathematically because
the product of their mathemetical work belongs to them and belongs to real life.
Part of the fun is sharing, posting graphics on the walls, modifying and
experimenting with each other’s work, and bringing the “new” products back to
the original inventors. Although the work at the computer is usually private it
increases the children’s desire for interaction. These children want to get together
with others engaged in similar activities because they have a lot to talk about.
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In Reality Ends Here, the core media-making game serves as a means of bringing about
these kinds of personally-relevant social interactions. While the many wonderful creative
projects produced by the students constitute an impressive outcome on their own, the
most important objective and most lasting outcome of Reality Ends Here can be
described in terms of the way that the game provides a channel through which players
can connect with one another and generate social arrangements centered on the
discussion and practice of media-making. Because the game is played in the lived
environment of its players, and because its constituent procedures involve taking real
actions that necessarily have impacts on the social environment independent of the game,
these arrangements emerge not as second-order “side-effects” of game play, but rather as
fundamental components of the activity.
The range of social impacts created by the 2011 implementation of Reality Ends Here can
be broken down into a spectrum spanning three categories: ludic, para-ludic, and extra-
ludic.
Ludic social impacts refer to the way the game’s constituent systems directly mediates
interpersonal relationships, community-oriented reflection, and knowledge sharing. For
example, once players sign up for the game, they begin to use the in-game website to
seek out collaborators, share knowledge, and perform various kinds of group and sub-
group affinities. This activity takes place on the “Bullpen”--a Facebook-like status
updating system on the game website--as seen in Figure 15:
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Figure 15: Bullpen post regarding search for collaborative partnerships.
During the 2011 implementation, 4762 status updates were submitted to the Bullpen. Not
all Bullpen updates were as directly focused on the collaborative activities of the game as
those seen in Figure 15. Many updates discussed the game from a broader perspective.
For example, in the early stages of the game, there was a great deal of discussion about
the purpose of the game and its role in the community. Debates emerged between
students who concentrated on making “high quality” projects (i.e., those who took “pride
in production”) and those who produced putatively “lower quality” projects in higher
volume so as to maximize the number of points they would earn in the game system.
These debates continued through the mid game, revealing a range of interesting analogies
to the media industry at large: one cannot “win” in the media business without producing
“high value” work, but at the same time, one does not want to sacrifice one’s artistic
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integrity. This self-reflection illustrates the degree to which the game mediates discussion
among students regarding the direction of their educational experience--and its role in
their development as artists:
Figure 16: Bullpen post regarding “art vs. commerce” debate.
Not all ludic social impacts are manifested online. For example, the top 4 or 5 players
who earn the most points in the game during a given week are connected with alumni of
the SCA for special “mentorship encounters.” Further, open-to-all “serendipitous
encounters” can pop up at any time, promoted via enigmatic tweets and secret messages
appearing on the game website. Shrouded in mystery, these “once-in-a-lifetime”
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encounters consist of face-to-face meetings--often in unusual places, such as the Museum
of Natural History, or the home of an Academy Award-winning filmmaker--with alumni
who are working in various aspects of the media industry. In the 2011 version of the
game, mentorship encounters included meetings with veteran cinematographer Dante
Spinotti, Mad Men writer Erin Levy, game designers Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago,
director John Singleton, screenwriter John August, and legendary filmmaker Robert
Zemeckis, among many others. These encounters connected students with the rich history
of the SCA, broadened individual social networks, and provided unique insights into the
careers of successful alums.
Figure 17: Player-submitted photographs of mentorship encounters.
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Para-ludic impacts included offline “icebreaker” discussions around the content included
on collectible playing cards, and online activities regarding the planning and strategizing
of game activities on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Extra-ludic social impacts
included the generalized licensing of DIY production at an institution that is traditionally
aligned with highly professionalized production techniques; the persistence beyond the
termination of the game of production groups formed during gameplay; and the transition
of students across Divisions or into the SCA as a result of their activities within the game.
Figure 18: CCG play in student dormitory.
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Intellectual and emotional growth is inherently social. Indeed, there are few kinds of
motivation or agency that are not focused on social objectives in one way or another.
Environmental games exist within this matrix of social energies. In order to be accessible
to new players, they must be designed so as to permit a certain degree of solitary play--
but they only succeed when genuine social arrangements are created. These arrangements
constitute an intervention on the performative dramaturgy of the environment, opening
new pathways for social discovery, collaboration, and serendipity. As Papert writes,
“[powerful] new social forms must have their roots in the culture, not be the creatures of
bureaucrats.”
2.4 Thesis IV: Leverage Motivation, Optimize for Agency
The fourth thesis of environmental game design is that environmental games best effect
transformations in communities and individuals alike only when they leverage existing
motivations in their player populations. This does not equal designing for the path of least
resistance. Many motivations can in fact place heavy demands on their subjects. What is
important is to conceive of the design of environmental games in terms of their ability to
channel, focus, and clarify the motivations of their players. Human intellectual and
emotional growth occurs when we reach out into the world in the pursuit of a self-defined
purpose and experience the consequences of that action. From this experience we clarify
our original purposes and form new ones--along with new ideas about how to chase after
them. This is the fundamental operation of human agency.
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This thesis can be understood by looking at the design of environmental games from two
perspectives: first, through the way such games invite players to play; and second,
through the way they create narrative figures via the interaction of players and rulesets,
rather than through the “top down” deployment of curated multimedia assets and/or
“missions.”
2.4.1 Agency and the Invitation to Play
Reality Ends Here is not mandatory for SCA students, nor is it openly publicized at the
school. In fact, we went to lengths to keep it under the radar. The game is meant to belong
to the players, not the other way around. Players discover it on their own, either through
word of mouth or by picking up on clues left around the campus--clues hidden in old
cameras, left near our mysterious flag which intermittently hangs off the third floor
balcony, or hanging from LED throwies we’ve stuck to the underside of staircases. One
by one or in groups, they come to the Game Office, undergo the initiation rites, receive
their game cards and website logins, and start playing.
Why did we go to these lengths? After all, we have more or less complete control over
our player population. They are students. We could tell them to do something and they
would have to do it. That is how they expect their education to work. So why don’t we
just say to them: go learn about the other divisions of the school, form into
interdisciplinary teams, and then make x number of creative projects? We have the power
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to give assignments and set deadlines. We could enforce our demands with grades. Why
did we make all this extra work for ourselves?
Outside of an educational institution, we would not have the ability to “conscript” our
player population. In the open market, the best we could hope for would be to capture a
decent percentage of our potential players through savvy communications design and the
creation of a genuinely engaging product. In this competitive context, the notion that one
could simply compel all of a given target demographic to sign up and play is something
that almost any design team would find difficult to resist. But in the end, the wise
designer wouldn’t give in to that hypothetical temptation--and for the very same reason
that we didn’t simply turn the game into an assignment. And that reason can be found in
understanding what it is we mean when we say the word, play.
Here is a classic definition of play from Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens:
Summing up the formal characteristic of play, we might call it a free activity
standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious' but at the
same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected
with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its
own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an
orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings that tend to
surround themselves with secrecy and to stress the difference from the common
world by disguise or other means. (13)
One can take issue with much of Huizinga’s definition. For example, the very nature of
Reality Ends Here is that it is an environmental game, and does not proceed within the
“proper boundaries” associated with familiar games such as board games or video games.
Further, proponents of art games and impact games would doubtless bristle at Huizinga
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describing play as being “not serious.” But despite these definitional shortcomings, there
is one thing in Huizinga’s definition that is fundamental to any notion of what play is, and
that is that it is a free activity.
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Consider the enormous amounts of energy people invest into genuine play activities. A
ready example is that of the young Pokémon player, who will, entirely without
supervision or deadlines or course readers, master massive volumes of information about
the Pokémon universe, the rules of the game, and the kinds of strategy and tactics
required to win. They will do this because the game is personal to them. It means
something in their world. It has a social value on the playground and in the lunch room. It
is a structured space within which they can explore different kinds of identity, mastery,
and leadership. It belongs to them. They have chosen it. They have “opted in.”
When players opt in to a play experience, they bring with them the awesome power of
their own agency. In the case of a game like Pokémon, players will yield up hundreds
upon hundreds of hours of precious childhood playtime to master the game. That’s the
power of agency, and that’s what engaging people in true play experiences can do.
Interaction designers know that they need to protect player agency at all costs. Within a
given game system, this means thoughtfully designing play mechanics such that player
action visibly and meaningfully shapes the evolving state of the game. If the game
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36
To be sure, games may not always involve voluntary participation, as illustrated by the grisly scene of coerced
“Russian Roulette” depicted in The Deer Hunter. But in such instances, the participants are obviously not truly
“playing.”
becomes random or deterministic, if it ends up feeling like everything is “on rails,” or if
the relationship between the players’ choices in the game and the effects those choices
have on the system is not apparent, players will cease to feel in command of the
experience and will invest less of themselves into the game. And once a certain threshold
is crossed, players will opt out entirely.
Crucially, player agency must be protected in the context of the invitation to play the
game in the first place. In most game design situations, this is something designers don’t
have to worry about, since games are typically conceived of from the start as something
that players will only play if they feel like doing so. But in the realm of impact games,
this isn’t always the case. In education, for example, students are often “told” to play
games in lieu of traditional assignments. Telling players to play in this manner is a sure-
fire way to compromise their personal investment and sense of agency. It transforms
genuine play into a simulacrum of play, stripping it of its essential nature as a “free
activity.” Further, the ability to coerce players to play can become a design crutch. That
is, designers who can simply command their players to play can end up making games
that are not engaging enough to attract players in the absence of such coercion, further
diminishing the extent to which the true power of play can be leveraged toward the
production of learning outcomes. Real play is supposed to be fun, after all. Being forced
to play a non-fun game is not that different from being forced to memorize times tables or
state capitals.
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Reality Ends Here takes the opposite approach: rather than telling players to play, we
“lured” them in by activating their curiosity.
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This strategy ensured that the entire
experience was rooted in the individual agency of players. It was a discovery, not an
assignment. It was something that belonged to the students, rather than something that
was forced upon them. Taking this approach forced us to make a good game, full stop--
for if we didn’t, no one would have played at all. While this strategy meant that we did
not engage the totality of the student population,
38
those who we did engage did so with
the kind of fervor that is only possible when people are truly playing.
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2.4.2 Process Intensity
This emphasis on agency has significant implications regarding the kinds of systems
design that can be employed in environmental games, leading toward an increase in
procedurality or “process intensity.” A game that is designed to tell a story through the
delivery of curated media artifacts typically has a low process intensity and a high data
intensity--that is, it generates play experiences and narrative figures less through the
emergent properties of players interacting with a ruleset than through the pseudo-
interactive presentation of pre-made elements (or “data”). Insofar as the overarching
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37
A detailed examination of how we “lured” or “pulled” players into the Reality Ends Here experience is contained in
the section titled, “First Contact Campaign,” in Chapter Three.
38
The game was targeted at the 140 incoming freshmen at the SCA. In the 2011 implementation, 109 of these students
registered for the game, along with several dozen students from other cohorts.
39
Of course, in many ways we had the ideal player population: young people eager to make and study media. Few
groups are more open to this kind of play than SCA freshmen. However, a different environment would by necessity
require a different design, and a different kind of play. Further, environmental games are not appropriate for all
situations. For example, it would be difficult (although perhaps not impossible) to design an environmental game to
address systemic problems at a maximum security prison.
objective of any environmental game is to enable and empower the inhabitants of a given
environment to tell their own story (that is, to direct and define the dramaturgy or
spectacle that shapes and constrains the use and identity of the environment), designs that
involve the deployment of curated multimedia assets must be rejected in favor of designs
that exhibit high process intensity. High process intensity designs maximize the degree to
which players, rather than designers (or “puppet masters”) are in charge of the emergence
of narrative.
In the context of long-term environmental games in particular, high process intensity
designs are more accessible, sustainable, and replayable than low process intensity
games. They are more accessible primarily because they do not depend on sequences of
narrative which players who arrive to the game after it has begun need to “catch up” with
in order to engage with the experience; they are more sustainable because designers do
not need to constantly create new content to keep players engaged--rather, the design
process consists of creating a ruleset that will generate experience “on the fly” through
the procedures of play; and they are more replayable because they cannot be “spoiled”--
the stories they tell are manifestations of the players’ actions, and are different every
time, depending on who is playing and what strategies and tactics they adopt.
An easy way to understand these concepts is to consider the differences between an
alternate reality game and a sport. Curiously, Reality Ends Here is much more like a sport
than it is like an alternate reality game. An alternate reality game deploys a story through
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a series of puzzles and challenges which unlock multimedia assets.
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These assets
constitute a sequential narrative. Players who arrive to an ARG after it has begun have
effectively missed the beginning of the story. The amount of effort required to get
involved with the experience thus increases in direct proportion to the time that has
elapsed since the game began. Further, since every stage of the game is effectively
another “turn” in a pre-curated narrative, designers must create huge archives of material
in order to keep the game moving. As soon as this flow of fresh material stops, so too
does the experience of the game.
In a sport such as ice hockey, it does not matter that the game has effectively been played
for over 100 years. New players can play without needing to know who won the 1919
Stanley Cup.
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The primary work of the “designers” of hockey is to periodically tweak
the rules of the game in order to improve it from various perspectives such as safety,
speed, and scoring. Each year, at the General Managers’ Retreat, the NHL considers these
new rules and experiments with them. However, the designers of hockey do not create the
“story” of hockey. That is done by the players. The story of every hockey game, season,
and series, whether played professionally or in a Saskatoon backyard, is told through the
interaction of players, referees, and scorekeepers with the rules and resources (i.e., the
ice, skates, sticks, and pucks required for play) of the game. No “top down” storytelling
is required. This is much more sustainable (and scalable) than an alternate reality game,
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40
A more in-depth discussion of ARGs and process intensity can be found in Chapter 1.
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No one did: it was the only year the Cup was contested for but not awarded.
wherein most of the “official” story of the game is created by the designers.
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Hockey is
also infinitely replayable, at least so long as ice, steel, sticks, and vulcanized rubber are
available to potential players. While the design of the game has remained relatively static
since the 1920s, the stories it has produced have been different every year. As a recent
advertisement for the Stanley Cup Playoffs notes, one can read the story of the Quest for
the Cup a thousand times but will still never know how it will end.
As illustrated by the example of ice hockey, having a high process intensity does not
mean that a game must involve large amounts of computation: rather, it simply means
that the narrative figures which emerge through gameplay must be determined as much as
possible by the generative text of the rules of the game. The procedures of this text can be
executed computationally, but may also be executed in whole or in part by the players
themselves in the manner of “analog” games or sports. Further, additional procedures will
emerge through the interface between gameplay and social reality. Ian Bogost calls games
which use compact computationally-executed procedures to give rise to more expansive
socially-executed procedures, “games of social experimentation” (“Persuasive Games:
Process Intensity and Social Experimentation”). To illustrate this kind of gameplay,
Bogost points to hybrid digital/analog multiplayer party games such as Johann Sebastian
Joust (Douglas Wilson, 2011), which use lightweight computational systems to both
mediate and “inspire” complex social and physical gameplay instantiations. Designer
Douglas Wilson describes Joust as a “no-graphics, digitally-enabled folk game”:
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42
Of course, the players of ARGs also create their own elements of the story--just as the fans of a film or television
property create narratives of their fandoms--but the progress of the experience as a whole is mediated and directed by
the active curation of content by puppet masters.
[The game is] for 2 to 7 players, designed for motion controllers (such as the
PlayStation Move). The goal is to be the last player remaining. When the music--
selections from J.S. Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos"--plays in slow-motion, the
controllers are extremely sensitive to movement. When the music speeds up, this
threshold becomes less strict, giving the players a small window to dash at their
opponents. If your controller is ever moved beyond the allowable threshold,
you're out! Channel the power of J.S. Bach, and try to jostle your opponents'
controllers while protecting your own.
As with games like Joust, in Reality Ends Here, computation primarily plays a mediating
role, while the bulk of the rules of the game, both those created by the designers (which
Salen and Zimmerman call the “explicit” rules) and those invented or interpolated by the
players (or the “implicit” rules), are articulated socially in both analog contexts and in
extra-ludic digital contexts, such as on Facebook or other social media environments
inhabited by players. In terms of the official game system, the website for Reality Ends
Here tracks player scores and provides a means for the sharing of media artifacts
produced through gameplay, while the main rules of the game are encoded in the
procedures related to the collectible card game (CCG).
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In this sense, the computational
components of the system have a low process intensity and a relatively low data intensity,
while the game system as a whole is nevertheless high in process intensity. That is, the
myriad narrative figures that emerge from “official” gameplay are almost wholly
determined by the rules of the card-based “procedural creative prompting system” which
players use to seed their creative collaborations, rather than by the code underlying the
website, which functions primarily as a feedback system.
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Both website and the CCG are detailed below, in Chapter 3.
On the other hand, the social codes which emerge as players compete, collaborate, and
perform gradually come to constitute an additional “unofficial” layer of procedurality that
is almost entirely authored by the players themselves. One striking example of this
emergent process intensity is the “group system” and its attendant phenomena of “card
banking.” These dynamics emerged during the 2011 implementation of Reality Ends
Here. In the early phases of the game, a group of approximately 8 particularly engaged
players, primarily composed of Production and Writing students, formed into a tight
association akin to a kind of production company. This group, known as “MARRA” (an
acronym for the names of its five founding members), pooled their game cards together
and signed an “exclusivity contract” which prohibited group members from working with
any other players in the game.
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Figure 19: Team MARRA, striking a variety of mock-serious poses. Screenshot from The Game: A
Forbidden Deal, a project about the game, submitted to the game.
MARRA quickly shot to the top of the Leaderboard as they used their tight team
arrangement and relatively large pool of cards to plan and execute a series of high-
scoring projects. That is, the new “rules” they invented for themselves initially served to
ensure their collective advancement in the game system. However, as the game went on,
this strategy partially backfired, at least in terms of MARRA exhausting their supply of
CCG cards: as is detailed in Chapter 3, each time a card is used in a creative prompt, it
decreases in value. Once it has been used three times, it is no longer worth any points
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whatsoever. This fact ultimately led MARRA to seek out methods for acquiring new
cards.
Additionally, in part in response to the early dominance of MARRA, new groups began
to form, several of which engaged in various kinds of what became known as “card
banking.” In card banking, players pool cards in the manner of a credit union. The most
successful example of card banking in the 2011 implementation was manifested by the
large player group known as the “The Tribe,” which assembled a card bank numbering
hundreds of cards.
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Figure 20: Members of The Tribe, posing in a tree. Screenshot from The Game: A Forbidden Deal.
The central “rule” of The Tribe’s card bank was that all players who are members of the
card bank receive credit on all projects produced by other members of the card bank, so
long as they share all their cards with the bank. This and other “card economy” protocols
established additional layers of procedures for a subset of players.
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Figure 21: Card bank for the Tribe. Each card in the bank is signed by the player to whom it belongs. All
members of the card bank may use the any of its cards in the construction of a creative prompt (or “Deal”).
These rules and procedures were invented by the players themselves, and came as a (pleasant) surprise to
the designers.
By designing the core (or “official”) game system around procedures, rather than curated
content, designers of environmental games lay the groundwork for players to further
iterate and repurpose the game according to their own desires. This high degree of “social
process intensity” is a key mechanism through which player agency is emphasized at
every stage of gameplay.
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2.4.3 Additional Remarks Regarding Agency
Of course, personal investment and sense of agency are not always of prime importance
in applied game design. The point here is not that educational games or other kinds of
impact-oriented games should always be agency-rich opt-in experiences. Every design
brief is different. In many instances, games can be effectively used purely as simulation
tools, or as methods for constructing complex arguments or presentations that would be
difficult or impossible to execute using other media forms. Students can be asked to
interact with a simulation, and can genuinely learn something about the system that the
simulation models, even if it’s not something they would normally interact with of their
own accord.
But our mandates are about action, not simulation. They are about what the players are
doing, not what we are showing them. The objective of Reality Ends Here is to transform
the environment at the SCA, not merely deliver information. We needed to create a play
experience that would bring about the kinds of social and creative situations that the
school had identified as being missing or under-represented. These situations couldn’t
just be one-offs. This was about effecting lasting change. It was about enlivening--and, in
some senses, creating--a community. To make that happen, we would have to inspire
sustained and deeply personal involvement in the game. That kind of passion isn’t
something you can tell people to have. They have to find it on their own. Students
discover and engage with Reality Ends Here the same way they discover and engage with
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things like college radio stations. They hear about it, and if they like the sounds of it, they
show up and pour their hearts into it.
2.5 Thesis V: Iterative and Permeable
Finally, all of these hypotheses are contained under the umbrella idea that the design of
environmental games is inherently an iterative process. This process requires both the
boldness to try new approaches, and the flexibility to learn from the outcomes they
produce. In many senses, iterating the design of an environmental game is an inseparable
part of being “supremely sensitive to the situations and conditions within the target
environment.” As the game transforms the environment, the game itself must change,
adapting to the new limitations and affordances that the play of the game surfaces.
Further, and perhaps most importantly, this process must be permeable to the constructive
energies of the players of the game. Games do not exist without their players, and the
more designers can do to close the gap between the official design team and the creative
energies of the player population, the more relevant and impactful the resulting design
will become.
The 2011 implementation of Reality Ends Here established the basic framework for the
game, but by no means is it the “final” version. Indeed, the long-term goal of the project
is to put its continued iteration into the hands of the players themselves, and to manage
the ongoing development of the game in a manner similar to a school newspaper or radio
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station. This is more than just an ideological design position. Rather, it is a matter of
survival. As soon as an environmental game ceases to be “in touch” with the environment
it targets, it will cease to function. By keeping the game in “perpetual beta,” and by
foregrounding the involvement of the players themselves in its evolution, designers can
ensure that an environmental game remains relevant and engaging to the population it
seeks to empower.
In the future, perhaps there will be a role at all institutions for “resident environmental
game designers” and other kinds of facilitators who do not teach in traditional classroom
facilities, but rather act as a kind of “ombudsperson of play,” connecting students and
faculty and other members of the community with each other through observation and
ludic intervention. In this regard, I am reminded of Seymour Papert’s lament about
physics education:
This problem goes deeper than a mere short supply of such people. The fact that
in the past there was no role for such people has been cast into social and
institutional concrete; now there is a role but there is no place for them. In current
professional definitions physicists think about how to do physics, educators think
about how to teach it. There is no recognized place for people whose research is
really physics, but physics oriented in directions that will be educationally
meaningful. Such people are not particularly welcome in a physics department;
their education goals serve to trivalize their work in the eyes of other physicists.
Nor are they welcome in the education school—there, their highly technical
language is not understood and their research criteria are out of step.
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Chapter 3: Technical Description
3.1 Overview
Reality Ends Here is an environmental game in which players cooperate and compete to
create and share media artifacts. The experience is driven by a collectible card game
(CCG). Through the play of the CCG, players generate creative prompts. Using these
prompts as inspiration, players then work alone or in self-assembled teams to create
media artifacts and submit them to the game’s website--along with a “Justification”
webcam video explaining how the work they created fits the conditions of the prompt it is
based on. A submitted project is known as a “Deal.” Submitting and Justifying a Deal
scores players points according to the number, types, and states of CCG cards that were
used in the creation of the project’s prompt. All players who worked on a given Deal
receive the full point value of the Deal. Players may work with as many other players as
they like, and may submit as many media artifacts as they can make. Additional points
can be earned by commenting on the work of other players, posting status updates, and
sharing photos. By scoring points, players advance on a weekly and overall leaderboard
and can earn access to special experiences and mentorship encounters.
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Figure 22: Gameplay overview. Players generate creative prompts via the CCG, produce media artifacts (or
“Deals”) based on their prompts, share these artifacts to the game website, and unlock mentorship
experiences by earning points on a weekly leaderboard.
All media artifacts produced in the game are shared on the game’s website and through
social media, producing a legacy of portfolio items for players, and extending the
narrative of the player community. The beta implementation of Reality Ends Here ran for
122 days from August to December of 2011 at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. 109 of
140 freshman students participated in the game. Students from outside of the freshman
cohort, and from outside of USC itself, also participated in the game. A total of 183
players registered for the game. A total of 122 Deals were submitted during the course of
play.
3.2 Cycle of Play
The main flow of the experience constitutes a positive feedback loop. In broad outline,
the core processes of this feedback loop are inherent to any lived environment, as
discussed in Chapter One. Reality Ends Here is a system designed to accelerate and guide
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these processes. As a machine for (re)making environments through network effects, the
system can be described as a “environmental play dynamo.” This dynamo consists of four
processes which fire in sequence from the perspective of the individual player, and both
in sequence and asynchronously from the perspective of the system as a whole.
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These
processes are: narration, discovery, engagement, and performance (see Figure 23). The
firing of each of these processes is governed by the procedures of the CCG and its
attendant social arrangements. At any stage in the sequence, Game Runners may
intervene to stabilize the system. An additional stage, ignition, is required to initiate or
“prime” the loop. A termination stage is introduced at the end of the experience to
conclude official game play.
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See “Temporal Structure” and “Interaction Patterns” below for further elaboration on the relationship between
synchronous and asynchronous processes within this game system.
Figure 23: Environmental Play Dynamo. Simplified view.
In the ignition phase, potential players are provided with limited amounts of ambiguous
information designed to spark interest in the activity. The precise nature of this
information is detailed below in the section titled, “First Contact Campaign.” This
information seeds the initial narrative of the experience (narration), leading potential
players into the discovery of the game. Players who find the game worthy of their time
then proceed to the engagement phase of play, participating in the CCG and related social
activities. This participation, insofar as it consists of both changes in everyday social
activity (e.g. the trading and arranging of game cards, debate over the nature of the game,
secrecy and other behaviors related to possession of knowledge of the game, friendships
and rivalries formed through play, and so on) and the submission of media artifacts to the
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publicly-viewable game website and its mirrors on social media platforms, constitutes a
performance. This performance evolves, expands, and amplifies the overall narrative of
the experience. Since this narrative is directly linked to the overarching narrative of the
SCA (and, more specifically, to the emerging narrative of the freshman cohort), it effects
changes in the dramaturgical structure of the environment. This transformation makes the
game increasingly discoverable, thereby opening induction pathways for new players. As
new players enter the loop, they discover not only the game, but other players as well.
To understand this cycle more clearly, consider Figure 24, which expands the four stages
of the environmental play dynamo into a more granular sequence of operations and
processes:
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Figure 24: Environmental play dynamo. Detailed view.
In this view, the ignition phase primes player engagement with the spectacle of the game,
which is initially constituted by a combination of the narrative content deployed by
designers through the First Contact Campaign and the existing narratives of the SCA
itself, as received by incoming students. As players first enter the system, the spectacle
thus serves a wayfinding purpose, directing them to the Game Office where they are
inducted into the card game. Players who choose to participate in the card game engage
in creative collaborations and the generation of media artifacts. These artifacts (or
“Deals”) are shared to the website and various social media platforms. The most highly-
engaged players are rewarded with mentorship experiences, which are also documented
on the website and through social media. The aggregate effect of the documentation of
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gameplay and game-related mentorship experiences, and of the word-of-mouth reporting
of ludic and para-ludic activities, feeds back into the overall spectacle of the game and of
the SCA as a whole. This then draws in more players, producing more experiences, more
documentation, and more word-of-mouth narration. As the game goes along, its spectacle
is increasingly defined by the players themselves, reducing the need for active
intervention or ignition activities by Game Runners.
3.3 Players
Although technically playable by any USC student, Reality Ends Here is specifically
designed as an optional activity for the approximately 140 incoming freshmen at the
School of Cinematic Arts (SCA). Most of these students arrive at the SCA having already
chosen a field of specialization represented by the school’s five Divisions: Animation,
Critical Studies, Film and Television Production, Interactive Media, and Writing for Film
and Television. An additional Division, the Peter Stark Producing program, is available
only to graduate students. Competition to enter any of the Divisions at the SCA is
extremely tight. Students hail from across North America and around the world.
In part because of this diversity of backgrounds and specializations, players will approach
the game with a range of interest levels, play styles, expectations, and intensities. As
such, the game is designed to accommodate varying degrees of ludic and social
engagement, from “casual” to “hard core,” and from “shy” to “gregarious.” Casual
engagement options include browsing and commenting on content created by other
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players, collecting cards, and brainstorming ideas for projects. Hard core engagement
options include producing projects, trading and bartering for cards, and implementing
strategies for placing in the top four players at the end of a given week (“Winning a
Week”). Both casual and hard core players may also engage with special puzzles and
other ancillary components of the experience, such as the pop-up “serendipitous
encounters” with visiting speakers that players can attend if they discover clues hidden in
the environment. Less-gregarious players can engage with the game by lurking on the
game website, exploring the content contained on the obverse side of CCG cards, or by
creating prompts and projects by themselves. Since these players can be among the
hardest to reach from the perspective of the Game Runners, future iterations of the
system will look for methods to increase the ways in which these kinds of players can get
involved. However, success in the game--as in the broader world of media arts--requires
collaboration, cooperation, and initiative. Indeed, this is a central rhetorical point of the
project.
As it is potentially of interest to all Cinematic Arts students, the test implementation is
designed to support a maximum player population equal to the total undergraduate
student population of the SCA--that is, about 800 players. Beyond this upper limit,
additional staffing, mentor availability, and card production capabilities would be
necessitated. In 2011, the game attracted 183 registered players, 109 of whom were in the
target population of 140 incoming freshmen. Possible future iterations of the system
could increase or eliminate the cap on player population through the automation of
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“Game Office” functions, enabling the game (or a derivation thereof) to scale. Many
online components of the test implementation, including the player profile system,
Bullpen, Deal Archive, Card Archive and submission tool, can already scale to
accommodate kiloplayer and megaplayer populations, with server bandwidth being the
primary limitation.
3.4 Temporal Structure
The experience commences several weeks prior to the beginning of the school year.
During this early phase, a variety of intentionally-ambiguous promotional materials are
“leaked” to students, either directly through orientation packets or indirectly through
social media and/or word of mouth, in order to seed interest in the game. Actual
gameplay begins once players arrive on campus, discover the Game Office, and acquire
the cards and website login required for play. From that point forward, the game unfolds
largely asynchronously based on the play styles and schedules of individual players and/
or self-assembled player groups. Card play, media production, and online engagement
may occur at any time. Special events, hours of operation for the Game Office, and
Leaderboard resets provide temporal choke points.
Once underway, the game proceeds in weekly cycles, beginning on Sunday evenings. At
the start of each week, the Weekly Leaderboard is reset. The top four players who earn
the most points during a given week are declared the “Weekly Winners.” Weekly Winners
receive special mentorship experiences and access to industry events, which typically
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take place during the following week. This weekly points competition enables new
players to join in and compete on a level playing field regardless of how long the game
has been running for prior to their induction. In the absence of weekly point resets, early
adopters of the game would gain an unfair points advantage over players who join in later
phases, resulting in a sharp drop off in player induction in the mid-game and beyond. In
the 2011 version of the game, many of the students who did not get involved in the game,
or who were only minimally involved, reported not knowing about these weekly points
resets. As a result, these students felt like it was “too late” to get involved in the game
after it had begun. In future iterations of the game, communications will be designed to
ensure that potential players understand that they can drop in and drop out of the game at
any time.
Weekly cycles also establish a narrative rhythm for the game. Player activity naturally
ramps up to a climax as the end of each week approaches. Narrative emerges out of these
climax moments, as players or player groups may “come out of nowhere” to win a week,
or “fall to the wayside” as other groups rise to prominence--among many other possible
outcomes.
Since the game is designed as a persistent activity, the experience does not inherently
move toward a conclusion. In the test implementation, a conclusion was imposed on the
experience by the Game Runners. The test implementation was played for 122 days, from
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August to December of 2011. In early October of 2011, players were notified via word-
of-mouth that the experience would conclude on or around December 10, 2011.
This assignation of an endpoint serves two purposes. First, it applies a limit to the labor
and material expenses required to run the game. This limit is necessary because of the
funding model of the test implementation, which, as mentioned elsewhere, is paid for
with tuition dollars and foundation monies. Future iterations of the game system targeted
at broader audiences may decouple from institutional education altogether and monetize
through licensing, the sale of CCG cards, and advertising, making the game profitable
and therefore capable of running for significantly longer periods.
A second reason for the assignation of an endpoint is that doing so produces a narrative
arc for the overall experience, funneling competitive and performative gameplay
activities into a climactic moment.
Looking beyond the financial feasibility and narrative-building utility afforded by a fixed
endpoint, it is possible to imagine a version of the game that can persist indefinitely.
There are two reasons to consider this possibility. First, the core procedures of the game
are not temporally bounded. Like a persistent asynchronous online game such as Words
With Friends or Draw Something, players of Reality Ends Here can play at any time, drop
out of the game at any time, and return to it at any time. Asynchronous games attract
legions of devoted players because of their temporal flexibility and persistence.
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Second, in part due to its capacity for persistence, the workload associated with the
management of the game system diminishes over time. In the early game, Game Runners
must seed interest and engagement in the activity through the deployment of puzzles,
special events, and other rabbit holes. But in the mid- to late-game and beyond, the play
of the game itself increasingly does this work, as the interaction patterns that constitute it
yield interpersonal relationships, sharable and spreadable media artifacts, and other social
and environmental phenomena that serve as player-induction pathways.
3.5 Space
Game space in Reality Ends Here is defined by its hybridity. Play takes place across
multiple contexts and involves multiple modes. Consequently, the game has extremely
blurry spatial boundaries. The game space is defined as the aggregate of all the spaces
that players inhabit during play, from the physical Game Office, to the in-game website,
to social media spaces, to the ad hoc play spaces of the CCG, to the city streets, campus
grounds, dorm hallways, classrooms, and parking garages where players strategize, plan
and create projects, and share knowledge and opinions related to--or inspired by--the
game.
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3.6 Interaction Patterns
During gameplay, players shift between several kinds of interaction with one another and
with the constituent interfaces of the game system. At any point in the game, a given
player may be engaged in multiple modes of interaction simultaneously.
CCG play and website interaction constitute the first level of interaction. Here, players
earn points as individuals and advance on the game’s Leaderboard either by producing
media artifacts or by posting status updates and other content to the game website. This
action involves cooperation with self-selected collaborative partners and multilateral
competition against the rest of the player population for weekly leader positions. It is
important to note that CCG play in particular is not limited to competition, but rather
consists of multiple overlapping modes of interactivity. For example, acquiring additional
cards through trade, barter, or subterfuge involves varying degrees of competition and
cooperation depending on the kinds of strategies players invent in response to the
resource system. Further, using the cards to produce prompts and create media artifacts
typically involves cooperation or team play among subsets of the overall player
population. An exception can be found in the case of the “lone wolf” player, although the
resource system precludes this as a winning strategy insofar as the solitary player will
quickly exhaust their supply of cards.
A second level of interactivity emerges around the acquisition and management of
information about the game itself--including knowledge of game-related special events,
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“easter eggs”, exploits, and bonuses. On this level, players alternate between competition
and cooperation as they decide whether and how to share these information resources or
capitalize on their scarcity. The degree to which these interaction patterns occur largely
depends on individual play styles and is not enforced by the rules of the game. However,
since the pace, mode, and tone of the initial dissemination of this information is under the
control of the Game Runners, it is possible to correct for undesirable interaction patterns,
or to stimulate the emergence of desirable ones.
A third level of interactivity emerges as a consequence of the game’s imbrication in social
media and the other spaces which constitute the lived environment of its players. Here,
players cooperate and compete to develop various forms of social capital. Such
cooperation and competition is inherent to any assemblage of human beings. However,
the game serves as a guide and accelerant to this process, as its core procedures present
the player population with previously unavailable vectors for peer discovery, creative and
intellectual exploration, and identity construction.
3.7 First Contact Campaign
First contact with players is initiated via a “stealth marketing” campaign (the “First
Contact Campaign”) deployed in the months and weeks preceding the beginning of the
experience. As students arrive on campus, digital assets are distributed online, and
physical assets are deployed on school grounds, to guide early adopter players toward
induction at the Game Office. As the game proceeds, player activity itself becomes a
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means of transmitting knowledge about the existence of the game, gradually eliminating
much of the need for marketing actions. In this sense, the First Contact Campaign is a
method for setting the stage for network effects to occur in the player population (see
“Cycle of Play”). As induction rates level out, non-participating students are identified by
cross-referencing game registration tables and student rolls. Efforts are then made to
present the game to these potential players within the tonal constraints of the game
identity system.
In the test implementation, the initial stealth marketing campaign consisted of materials
inserted into orientation packets, a website, “sock puppet” Facebook profiles, and a series
of email communications. The objective of the campaign was to develop a degree of
awareness and self-directed investigative activity among incoming freshmen regarding
the presence of an anomaly or mystery within the broader context of the student careers
into which they were about to enter. The game itself and its core procedures were not
mentioned whatsoever. Further, the campaign was not designed to saturate the incoming
student population. Rather, information was supplied in extremely limited quantities.
Underwriting this strategy is the notion that the values of certain kinds of information--
particularly information which regards the future--increase in direct proportion to
scarcity. John Perry Barlow, speaking to the range of possible relationships between
information and value in “The Economy of Ideas,” writes:
Exclusive possession of certain facts makes them more useful. If everyone knows
about conditions which might drive a stock price up, the information is
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valueless. . . [The] critical factor is usually time. It doesn't matter if this kind of
information eventually becomes ubiquitous. What matters is being among the first
who possess it and act on it. While potent secrets usually don't stay secret, they
may remain so long enough to advance the cause of their original holders.
From the moment they accept admission, incoming freshmen at the SCA are showered
with information about the school, their home Division, the broader USC community, and
official USC/SCA extracurricular programs. Such information is almost always presented
in a comprehensive and transparent manner, and in accordance with strict institutional
branding guidelines. This mode of presentation has two consequences in terms of the
incoming student information economy:
First, information presented in this manner carries with it the implication of ubiquity--an
implication that is made explicit during orientation sessions, wherein attending freshmen
can observe other members of their cohort hearing the same speeches and receiving
identical information packets. While the perceived importance of individual information
artifacts presented in this manner may vary based on degrees of interest present in the
population (among other factors), the ubiquity of the information as a whole has a
normalizing effect. Even in the case of information which is de-emphasized or otherwise
occupies a relatively small proportion of the total information shared via orientation
sessions and packets, a qualitatively different kind of scarcity remains absent--that is, the
scarcity of a thing being completely unavailable, difficult to find, or only available to a
few. First contact communications regarding the game synthesize these kinds of scarcity
to confer special importance upon early-stage game-related information.
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Second, insofar as conventional orientation materials are designed to clearly define
available resources and opportunities such that students can conduct personal cost/benefit
analyses in apportioning their time across a wide array of competing curricular and extra-
curricular activities, they leave little to the imagination. While this practice undoubtedly
serves a worthy purpose in terms of equitably distributing vital information to incoming
students, it nevertheless has the effect of muting the degree to which the presented
materials can activate the agencies of potential players. By virtue of its emphasis on
comprehensibility and transparency--and its general adherence to the brand identity and
other sanctioned fictions of the institution--traditional orientation material answers more
questions than it asks. Put simply, it lacks in intrigue. To paraphrase Skeletor
impersonator Donald Rumsfeld, a known quantity is a known quantity, and an unknown
quantity is an unknown quantity. An unknown quantity is either zero or non-zero; that is,
it could be nothing, or anything. It is the unknown that stimulates our imagination, and it
is our imagination that drives our agency. The world that “could be” holds more promise
than the world that “is.” For these reasons, withholding information or providing
ambiguous or incomplete information can often be an effective method for initiating
participatory activity.
In sum, while traditional orientation materials have a clear use value, they are typically
not designed to maximize their potential as objects of curiosity. In the test
implementation, official orientation materials thus constitute a baseline for information
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artifacts in the incoming student information economy. Early game-related
communications seek to exceed this baseline through scarcity and ambiguity, thereby
attracting the interest of early adopter players.
In June of 2011, postcards containing the phrase, “CARRY YOUR CARDS WITH YOU
AT ALL TIMES,” were inserted at random into a third of the orientation packets
distributed to students. At the bottom of each postcard was a URL leading to a website
consisting exclusively of a black background and a countdown timer widget. The
countdown end date was the first day of the Fall 2011 semester at USC. On the obverse
of each postcard were photographs of varying vintage: a candid picture of Mary Pickford
with her dog, probably from the early 1930s; a deserted suburban street from the 1970s,
the colors faded; a strange editorial montage of empty classrooms from the 1940s; and so
on. This was the full extent of the contents of the postcards.
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Figure 25: First contact campaign postcards.
This ambiguous and sparsely-distributed information would be worthless from the point
of view of incoming freshmen were it not for its referencing of a specific date (August
22nd, 2011 [check]), a URL pointing to a usc.edu subdomain, and an associated protocol
(“CARRY YOUR CARDS WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES”). This content communicates
four important points: first, that the postcard refers to something that will occur in the
future; second, that this future event is somehow affiliated with the University of
Southern California (albeit in an ambiguous and anomalous way); third, that cards of
some sort are involved in this event, and that carrying them at “all times” is somehow
important--an unusual requirement in any context, and perhaps more so in the world of
post-secondary education; and fourth, that the exact details of this event, including the
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consequences for not observing the exhortation regarding carrying cards, are being
intentionally concealed.
For the roughly one-third of incoming students who receive these postcards, their
relationship with the game thus begins with a question. Without further investigation, it is
impossible for them to know exactly what benefit is on offer and by which methods that
benefit--if it indeed exists--may be gained. In this sense, the postcards present actionable
information regarding the future.
The practice of offering potential players limited access to ambiguous information that
requires agency to render sensible (and which, once rendered sensible, yields new and
even more ambiguous information requiring agency to interpret, and so on--) runs
through the entirety of the experience. However, it is important to note that the primary
objective of this communications posture is to draw players toward induction into the
game proper. This process entails the kinds of transmedia storytelling and puzzle crafting
described here in order to mediate the entry of early-adopter players into the world of the
game. But, as is discussed elsewhere in this document, as the game becomes more
populated, this storytelling becomes increasingly less necessary. Through the play of the
CCG, players meet one another, share ideas, collaborate (or don’t), and produce media
artifacts across a multitude of platforms and contexts. These interactions constitute the
ultimate “story” or spectacle of the game, and serve to draw in the bulk of the player
population.
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Many early implementations of alternate reality games in commercial and social impact
contexts rely exclusively on transmedia storytelling and puzzles. These games can create
tight-knit communities of players and collective intelligence outcomes, but require
enormous resources to sustain, and are often focused more on the creativity of the
designers than the players. Such implementations suffer from numerous problems related
to player induction, synchronous participation, community persistence, and sustainability.
A detailed discussion of these issues can be found in Chapter One of this document.
In the 2011 test implementation, stealth marketing was adopted as a strategy in part
because it was possible to maintain total secrecy about the nature of the experience in
advance of students arriving on campus. For future iterations of the game, played either at
USC or elsewhere, this will not always be possible, as press coverage about the game and
documents such as this one may be easily discovered by potential players. However, the
existence of foreknowledge of the game does not negate the praxis of stealth marketing,
particularly as it regards the induction of early adopters. For these players, the existence
of a curated intrigue of any sort is the fundamental draw. Their engagement in parsing
that intrigue--and their subsequent engagement in the game proper--is what is most
important, as they will lead the way for other students in discovering and engaging with
the experience.
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Figure 26: Clue card and player-submitted response. In the early phases of the game, clues were hidden in
Super-8 cameras on campus. The first group of players to decode these clues (L) answered in kind by
emailing a response (R) to one of the in-game email addresses using the same cryptographic technique.
3.8 Induction
Induction begins once a potential player has found out about the game and attends the
Game Office. Upon arriving at the Game Office, potential players are presented with a
series of choices which result in the receipt of a customized packet of CCG cards. This
process is administered by Game Runners. Before leaving the Game Office, new players
must provide their email address to the Game Runners. Game Runners then use this email
address to create a player accounts on the game website. Upon account creation, login
information is automatically emailed to the new players. On first login, players must
agree to an “Oath” of creative fearlessness, experimentation--and safety. Once logged in,
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may participate in Bullpen discussions, comment on the work of other players, share
photos, and submit projects.
In the test implementation, the Game Office is located on the second floor of the
Spielberg Building at the SCA. The office is marked with a simple sign reading “Game
Office.” During normal operating hours, the door to the office is kept closed. A small
post-it note bearing the words, “Knock, Knock,” and the game logo is placed near the
handle. During the early phases of the experience, the Game Office is open Monday to
Friday from 10am until 5pm in order to facilitate induction. As the game proceeds, office
hours scale back to three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday).
The location of the Game Office was partly determined by the limited availability of
office space at the SCA. In 2013, the Interactive Media Division (IMD), Institute for
Multimedia Literacy (IML), and Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice PhD program
(IMAP) will relocate to a new building. However, during the 2011 test implementation,
these units of the SCA were located in separate buildings. The IMD occupied half of the
second floor of the Spielberg building, while IMAP and the IML were located at a six
block remove from the main USC campus. Because these three units were those which
were most closely associated with the execution of the game, the logistical challenge of
securing a space for the Game Office fell to them. Since all incoming freshmen at the
SCA regularly attend classes at the Spielberg building, the IMD was asked to provide a
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vacant office. This office, SCA 201, was graciously vacated by Professor Andreas Kratky
to make room for the game.
Figure 27: Students arriving for induction at the Game Office, August, 2011.
The interior of the game office contains a desk for Game Runners, a small seating area, a
staging area for laying out cards, and a “Justification Booth” consisting of a simple
lighting system and a webcam. The space is decorated with artifacts borrowed from
Professor Steve Anderson, Professor Jed Dannenbaum, Professor Perry Hoberman, and
the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Picture Archive. These artifacts, which include vintage film
production and editing equipment, board games, vinyl records, color blindness charts,
cans of 16mm and 35mm film, and an assortment of posters, link the space to the history
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of media arts. In the first week of the 2011 test implementation, a password was required
to gain entry to the Game Office. This password (“Harryhausen,” a reference to legendary
animator and SCA alumnus Ray Harryhausen) was a component of the First Contact
campaign designed to attract early adopter players (see “First Contact”). As the
experience proceeded and knowledge of the game approached universality, the
requirement of a password was rescinded.
Once inside the Game Office, new players meet the Game Runners, who introduce
themselves as “employees of the Reality Committee” in accordance with the game’s
narrative framework. Although the Game Runners in the 2011 implementation were
primarily constituted by the design team, efforts were made to make it appear to players
that they were merely graduate students who had been tasked with staffing the Game
Office. This tactic helped to reinforce the overarching narrative framework of the game,
which posited the existence of a secret SCA organization that was pulling the strings from
behind the scenes (see “Narrative Framework”).
Following these brief introductions, the Game Runners then lay out a 5x2 matrix of
green, or “Maker,” CCG cards. Half of these cards are laid out face-down, and the other
half are laid out face-up. New players are then instructed to select two cards from the
matrix, one from the face-down row, and one from the face-up row. If they inquire, new
players are simply told that the cards they pick will impact their initial set of options in
the game. However, a brief examination of these Maker cards usually reveals to players
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their basic function in the game--that is, to state particular forms of media-making
activities.
After selecting two Maker cards, new players receive a small kraft envelope containing
eight semi-randomly selected pink “Property” cards an instruction card. Some packets
will also contain a blue “Special” card. The precise contents and ratios of these cards and
card packets is detailed in the section entitled, “Collectible Card Game.” Many players
will want to know how the cards work right away. Depending on available time and how
busy the Game Office is, Game Runners may choose to briefly explain the game, or may
refer players to the website.
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Figure 28: Card packet (#3 Coin Envelope containing CCG cards and instructions).
New players conclude their first visit to the Game Office by giving their names and email
addresses to the Game Runners. They are then informed that they can expect to receive
an email from the system containing website login information within the next few
minutes. An ink stamp on the obverse of the card packet contains the URL of the website,
as well as the phrase, “CARRY YOUR CARDS WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES.” Finally,
before players depart, Game Runners indicate to them that participation in the game will
lead to “strange and unusual experiences.” Depending on the stage of the game and the
character of the interaction between individual Game Runners and new players,
additional hints about “meeting interesting people” or “doing interesting things” may be
provided. However, as with the First Contact campaign, and for much the same rationale,
the information provided is intentionally ambiguous.
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After leaving the Game Office, players receive login information enabling them to
connect to the game website. For the test implementation, the system was configured to
detect if a given user was logging in for the first time, and if so, to prevent them from
viewing the website until they agreed to the following “Oath”:
In the course of making projects, I will not do anything that involves guns, fire,
rooftops, high windows, moving cars, the ocean, trespassing, live animals, or
anything else that reasonable people could construe as stupid, dangerous, or
illegal; I will not draw negative attention to myself or my team, especially if I find
myself in a public place; and I will always err on the side of caution when it
comes to safety and legality while playing the game or participating in any of its
events, encounters, evenings out, screenings, or adventures.
That said, I will shake things up. I will jump in with both feet. I will not be afraid
to make risky creative choices. I will prefer the interesting failure to the polished
imitation, the slapped-together discovery to the perfectly-executed retread. I will
not take myself or this game too seriously, but I will recognize that everything we
do here is important. (Watson, Reality Ends Here)
This Oath served two purposes. First, agreeing to the Oath provided the SCA with a
degree of inoculation against liability. In the official SCA curriculum, safety training for
incoming production students takes place through a series of seminars spread out over the
first two semesters of the freshmen year. For the test implementation, crucial elements of
this training needed to occur prior to the arrival of students on campus. In concert with
the “60 Seconds to Safety” video released during the First Contact campaign, the Oath
ensured that players were aware of critical safety issues involved with DIY media
making. By making it impossible for players to sign on without agreeing to the Oath, a
paper trail was created, providing a modicum of legal cover for the University should an
incident occur.
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The necessity of creating this paper trail presents an opportunity to further mediate the
initial interactions players have with the game. In the Oath, players are asked not only to
swear to avoid making projects that involve guns, heights, and “anything else that
reasonable people could construe as stupid, dangerous, or illegal,” but also to push
themselves creatively and as individuals. This exhortation, delivered in the polemical
revolutionary tone of the Reality Committee, frames the game not only as a competition,
but as an opportunity to experiment, discover, and productively fail. In contrast to the
progressively professionalized modes of production that many incoming students will
engage in as their careers at the SCA continue, the Oath presents the game a space for
rapid prototyping, sketching, and boundary-pushing.
Finally, the Oath alludes to “events, encounters, evenings out, screenings, [and]
adventures.” For many players, this is the first indication of specific rewards associated
with engagement (beyond the intrinsic rewards suggested by the Oath’s appeal to creative
experimentation). Discovering precisely what is meant by this allusion thus becomes an
additional motivation for early engagement, jump-starting the core play cycle of the
game.
3.9 Collectible Card Game (CCG)
CCG play unfolds asynchronously as players acquire cards, combine cards to generate
creative prompts, produce media artifacts based on those prompts, submit the artifacts to
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the game website, and score points. In addition to this connectivity mechanic, the obverse
(or “collectible side”) of each card contains a collectible item related to the history and
theory of media making.
Figure 29: A selection of CCG cards from Reality Ends Here.
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Figure 30: Sample CCG card. At left: obverse (or “collectible”) card face; at right, “playable” card face.
3.9.1 Objective
The objective of the CCG is to acquire and combine cards in order to a) generate creative
prompts, and b) create media artifacts based on those prompts. By submitting completed
media artifacts (or “Deals”) to the game website, players earn points which can unlock
mentorship experiences.
3.9.2 Acquiring Cards
Upon signing up for the game (see “Induction”), all players receive a “Starter Pack”
containing 10 semi-randomly-selected cards. Each pack includes at least one of each type
of card, including 2 Maker Cards, 6 Property Cards, 1 People Card, and 1 Instructions
Card. Some packs may also include 1 Special Card. Further discussion of the process by
which these cards are selected, and rationale underlying the ratios of cards included in the
Starter Pack, can be found in the section titled, “Card Packet Ratios.”
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Additional cards can acquired through trade or barter, by discovering hidden caches of
cards left by Game Runners at various sites across the campus, through encounters with
visiting mentors and faculty, or by crossing a series of points thresholds in the game.
3.9.3 Combining Cards
By combining cards, players generate creative prompts known as “Deals.” A connectivity
mechanic constrains the ways in which Deals may be assembled. Generally speaking, the
more cards a player or player group can connect into a given Deal, the more that Deal
will be worth in points.
Each card in the system contains at least one connection point. These connection points
have two graphic elements which describe how they may be used to connect one card to
another. The first element is color. For a connection to be valid, at least one of the colors
on each side of the connection must match. The second element is arrow direction. For a
connection to be valid, the direction of the arrows must be the same on either side of the
connection, establishing “inbound” and “outbound” connection points. By matching color
and arrow direction across connection points, cards may be connected together.
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Figure 31: A minimally-valid card combination. Note matching color and arrow direction at connection
point. This combination yields the prompt, “Make a Silent Short in the SCA Courtyard.”
At minimum, a Deal must have 1 green Maker card and at least 1 pink Property card in
order to be valid. Maker cards specify the kind of media artifact players must create, and
Property cards specify themes and other elements that must be present in the finished
project. No Deal may have more than 1 Maker card. An example of a minimally-valid
Deal can be seen in Figure 31. Here, a “Silent Short” Maker card is combined with an “In
the SCA Courtyard” Property card, yielding the prompt, “Make a Silent Short in the SCA
Courtyard.” An example of a Deal that employs more than 1 property card can be seen in
Figure 32.
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Figure 32: Deal containing two Property cards. This combination yields the prompt, “Make a Silent Short
about Greed in the SCA Courtyard.”
Players can make increasingly complex and high-scoring prompts by connecting
additional Property cards to a Deal, depending on the availability of open connection
points. This procedure is constrained by the variable number of connection points present
on Property cards. For example, in Figure 32, a “Silent Short” Maker card is combined
with two Property cards, yielding the prompt, “Make a Silent Short about Greed in the
SCA Courtyard.”
Two other kinds of cards can also be integrated into a Deal: blue Special cards, and
orange People cards. Special cards describe global constraints that affect prompts in a
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variety of unusual ways. For example, the “Indivisible” Special card indicates that
players must collaborate on the Deal with other players from at least four of the Divisions
of the SCA. Another Special card, the “Mirror World” card, indicates that players must
invert or reverse the meanings of all the other cards contained in the Deal. Special cards
are not only rare in number in the deck, but are also difficult to integrate into a Deal
because they require an available blue connector point.
In the test implementation, People cards contain the names of freshman students. These
cards were generated using a complete list of the incoming freshman cohort, resulting in
each student in the cohort having a unique People card in the CCG. By incorporating a
People card into a Deal, players earn bonus points if and only if they work with the
person specified on the card to complete the project. The color, arrow direction, and
positioning of connection points on People cards allows them connect exclusively to the
left side of Maker cards, or to each other. In addition to preventing People cards from
being used to increase the number of available connections in the prompt matrix, this
connectivity also allows an unlimited number of People cards to be added to a Deal--so
long as the resulting project involves the participation of all those who are named on the
cards.
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Figure 33: Card-based procedural prompting system. In this example, all available connection points are
used. The prompt this Deal yields approximates to: “Make a Silent Short about Greed involving Breaking a
Rule, a Bicycle, Somebody Waiting, An Unwitting Pawn, and a Love Triangle; featuring a Tramp; taking
place in The SCA Courtyard; constituting a part of a Shared Universe; and in partnership with Jane
Student.”
3.9.4 Connectivity Schema
The degree of connectivity present on a given Property card is loosely mapped to the
conceptual complexity of the element described on the card. For example, the “Love”
property card contains 3 outbound connection points, while the “Involving a Bicycle”
card contains none. There are two reasons for this mapping. First, the more outbound
connection points a given card has, the more utility it has in a Deal, since the size of a
Deal is limited by the number of available connection points it contains. The more cards a
player has with outbound connection points, the more options they have in creating
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Deals. Consequently, the more outbound connection points a given card has, the more
inherently valuable it becomes in the play of the CCG. This value is the “game
mechanical value” of the card.
Cards also have “instrumental value”--that is, a value related to their effect on the
creative prompt generated by a given Deal. While any creative media-making endeavor is
ultimately resistant to formula, in general, a theme or point of view typically has a greater
impact on the whole than a single detail. Since the game mechanical value of a card
increases with the number of outbound connectors the card possesses, the instrumental
value of the card within the context of the creative prompt should also increase.
3.9.5 Point System
Players generate Deals through a connectivity-based card mechanic. The point value of a
Deal is determined by the total of the highest point values indicated on the cards used in
the Deal. For example, the cards in Figure 32 have maximum values of 35 (Silent Short)
and 10 (in the SCA Courtyard). The total value of this Deal is thus 45. Cards degrade in
value each time they are used. This degradation is enforced by the punching of holes in
the cards. Holes are punched at the Game Office when the Deal is submitted for
Justification. The highest point value hole is punched first. Once a card has been fully
“punched out,” it can still be used in a Deal, but is not worth any points.
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3.9.6 Card Packet Ratios
To ensure balance within the resource system, starter packs contain precise ratios of
cards, as follows:
• 2 Maker cards - During induction, 2 Maker cards are selected by new players from
a set of 10 randomly-drawn Maker cards. This selection process is intended to
increase the probability that new players begin the game with cards that harmonize
with their existing media-making interests and competencies. For example, an
Animation student may feel more comfortable taking their initial steps into the
game by producing a Flip Book or Animated Short instead of a Video Game. At first
glance, providing students with this choice may seem counter to the
interdisciplinary collaboration mandates of the project; however, once players
engage with the game, they will quickly exhaust the value of the cards in their
starter pack (see “Points System”), necessitating trading and/or partnering with
other players. Further, as the game proceeds, the range of Maker cards available for
trade will shift based on each card’s relative popularity, making it increasingly
difficult to find specific cards. As a result, players will find it necessary to explore
new mediums and practices in order to advance in the game.
• 1 3-out Property card Since “3-out” Property cards are the most “powerful” in the
connectivity system (i.e., they enable the maximum expansion of the size of a
Deal), players only begin with one such card.
• 2 2-out Property cards
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• 3 1-out Property cards
• 1 People card Efforts are made to ensure that players do not receive their own
People card; however, as People cards are placed into packets at random,
occasionally players will receive their own card. In this situation, players find
themselves at an advantage, and become sought-after members for collaborations
with other players, as they will always bring with them a 25 point bonus.
• 1 Instruction card
3.10 Game Identity System
During setup, special attention is paid to maintaining a unified tone and design aesthetic
across all components of the experience. To this end, developing an identity system is
among the first steps to take in preparing the game for launch. This identity system is
constituted by graphic identity materials, a loose narrative framework, and game-specific
nomenclature. Developing each of these elements is a nonlinear iterative process: rather
than producing graphic identity, narrative, and nomenclature in sequence, they are
developed together as an interdependent system. Further, this process has no terminal
point: as the game proceeds, player activity and other outcomes feed back into the game
identity system and shape its ongoing evolution.
The game identity system inflects the production of all material and digital assets for the
game, and also informs the actions of Game Runners and other human agents associated
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with the experience. Further, and perhaps most importantly, it sets the tone for player
participation.
3.10.1 Graphic Identity System
Credit sequences are a relatively under-discussed component of cinematic storytelling.
Nevertheless, they have long had an important role in framing the reception of filmic
narratives. As Will Straw notes in his 2010 paper, “Letters of Introduction: Film Credits
and Cityscapes,” credit sequences function as “liminal zones within the filmic text . . .
performing a necessary mediatory function, organizing the spectator’s passage from an
extratextual to a textual world” (159).
Environmental games rarely have credit sequences. In some cases, ARG designers will
produce online “teaser” trailers intended to serve a somewhat similar purpose. However,
once the game is underway, the passage of players from extratextuality to textuality must
be continually mediated as they move in and out of the experience, particularly in games
with durations in excess of a single day. In environmental games, as in all games, the
graphic design of user interfaces, in-game communications, and other game-related
media artifacts serves a purpose similar to that of the design of typography and graphics
in cinematic credit sequences. The crucial difference is one of time and space. Graphic
design and typography in games permeate the experience as a whole, and therefore bear
significantly more mediatory responsibility than cinematic credit sequences. These
elements do not constitute a sequence, but rather a system: a “graphic identity system.”
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The graphic identity system in the test implementation is used to confer unity and
distinctiveness to all game-related visual communications and to situate the experience in
a network of historical, political, and aesthetic references. This system includes fonts,
color schemes, layout guidelines, stylesheets, templates for each kind of card in the CCG,
and a game logo. For the test implementation, the graphic identity system was developed
in partnership with Matt Manos of A Very Nice Design Studio. Manos was given
extensive information regarding the purpose and nature of the game, and was provided
with a list of logistical constraints, design touchstones, and references. From these
materials, a set of prototypes was derived.
The broadest objective of the graphic identity system is to ensure that all digital and
physical materials associated with the game conform to a unified visual standard. A
cohesive graphic identity system is essential to this process because the production of
game materials often involves multiple designers working independently. For example,
Texas-based media artist Haley Moore was contracted to produce reward and “swag”
items such as medals for overall winners, wristbands for all players, and a set of flags. To
ensure that these objects matched the website, cards, and other game assets, Moore was
provided with a copy of the graphic identity system. Despite being produced with
minimal supervision and at a significant geographic remove from the main design team,
the assets produced by Moore harmonized with the overall look and feel of the project.
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In designing the graphic identity system, emphasis is placed on finding ways to ensure
that game communications and materials appear visually distinct from the “background
noise” of the SCA media environment. Since the game functions as an opt-in experience--
that is, something that students must discover and enter into on their own--it is essential
that it present itself as an object of curiosity. Toward this end, the visual palette of the
game eschews all USC- and SCA-specific branding. Also excised from the visual palette
of the game are ancillary associative design aesthetics that echo or reify traditional USC
messaging--such as the “Hollywood” font, which indirectly references the SCA’s status as
training ground for the US film industry. By maximizing the amount of contrast between
game communications and those of the University and its partners, the graphic identity
system helps to position the game as an anomaly, increasing the likelihood that potential
players will seek out more information.
In addition to providing contrast and generating curiosity, the graphic identity system also
serves to frame the game experience in visual references to milieus that evoke or are
otherwise associated with core game mandates. For example, two of the central impact
goals of Reality Ends Here are to accelerate peer discovery and to inspire creative
experimentation among students at the SCA. To find ways to visually reference these
goals, images and iconography from the history of the SCA were collected from the Hugh
M. Hefner archives in the early phases of game development. Images depicting
community, teamwork, and creative experimentation were isolated. To maintain the
appropriate degree of contrast with official SCA branding, photographs from the
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contemporary era were removed. From the resulting subset of photographs, the period of
1965-1980 was singled out. During this period, the SCA--then known as the USC School
of Cinema-Television--was primarily housed in a building known as “The Stables.” At
the center of The Stables was a communal space which students and faculty referred to as
“The Bullpen.” In the images we found, both Stables and Bullpen appeared as wild and
unruly spaces. Notes accompanying images of the Stables tell stories of students climbing
into the building through the roof during closed nighttime hours in order to meet in the
Bullpen and work on film projects. In one picture, a wrecked Cessna 182 light aircraft
can be seen positioned nose-down in the center of the courtyard, installed there by
students as a stunt to promote their thesis film project.
These photographs became central touchstones in the design process underlying the
development of the graphic identity system, and also substantially informed the narrative
framework and nomenclature of the game as a whole. For example, the game website, as
detailed elsewhere in this document, displays randomly selected images drawn from this
period at the top of all index pages, and a key social feature of the website is named in
honor of the Bullpen. However, following the lead of these images also entailed
connecting with and referencing the broader media culture. To avoid semantic confusion,
any use of or reference to the photographs we had isolated--and the school culture that
they evoked--would have to be grounded in visual references legible to our players, all of
whom were born over twenty years after the demolition of the Stables. It was thus
necessary to develop a set of media associations that could access the kinds of meanings
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we wished to surface from the photographs without relying on deep contextual
knowledge of the history of the SCA.
To identify these media associations, we proceeded laterally from the Stables-era SCA
into a set of cinematic and critical movements characteristic of the period, rejecting any
references that might conflict with our overall game mandates or graphic identity design
objectives. This process initially involved an examination of the global cinematic context
of the Stables-era SCA, beginning with the “post-classical” or “New Hollywood”
American cinema of the 1970s. This fertile period of American narrative cinema was
deeply informed by the filmmaking revolutions that swept Europe during the 1950s and
1960s. Many significant exponents of New Hollywood would emerge out of the USC
School of Cinema-Television. In order to reference this relationship while maintaining
contrast between the graphic identity of the game and the Hollywood-centric graphic
identity of the SCA as a whole, we looked to the bold typographical elements present in
the credit sequences of films of the French New Wave, particularly those of Jean-Luc
Godard. The layout strategies on view in the credit sequences of films like Pierrot le fou,
Alphaville, and Weekend entered into the culture of their time as signals of Godard’s
(self-consciously self-aggrandizing) willingness to buck tradition and explore new
territory for cinematic storytelling. While these signifiers certainly have altered meanings
today, they nonetheless retain compressed versions of their original disruptive meanings
in their design heritage.
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This approach of identifying media associations between relevant cultural touchstones
and the Stables-era SCA continued through several iterations, yielding an archive of
images and notes. Additionally, a series of prototypes was generated to illustrate how a
hypothetical graphic identity system could be expressed in environments across the
campus. These prototypes centered on the deployment of a single recognizable game logo
that would stand in as a visual reference for the “Reality Committee” -- the secretive and
semi-fictional organization behind the game itself.
Figure 34: Logo implementation prototypes. These prototypes were used to communicate to graphic design
partners the kind of ambient visual experience Reality Ends Here was intended to create.
These prototypes, along with the archive of images and notes regarding SCA history and
relevant media associations were provided to graphic designer Matt Manos. Manos then
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produced a series of prototypes which were presented as PDFs to the game design team.
These prototypes were evaluated in terms of their ability to meet the overarching
objectives of the game identity system. After a series of consultations, the final version of
the graphic identity system was delivered as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign files, along
with a font suitcase.
3.11 Website
The website for Reality Ends Here provides players with a means for uploading, sharing,
and discussing Deals, socializing, posting blog entries, and keeping track of their scores.
This website is a custom WordPress install employing multiple original and third-party
plugins. Core plugins include a highly “remixed” version of BuddyPress, which enables
social networking and player profile features; Gravity Forms, which enables content
uploading; a modified version of CubePoints, which enables the tracking of points and
display of leaderboards; and GD Star Rating, which enables the rating of individual
Deals. Additional functionality was added using custom PHP and JavaScript scripts. The
templates and stylesheets for the site were built using the Blueprint CSS Framework.
Readers who would like to gain access to the software package developed for Reality
Ends Here are invited to contact the author directly.
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Figure 35: Player profile. Each player’s profile displays their points total, a list of all the Deals they have
submitted, a data visualization representing the kinds of projects they have created, a collection of “award”
badges earned by crossing certain point thresholds, and a user-submitted avatar image. Each profile also
has a special messaging system for direct player-to-player communications.
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Figure 36: The Bullpen. The Bullpen allows users to post status updates and participate in threaded
discussions. The sidebar displays the most recently-submitted Deals. This image from the Bullpen was
captured in June of 2012.
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Figure 37: Members directory. The members directory allows players to search for other players by name
or keyword. The page defaults to display the 10 most recently logged-in players. This image was captured
in June of 2012.
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Figure 38: Deal archive. The Deal archive lists all Deals which have been submitted and Justified,
displaying the most recent Deals first. Metadata for each Deal is also included in the list. The sidebar
displays the most recent comments made on Deals.
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Figure 39: Deal page, part 1. The top half of the page for each Deal contains a photograph of the cards used
to generate the prompt for the project, a list of the players involved, a rating tool, and the media artifact(s)
themselves.
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Figure 40: Deal page, part 2. The bottom half of the page for each Deal contains social media sharing
buttons, a video Justification of the project, a clickable matrix of cards used, a comment area, and links to
other Deals.
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Figure 41: Submission tool. Each Maker card in the system has its own submission page, accessed via the
Card Lookup feature. To submit a Deal, players enter the title, a log line, the documentation of the project,
a list of collaborators, and a list of cards used. Once submitted, the Deal is ready for publication; however,
players must come to the Game Office to Justify the Deal before it goes live.
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Figure 42: Card page. Each card has its own page which displays a picture of the front and back of the card.
Each card page also has a list of all the Deals that the card has been used in, and a comments area where
players can discuss the content on the card.
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Figure 43: Photoblog. Players can submit photos and brief blog posts to the site through the Photoblog.
New photos appear inline in the Bullpen as they are submitted. The sidebar of the Photoblog displays
additional information, including the avatars of recently-active members.
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Chapter 4: Reflections
4.1 Impact Analysis
In terms of raw numbers, Reality Ends Here largely exceeded our expectations. 109 of the
140 students in the freshman cohort (77%) registered for the game, along with 73 players
from other cohorts or from beyond the SCA. A total of 122 Deals were submitted
(although only 119 were "Justified"), encompassing 48 of the 57 available kinds of media
artifacts specified on "Maker cards." An average of 8 Deals were submitted and Justified
per week, with the median group for each Deal consisting of 8 collaborators. Almost all
Deals represented some kind of collaboration: only 1 Deal was submitted that had a
solitary creator. 75 players earned at least 1000 points in the game system through online
participation and Deal submission; 51 earned more than 2500 points; and 27 earned more
than 10000 points.
45
Online activity produced by the player population included 4762
posts on the Bullpen, 1426 comments on card and Deal pages, 300 Photoblog posts, over
800 tweets, and numerous independently-organized Facebook groups.
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45
Our initial projections were that few if any players would earn more than 2000 points; indeed, we only created point-
related ranks for players up to the 2000 point level. As the game went on, we needed to invent new rankings to keep up
with the frantic energy of the players.
Figure 44: Divisional participation chart. Statistical analysis prepared by Benjamin Stokes.
Disciplinary Focus
(declared major)
% of sample
with known
department
% of freshman
class by roster
Difference Average Points-
per-Person
(group average =
5.3 k)
Animation/Digital
Arts
8% 13% -5% 4.1 k (-1.2 k)
Critical Studies 12% 20% -8% 3.9 k (-1.4 k)
Production for
Film and TV
35% 32% +3% 7.6 k (+2.3 k)
Interactive Media 17% 12% +5% 5.0 k (-0.3 k)
Writing for Screen
and TV
29% 23% +6% 5.9 k (+.06 k)
A quantitative analysis of Reality Ends Here, conducted by Benjamin Stokes in an
unpublished paper entitled “Gaming to Cross Disciplines,” reveals more nuance. In terms
of engagement across the five undergraduate Divisions of the SCA, Stokes' analysis
shows that while participation was closely mapped to the relative size of each Division,
Animation and Critical Studies students were underrepresented by 5 and 8 percent
respectively (while Writing, Production, and Interactive Media students were
overrepresented by 6, 3, and 5 percent). In the case of Critical Studies, this
underrepresentation reflects the bias in game mechanics toward "maker" activities. Such
activities may be too far outside of the comfort zones of some incoming Critical Studies
students; in future iterations of the game, efforts will be made to streamline entry into the
practice of making for students such as these, as discussed below. The case of Animation
students is somewhat more complex. In contrast to students in the other Divisions,
Animation students take practice-oriented courses in their first semester. While several
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Animation students realized that projects created as coursework could be submitted to the
game and did so, this option was not expressed clearly enough in induction
communications. That is, many students did not know until the mid-game or beyond that
work created for a class could be submitted to the game if it was based on a prompt
created by the collectible card game. Further, due to the relatively labor-intensive nature
of animation, there was less incentive in the points system to create animated projects --
they simply took too long to produce to compete with the more rapid turnaround possible
in live-action filmmaking or even game design. By improving communications and
making animated projects worth more points in the game system, future iterations may be
able to draw in additional students from the Animation Division.
The question of "who gets to play?" is especially important in the design of
environmental games. Because these kinds of games can create disruptive spectacles in
lived environments, designers need to be as attentive as possible to who gets to be a part
of the spectacle, and who doesn't. As Mary Flanagan notes in Critical Play, this is a
question that needs to be asked of many kinds of performance-oriented games played in
public space:
[Questions] that applied to Situationist efforts must also be asked of locative
games: Who has time to engage in "alternate playgrounds?" Who has the freedom
to explore those urban spaces in which designers should "create new sandboxes in
the metropolis" and promote playful encounters? Some artists and designers
certainly have answered the call to create such works . . . but objectively
speaking, their efforts may need to better address real-world disparities. (200)
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One perspective to consider these kinds of questions from is that of gender. According to
Stokes' analysis, 67% of the players of Reality Ends Here were male. The actual gender
balance of the SCA is 60/40 male/female, meaning that the game skewed toward male
participation. Further, men were slightly more likely to collaborate with other men than
they were to collaborate with women. Upending the masculine spectacle of the SCA is
certainly a difficult challenge given the existing imbalance, but additional work can be
done to make the game mirror or exceed the existing male/female ratio in terms of the
participation of women. One solution is to put more energy into directly reaching out to
female potential players during the induction phase of the game. As was observed
throughout the player population in the 2011 implementation, participation in the game
was often linked to dormitory roommates: that is, if one roommate played the game, the
other was likely to play as well. By targeting female potential players with direct
communications, we can increase the likelihood that they will spread the practice of the
game through their (same-sex) dormitory relationships.
Despite this statistical gender imbalance, it should be noted that women played a central
role in the spectacle of the 2011 implementation of Reality Ends Here. Indeed, in many
respects, the women who participated in the game were among the most active and
aggressive of all players. The most productive and winningest group in the early phase of
the game (team "MARRA") was largely constituted by women. 3 of the top 4 players
who earned the most points through online activities (posting to the Bullpen, commenting
on Deals, and so on) were female. Other prominent women included the third place
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overall winner (who participated in a whopping 42 Deal submissions), the most active
interdivisional social convener among the player population, and the widely-agreed-upon
"best cinematographer" in the game.
While there is a degree of economic uniformity among the incoming undergraduates at
the SCA, it should be noted that not all players have the same pools of resources from
which to draw. For example, several players lived off-campus, either in apartments or
with their families. These players were at a distinct disadvantage when compared to
players who lived in dormitories, as they would have to commute to campus--or have
others commute to their location--in order to participate in collaborative actions. To a
certain extent, these players were able to participate through the game's website, but
insofar as much of the creative collaboration which took place in the game occurred in
the evenings at and around on-campus dormitories, players who did not live on campus
were at least partially cut out of the experience. Further, many of the most active players
had sophisticated and expensive computer and camera equipment. One student even had
access to a smoke machine and a fully-functional Tesla coil, both of which were used to
spectacular effect in the creation of Deals.
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Figure 45: A student’s Tesla coil in action. From the Deal, Intelligent Design.
Although it is difficult imagine a way of completely erasing these kinds of economic and
geographic imbalances, more needs to be done to mitigate their effects. One solution to
the question of economic imbalance involves the introduction of special Maker cards
which restrict players from using anything but near-ubiquitous technologies such as cell
phone cameras. Such cards can help level the playing field for students who do not have
high-end DSLRs or other expensive pieces of technology. A possible solution to the
geography problem is to introduce more methods of meaningful remote participation
beyond the posting of comments or photos to the game website. For the 2012 iteration of
the game, a system is being developed to allow players to score points by issuing a
special kind of creative prompt that exists only on the website. Players will earn points
based on the number of other players who choose to tackle these prompts, as well as for
posting the prompts.
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The more accessible an environmental game becomes, the less likely it is to amplify pre-
existing divisions and hierarchies in its target population. However, optimizing only for
accessibility can sometimes undermine the fun of a game. For example, the mystery and
confusion surrounding the initial appearance of the game, and the relative difficulty of the
challenge it presented to players, were key drivers of interest for many participants.
Making a game too easy to access or too easy to play can detract from the pleasures of
discovery and mastery that it can offer. It is thus necessary to strike a kind of balance: on
the one hand, the game needs to be widely discoverable and accessible so as to produce a
maximally democratic (as opposed to "oligarchic") kind of spectacle. On the other hand,
the game needs to offer a real challenge, both in terms of how it is discovered, and how it
is played.
Among students that did not fully engage with the game a common complaint was that it
was difficult to find collaborative partners after the initial wave of players had joined.
While some active players collaborated freely with a wide range of other players--the top
collaborator, for example, worked with a total of 77 other players over the course of the
game--there were also players that chose to only work within relatively tight subset of the
overall population.
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Figure 46: Data visualization of player clusters. Red circles represent players. Blue squares represent
completed Deals. The hyperconnected concentrations of players are the two dominant groups from the 2011
iteration of the game (MARRA and The Tribe). Visualization courtesy Benjamin Stokes.
Further, while it is impressive to note that 60 players worked with more than 30
collaborators each over the course of the game, these numbers are not always reflective
of true practice-based collaboration. Many players listed as collaborators on individual
Deals did not in fact participate in the making of the Deal, but rather simply provided
their cards as a kind of "investment" in return for being credited. While this indicates that
a social interaction took place, it does not always map to an actual practical media-
making experience.
Additionally, in many cases, the players who created a given Deal constituted a tight
group of 8 or less students. These groups often stayed together from Deal to Deal and
took on unique branded identities in the manner of professional production companies.
Some of these groups even produced elaborate logo and graphic identity systems to brand
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their work. As the game went on, these kinds of group arrangements made it increasingly
difficult for new players to find collaborative partners who were not already a part of a
working group. What was missing was a "free agent" tool that would allow non-affiliated
or outsider players to be connected with other non-affiliated or outsider players so as to
facilitate the formation of new collaborative groups. This tool is being developed for the
2012 iteration of the game.
Figure 47: Group logos: MARRA and The Tribe.
Accessibility issues also relate to questions of learning style. Critical Studies students in
particular may tend to adopt a more reflective mode in their informal learning habits;
such modes are not extensively represented in the game. Further, while the website
provides many opportunities for discussion, it has yet to be optimized to function as a
space for the generation of easily retrievable and expandable critical reflections.
Discussion in the Bullpen and on the comments threads for individual Deals and cards
affords a certain amount of space for criticality, but with a few notable exceptions (such
as the art/commerce debate discussed above), the kinds of communications we observed
in these contexts were much more about socializing, discussing the merits of different
projects, engaging in casual debates about popular media, and sharing technique, than
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they were about deep reflection. To be sure, this activity was a valuable component of the
peer-to-peer learning the game inspired, insofar as it served to license more open
discussion about media-making and activate vectors for students to discover and perform
expertise. Further, the website and its extensions in social media did not capture any
reflections inspired by the game that may have taken place in face-to-face encounters
between students. However, the lower participation rates observed in Critical Studies
students suggests that more can be done within the official game system to provide them
with ways of participating relevant to their learning styles.
To this end, new cards that exist apart from the combinatorial system of the main
collectible card game are proposed for future iterations of the game. These special cards
will invite players to write in-depth reflections on a variety of subjects, providing a venue
for reviewing or critiquing films, games, and other forms of media, among other
possibilities. Another proposed way of addressing this issue is to increase the capacity of
the website to function as a retrievable and amendable knowledge archive. In the 2011
implementation, the website worked much more like Facebook than a wiki. While it
facilitated many kinds of knowledge transmission, performance, and social discovery, its
use of Facebook-style status update threads meant that discussions were ultimately
ephemeral exchanges which would be "buried" by the emergence of fresher discussions.
This problem was exacerbated by our decision to keep the full archive of cards a secret
from the players. This secrecy was intended to keep our players guessing as to what kinds
of cards they might be able to get their hands on over the course of the game. Much as the
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designers of commercial collectible card games release “expansion packs” of special
cards, we wanted to delay the release of many of the more unusual or “powerful” cards in
order to create various kinds of scarcity in the card-trading economy. Consequently, we
removed the master index and search tools for the online card archive. This had the effect
of making it difficult for players to easily browse the often rich discussions that took
place on the pages for individual cards. In future iterations, we will try to solve this
problem by restoring the master index and search functionality to the card archive, and by
keeping our “expansion” card pages offline until the release their physical counterparts to
the players.
It is important to emphasize that providing an opportunity for all students, including those
in Critical Studies, to have hands-on experience of the actual practice of collaborative
media-making is a core objective of Reality Ends Here. While providing players with the
option to engage with the game through critical reflection can be an important way of
inducting students with less practice-oriented learning styles into the system, the ultimate
aim should be to draw all players into the maker activities at the core of the game.
The way these maker activities are structured is of crucial importance. By mapping point
values to the number, kind, and state of collectible cards used in a given Deal, the content
of a completed project can be said to be inseparable from the mechanics of the game.
This intrinsic relationship between collectible card game play and creative expression can
raise alarm bells when it comes to notions of individual artistic agency. Put differently,
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are the creative works generated by the players ultimately determined by the mechanics
of the game more than the players themselves?
In practice, several factors indicate the while the game provided both the motivation to
create and the building blocks for the generation of ideas, it did not overdetermine the
creative output of its players. On one level, this is an issue of mathematics. The potential
combinations of cards number in the tens of millions. Students created Deals using as few
as 2 cards and as many as 70. Further, the content specified on the cards ("About
Betrayal," "Involving a Bicycle," "Featuring a Trickster", and so on) is much less specific
than the content that emerges in a completed Deal. For example, the evocative Deal,
Letters of My Lai, uses carefully-crafted “character artifacts” to tell a Vietnam-era love
story about a journalist, his lover, and a massacre the Army would rather keep a secret.
The cards used for this deal do not mention any of these elements in specific. Of course,
not all Deals were as sophisticated as Letters of My Lai. But even in the case of a Deal
with a very literal mapping of content to cards, it is still up to players to render the
nonlinear prompt they created for the Deal into a coherent whole. Further, as the game
went on, many players began to "reverse engineer" their Deals. That is, players would go
out and create a media project, then find cards (often through a player-run "card bank") to
match in order to submit the project to the game.
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Figure 48: Letters of My Lai. Inset: a photograph of the card combination used as the creative prompt for
Letters of My Lai.
In this and many other senses, the mechanics of the game functioned as a kind of
"MacGuffin" for the main actions of collaboration, peer discovery, knowledge sharing,
and creative expression. It gave students an excuse to have conversations about media
arts, thereby functioning as a kind of icebreaker for peer-to-peer learning. These actions
in turn licensed further such actions, resulting in more discursive openness and
connectivity among freshman students.
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4.1 Contrast: Gamification
Reality Ends Here emerged in a moment of great enthusiasm regarding the transformative
potential of games and game-like systems. In this moment, numerous educators, policy-
makers, activists, and corporations were exploring a variety of ways of using games to
bring about real-world impacts. While much of this exploration engaged with the forms
of simulation and environmental game play discussed elsewhere in this document, a
somewhat disproportionate amount of the interest in this domain in 2011 and early 2012
centered on the practice of “gamification.”
Proponents of gamification loosely define it as a practice which “involves applying game
design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and
engaging” (“Gamification”). Gamification typically involves using badges,
“achievements,” points, and other tracking and visualization methods to provide users
with various kinds of feedback related to real-world activities. Because such feedback
systems are often present in games, their deployment in a real-world context is thus said
to “gamify” that context. Early examples of gamification include the loyalty programs of
airline frequent-flyer cards, geolocative check-in systems such as Foursquare, and the
“karma” points and “level-ups” present in many kinds of online discussion forums. These
and other kinds of gamification present a highly-truncated kind of game: a tracking
system divorced from a play system, with real-world activities, goals, and obstacles
standing in for the artificially-imposed activities, goals, and obstacles that are normally
present in games.
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Player profiling systems, points, badges, ranks, level-ups, and unlocks can be important
parts of game designs, but only insofar as they can serve a feedback function in relation
to instantiations of play. One could argue--as the proponents of gamification will--that by
layering such tracking systems over real life, one transforms life itself into a kind of
game. However, even if this claim is technically true (if only to a limited extent), one
must ask what ends such an operation serves. Does gamification really make life more
playful, opening the doors to new forms of perception and action? Or does it ironically
make life less playful and more regimented? Does it release the imagination, or imprison
it? Independent of the formal distinctions that game developers rightly make between the
hard work of “real” game design and the “just add points” (Bogost, “Gamification is
Bullshit”) mentality of gamification, answering these ethical questions is of prime
importance, especially in light of the rush among policy makers to deploy such methods
in educational and civic engagement contexts.
Consider a product like Nike’s FuelBand exercise bracelet, which uses an accelerometer
and near-field communications to track the physical activities of its users. The “self-
tracking”
46
data collected by this appliance is used to generate a variety of visualizations
and milestones intended to provide the user with persistent feedback about their general
physical activity levels and the number of calories they are burning. Over time, as the
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46
In 2010, an online affiliation known as The Quantified Self (http://quantifiedself.com/) began publishing how-to blog
posts and organizing meetups to discuss the subject of “self knowledge through numbers.” Members of the Quantified
Self seek to track biometric data, location data, social media and web usage, and other metrics in order to reveal the
patterns hidden in the practice of their everyday lives. It is unclear if this tracking is meant to increase or decrease the
level of regimentation in the lives of these individuals.
user becomes more aware of their activity levels, and as they observe themselves in
relation to friends and others who use the product, they can modulate their behavior
toward better physical fitness outcomes. Users set fitness goals and chase after them,
guided by the FuelBand and its visualizations. To use the FuelBand properly is to
conform to its regime of physical fitness. In terms of health outcomes, the FuelBand is
undoubtedly a worthy tool. It is, after all, a kind of trainer.
In this sense, the FuelBand is representative of the manner in which “gamified” systems
add regimentation to the lives of their users. Especially in the case of systems which are
linked to social networking platforms, this regimentation articulates itself through a kind
of “data spectacle,” as the actions of users are reflected back upon them through
visualizations and other representations. These representations in turn can have concrete
impacts on behavior.
It is an open question whether the regimentation produced by data spectacle is as closely
aligned to the stultifying optimization of commodity exchange associated with the
spectacle as described by Debord. Indeed, as the FuelBand illustrates, this kind of
regimentation can in certain contexts have an empowering effect on its users. Simply put,
if training is the objective, gamification can be an appropriate design approach. Well-
crafted products like the FuelBand provide examples of how such systems can be
productively aligned with the purposes of individual subjects.
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Of course, the FuelBand is not free. There is an exchange at play in the use of such
devices, and not only the immediate exchange of purchase. Nike profits from the
FuelBand in myriad ways beyond its hefty sale price. From one perspective, it is possible
to see the entire FuelBand enterprise as an elaborate marketing endeavor: by associating
itself with health and other notions of “corporate social responsibility,”
47
and by
leveraging social media throughout the FuelBand system, Nike communicates a rich
promotional message across multiple and often highly personal channels. Further,
because this message begins its spread through social networks with affluent early tech
adopters, it rapidly reaches broad and deep penetration in its target demographic--all the
while generating increasingly granular intelligence for Nike regarding market dynamics.
None of this exists without the active engagement of “players.” It is brilliant dark
corporate propaganda.
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47
A strategy first embodied in Nike’s seminal “Just Do It” campaign--and now in its gamified version: “Life is a sport.
Make it count.”
Figure 49: Nike FuelBand Homepage. “Game on, world.” Retrieved 30 June 2012.
Coincident to the development of Reality Ends Here, a team of researchers and designers
funded by Microsoft and based at the Rochester Institute of Technology developed a
“student achievement system” for undergraduates at RIT’s School of Interactive Games
and Media. The project they developed, Just Press Play took a little over a year to
develop, and launched several months after Reality Ends Here. Just Press Play is
described on its home page as an “achievement-based game system [that] can encourage
students to think of the ‘necessary obstacles’ in their path as part of a coherent narrative
of their learning and professional development” (“About Just Press Play”). Some of these
achievements are earned by engaging in specific real-world interactions with faculty,
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peers, and school facilities. One example of these interactions presented at the 2011
Digital Media and Learning Conference involved students receiving an achievement in
exchange for finding a specific professor and making her laugh. In exchange for this
action, the professor would hand the students a card containing a QR code which, when
scanned, would unlock the achievement. Other more wholly automated interactions are
described as taking place online:
We will embed game content in a variety of RIT systems, providing students with
the opportunity to launch game-related activities in RIT’s courseware system,
library databases, our co-op system site, and others. Students who have opted into
the game will be able to see “hidden” content on these pages, and will have the
option to activate that content to complete quests and earn achievements.
According to the project website, the game consists of students earning experience points
and “leveling up” by completing quests distributed across the freshman experience. For
its initial launch, these quests were curated entirely by the game designers (future
versions are envisioned in which students “will play a role in creating the content”), who
describe the experience of the game from the perspective of the individual player as being
“about recognizing and reflecting on your achievements, both social and technical.”
A thumbnail impression of the game can be garnered from the highly polished teaser
trailer on its public-facing home page. This trailer frames the arrival of students at RIT in
a narrative about the “delicate balance” between the “warring factions” that came
together over 100 years ago to form the institution. The trailer goes on to depict students
engaging in various activities, from snapping smartphone photos of certain paintings in
the art gallery and exploring obscure parts of the school, to playing video games and
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ascending climbing walls. Each time a student “completes” one of these activities, a
badge pops up behind their heads and they smile or cheer. Each activity is preceded by a
title: “Explore... Uncover secrets... Push your limits... Have fun... Seek out your
balance...”
Figure 50: Just Press Play promotional video. A Mondrian-style badge appears behind an RIT student as
she earns an achievement for taking a picture of a painting with her mobile device.
Just Press Play presents an intriguing model for FuelBand-style systems in educational
settings. Instead of measuring various kinds of exercise and physical activity, Just Press
Play measures progress through a variety of dimensions of the post-secondary
educational environment at RIT. As with the FuelBand, these measurements are reflected
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back upon the player in the form of badges, achievements, points, and unlocks. Where the
overtly intended outcomes for the FuelBand are to improve its users’ physical fitness,
give them a way to monitor their progress toward health and activity goals, and provide
them a platform for sharing their achievements with others, the stated outcome objectives
for Just Press Play are similarly to “improve [students’] ability to manage the college
experience, help prepare them for careers in game development and new media, give
them a sense of accomplishment and progress along the path to their goal of graduation,
and provide them with a way to meaningfully demonstrate and record the variety of skills
they have mastered” (“A Vision of Play”). And like the FuelBand, Just Press Play yields
intelligence dividends for both the designers and the players of the game:
A GPA tells us little about a student’s competencies, but a multi-faceted set of
achievements and completed “quests” has the potential to express far more about
the student’s areas of interest and accomplishment.
Systems like Just Press Play will almost certainly have a role in many kinds of
educational settings. Indeed, recent large-scale projects such as the Open Badges system
underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla envision a future wherein
“learners can...collect badges from different sources and display them across the web” in
order to “show a more complete picture of your skills and achievements to the
world”(“Open Badges”):
[It’s] often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements gained outside
of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that
problem, making it easy to issue, earn and display badges across the web. The
result: recognizing 21st century skills, unlocking career and educational
opportunities, and helping learners everywhere level up in their life and work.
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Figure 51: OpenBadges Project. MozillaWiki. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/About 30 June 2012.
What can be difficult to reconcile about projects such as Open Badges and Just Press
Play is the tension between the claims they make about the values of play and informal
learning on the one hand, and the inherent formality and structure of their underlying
systems on the other. Indeed, there is something of a paradox in the way that these
systems attempt to honor and license informal learning by effectively expanding the
scope of the formal. Viewed in this light, quest-based badge systems seem to reinforce
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the kinds of teacher-student, master-apprentice, senior-junior, and adult-child
relationships that have characterized education for the past two centuries. In such
systems, teachers and other authorities create achievements and experience point awards
based on activities that they consider worthy from various learning and professional
development perspectives. While the use of digital badges and other markers that refer to
game culture may add a patina of novelty to these systems, at bottom this arrangement is
effectively another iteration of the standard educational practice of awarding subject-
based letter grades. Its utility to students--and, perhaps to a greater extent, to institutions--
is located in its capacity to render more granular and expansive forms of credentialing,
feedback, and activity tracking than those offered by the crude approximations of letter
grades. Insofar as such systems can afford both students with a means of gaining an
understanding of the obstacles and “choke points” present in the educational system and
the broader ecology of career development, and educators with a means of monitoring
progress, they can serve useful navigational and assessment purposes. But in the context
of the present discussion, they must also be recognized as bearing distinct resemblance to
what Dewey would call the “traditional scheme” of education, an “imposition from above
and outside” which “imposes adult standards, subject-matter, and methods upon those
who are only growing slowly toward maturity.”
Systems such as Just Press Play and the Open Badges project can be appealing to
funding bodies because of their putative scalability and leveraging of computational
automation. Open Badges promises to “[make] it easy to issue, display, and manage
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badges across the web.” Similarly, the title of Just Press Play evokes a kind of “plug-and-
play” or “set it and forget it” mentality that may be attractive to institutions looking to
implement new programs within the constraints of lean budgets and limited personnel. As
I have discussed in Chapter 2 of this document, designing for massive scale is unlikely to
be the most cost-effective approach to any kind of environmental design, as it results in
flattened experiences that lack the fine-grain and high-touch attentiveness to the local
often required to sustain engagement. However, of greater concern are the implications
raised by the emphasis on automation and surveillance that these and other such systems
can exhibit.
The degree to which participation can be rendered machine-readable is directly
proportional to the degree to which that participation can be controlled and exploited.
This principle is fundamental to the business models of companies like Facebook. By
capturing our “likes,” social relationships, group activities, affiliations, media habits,
interests, and locations in a granular and parseable format, Facebook can provide its
clients with detailed and highly-targeted market intelligence and direct access to relevant
consumers. Similarly, Just Press Play envisions a trade-off between the utility conferred
upon learners and “far-reaching applications” with the “publishers and producers of
curricular materials, and software and hardware vendors invested in the educational
market” (“A Vision of Play”). Of course, the mere association with the mechanisms of
capital is not necessarily a bad thing. Identifying and opening new revenue streams for
educational institutions is a worthy objective. On the other hand, the increased
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involvement of corporations and other private interests in the educational system carries
with it numerous risks, especially in light of the already highly exploitative, co-
dependent, and manipulative relationships between capital and governance.
Crucially, however, what is at stake here goes beyond exploitation. Even in a utopian
outcome wherein such systems can be completely disconnected from corporate influence,
the fact remains that they ultimately resolve into panoptic surveillance mechanisms. Put
differently, they become an apparatus for administering discipline, rather than for
prompting learners to discover discipline on their own. Imagine a future wherein the
Open Badges project or something like it approaches ubiquity at educational institutions
and gains recognition among a substantial set of employers. In addition to managing
traditional educational outcomes such as grade point averages, learners living in this
future must also be attentive to their “badge collections” in order to position themselves
for entry into, or advancement within, a given career path. That is, those who have been
more extensively credentialed across a variety of sanctioned (or “badgeable”) categories
will be more likely to succeed, while those with anemic or inappropriate badge
collections will find themselves at a disadvantage. While projects like Open Badges insist
that “anyone” will be able to create a badge in the future, this does little to prevent
hierarchies of value from emerging within the system. For example, an employer may
find an “I V olunteered at the Museum” badge issued by the Smithsonian to be a positive
sign in a prospective employee, while they may not be likely to look kindly on an “I
Dropped Acid” badge issued by local stoners. Further, it must be asked who will have the
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time and capital to earn appropriate badges, and how this will map onto matters such as
race and class. Learners in remote areas or cultural deserts, or who lack the available free
time or web access to engage in badge-earning practices will suffer, exacerbating
inequities in an already wildly unbalanced socio-economic landscape.
Regardless of socio-economic status, learners in such a system find themselves in a
position where they must direct their energies toward acquiring high-value badge
credentials in order to thrive. Does this create the kind of independence of mind called for
since the first half of the 20th century by thinkers such as Dewey or Piaget? Or does it
create a new and more insidious brand of conformity? If I am a determined learner in this
kind of future, am I going to spend my time experimenting with “unbadgeable” activities,
or am I going to succumb to the pressure of satisfying the increasingly granular
requirements of an achievements-based educational and career economy? If I choose to
“buck the system,” what impacts will that choice have on my future? If I choose to
conform, what kinds of experiences will I have when my exploration of the world
becomes defined by unlocks, level-ups, and the acquisition of credentials? What will
happen to my imagination?
48
194
48
Is this Debord’s dystopia wherein “spectacle is mixed into all reality and irradiates it”? There are surely numerous
science fiction novels that cover this territory. If not, there should be.
4.2 Surveillance and Control: @EndReality
Of course, Reality Ends Here is not immune to producing its own kinds of dystopia and
harm. As open-ended as its play activities may be, its rules nevertheless constitute a
system “created by others” around a specific set of mandates. While it is designed to
harmonize with the existing motivations of its players, it should not be forgotten that it is
nevertheless funded and implemented by a self-interested institution with its own set of
motivations. This fact will become increasingly important to keep in mind as the game
moves beyond its experimental phase and toward more official incorporation into the
curricular system of the SCA. Nevertheless, in terms of the present iteration of the
experience, concerns over exploitation and the interference of commerce are somewhat
less pressing than those regarding the game’s capacity to “instrumentalize” the
participatory energies of its players.
From one perspective, each week of gameplay in Reality Ends Here can be seen as a kind
of miniature media arts festival or conference, providing players with opportunities not
only for playful experimentation and performance, but also for exposure and
advancement in both social and institutional hierarchies. Winning a week can catch the
attention of faculty or alumni just as it can create different kinds of status and reputation
in the student body. In the 2011 implementation, the more successful the game became in
terms of attracting players and making waves in the SCA freshman cohort, the more
playing it became a kind of signal of differentiation in various social and academic
hierarchies. There was thus an equation drawn relating participation in the game with
195
social and professional advancement. Was the game creating its own kind of conformists
by offering students social and career advancement in exchange for their creative
engagement?
We felt it was important to confront these questions head-on. Making the game optional
was a necessary component of this confrontation, but was not sufficient. We wanted to
acknowledge that any game such as this--that is, any game deployed by an institution for
play by its membership -- can function as a control and surveillance system. To represent
this “dark side” of the game, we created the conceit of the “Reality Committee,” the
faceless organization that presides over gameplay. Its logo--which was also the logo of
the game itself--was designed to resemble an eye combined with an aperture. Its
communications were cryptic and had airs of both authoritarianism and revolutionary
agit-prop. And whenever it was referred to by Game Runners or faculty, it was playfully
implied to constitute a kind of vast and unknowable Oz-like power nexus. This
representation of the mechanisms of surveillance, power, and control was intended to
foreground the fact that any game of this sort inherently contains a capacity for
exploitation and indoctrination.
196
Figure 52: Flag advisory. This advisory was one of the first in-game communications released to players.
The Reality Committee was thus ambiguously positioned within the narrative framework
of the game. On the one hand, it was the benevolent organizing force behind the fun of
the game and a source of networking and career advancement opportunities for players.
On the other, it was an elusive and shadowy organization with uncertain motives of its
own. It played this dual role not by arbitrating the work created by the players, but rather
by serving as a kind of abstract overseer and liaison. Players would receive direct
communications from the Reality Committee only upon winning a week. These
communications would lead to mentorship experiences. Beyond this interaction, the
197
Committee largely stayed in the background after the early stages of the game, and at no
point was its membership identified -- although most students would eventually intuit that
it in fact did not exist at all.
The fiction of the Reality Committee was intended to help us earn the trust of our players.
We believed that by acknowledging the dark potentials latent in a game such as this, we
could license the kinds of skepticism and resistance that would prevent it from devolving
into a behavioral control system. To a certain extent this strategy paid off. The fact that
the Reality Committee was anonymous and distinct from the rest of the SCA curriculum,
and that it had an overtly (indeed, somewhat parodic) fictional identity, made it easier for
players to talk about and critique. Had the game been linked to the official curriculum or
to a particular faculty member or group, students may have felt less comfortable pushing
back against it or otherwise taking control of the situation. As discussed in Chapter 2,
numerous Deals were made about the game, affectionately poking fun at it and
interrogating its structure. There was also much discussion on the website and Facebook
about the kind of values the game articulated. However, the ambiguous fictional conceit
of the Reality Committee also framed the game in terms that were confusing to some
students, and off-putting to others.
Some students initially actively resisted the game. For example, in the second week of
gameplay, an anonymous student undertook a stealth “gamejacking” of Reality Ends Here
that reacted against both the game’s mock authoritarian tone and the kinds of effects the
198
student perceived it as having produced in the freshman community. By this point in the
semester, word about the game had spread to less than a quarter of the freshman students.
However, many players were already beginning to take their play very seriously. The first
“power group,” MARRA, had formed and was busy making four separate film
productions to submit the subsequent week, all the while taking precautions to keep their
activities secret from other students in an attempt to keep out the competition. Others
who knew about the game were equally possessive of their knowledge, and various
camps had formed. These secretive and cliquish behaviors would later dissipate; but at
the time of the gamejacking, they were in full swing. Further, because the Game Runners
were continuing efforts to induct new players through the deployment of miscellaneous
rabbit holes throughout campus and online, even those students who did not know about
the game could sense something was afoot. Strange signs were everywhere. This was a
situation ripe for intervention.
The gamejacking took place on the 2nd of September. It began as an intervention on the
Twitter stream for a session of the Reality Starts Here symposium class taught by Tara
McPherson. Using the #heyhenry hashtag, which Professor McPherson (@tmcphers) had
asked students to use for the class backchannel (the guest speaker that day was Henry
Jenkins), a Twitter account named @EndReality began issuing declarative
commandments that parodied the kinds of enigmatic pseudo-authoritarian
communications of the Reality Committee. Because these tweets referenced activities
199
happening in real time in the class, it was clear that whoever was producing them was in
the lecture hall where the symposium was being held.
Figure 53: Twitter: @endreality.
This intervention also consisted of a Facebook page for EndReality, which provided a
clearer sense of the perspective of its creator:
Welcome to a test that transcends all forms of media. We are not trying to teach
you or recruit you. We do not need you to learn anything and we do not need you
among us. You are here for a different reason, a reason some will discover while
others fall by the wayside. During this test you will be required to comply and
cooperate, not only with us but with your fellow subjects. The sidewalk has
200
already ended, along with the world and your independence. All that is left to end
is Reality.
For us, this “attack” on the game was both encouraging and frightening. On the one hand,
we were excited to see students critically engaging with the narrative framework of the
game and its potential for abuse as a surveillance and control system. We also appreciated
the sense of humor and wit of the author. To a certain extent, this kind of engagement was
precisely what we had hoped for. On the other hand, we worried that the unidentified
gamejacker could derail the entire experience. For example, many students later reported
not knowing whether the @EndReality account was affiliated with the actual game. For
students in the symposium class who had not yet discovered the game, the menacing tone
of @EndReality may have served as a deterrent to their participation. But most troubling
was the notion that @EndReality could signal the beginning of a backlash against the
game that would lead to its collapse. Would the students “End Reality” before it had
really begun?
Just as quickly as @EndReality appeared, it disappeared. Its final communications,
issued later in the day on September 2nd, referenced an upcoming fraternity party. As the
tweets stopped appearing, the design team breathed a sigh of relief, with some concluding
that the whole operation was just a way of riding the coattails of the game in order to
pump up the weekend’s “Greek” festivities. But I do not believe that @EndReality was
entirely about promoting an underage booze-up. This was a very real critique of the game
that called it out as a behavioral control system. I believe that this critique became a
touchstone for student discussions that took place beyond the purview of the Game
201
Runners, and that these discussions helped to put the game in its proper place. Indeed, in
the week following the appearance of @EndReality, participation in the game spiked,
with dozens of new players signing up and the number of Deal submissions jumping to
11 from the previous week’s total of 3. While it was anxiety-provoking for the design
team at the time, it is my hope that we experience similar gamejackings in subsequent
iterations of the game. @EndReality was an important moment of reflection which
further licensed the interrogation of the game’s impact by its players.
Addressing issues of control and surveillance is an essential part of the design process of
any impact game. After all, such games are by definition intended to “have an impact” or
“change the world” by modifying how players think and act. Designers must deeply
interrogate the kinds of mechanics they employ to bring about such transformations. Do
the changes in behavior brought about by a given design emerge organically in players, as
a process of discovery akin to that described in the Meno? Or are they imposed from
above in one way or another? Perhaps at the end of the day the best we can do is a kind of
triage. In any designed participatory system, there will always be a mixture of the organic
and the synthetic.
49
Games can provide methods for generating agency-rich versions of
this mixture insofar as they can bring about highly organic play and discovery situations
202
49
In this regard, one might contrast the spectacle produced by an environmental game such as Reality Ends Here,
which has its origins in a central authority (in this case, the research and design team working in concert with the SCA
administration and faculty), with the spectacle produced by much more distributed and organic interventions into lived
environments, such as the Occupy movement or the recent tuition hike protests in Montréal. Viewed in this light,
perhaps the best way of looking at impact games in general and environmental games in specific is to see them as
temporary catalysts for action. Such games truly succeed only when their players go on to invent new forms of action
external to the game system. Especially in the case of Reality Ends Here, if the students did not continue to collaborate,
experiment, share, and otherwise engage with the direction of their intellectual and artistic growth in the absence of the
game, the game would be considered a failure. Indeed, one of the worst possible outcomes for such games is that
players become dependent on them.
using relatively compact and transparent rulesets. Nevertheless, because games designed
for impact are just that--that is, designed for impact--it is impossible to completely
eliminate their potential to function as systems of domination.
203
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Appendix A: Additional Documentation and Player Interviews
The best source for additional documentation of this project is the game website itself,
located at http://reality.usc.edu. As of this writing, the majority of the website, including
player profiles, the archive of completed Deals, the Card Archive, the Photoblog, and the
About pages, is open to the public. Readers who would like to access the player-only
features of the site are invited to contact the author directly for login credentials.
Further documentation, including interviews with players (conducted by the players
themselves) from the 2011 implementation of the game, will be published online at http://
remotedevice.net/dissertation in the Fall of 2012. This documentation will also include
reflections on the second “season” of Reality Ends Here.
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Appendix B: Interview with Nathan Maton
The following interview was conducted as a part of the research for an article published
in Wired on December 30, 2011. It is included here to provide readers with a gloss of the
core elements of Reality Ends Here. In this interview, game journalist Nathan Maton asks
me a series of questions about the design and implementation of the game.
First, for those who haven't read about the game on Henry's blog, can you explain how it
works briefly?
Basically this is a secret game at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. As a student, you
find out about it organically -- through word of mouth or by piecing together clues left
around the school or on the Web. If you're persistent, you'll eventually discover the
hidden Game Office, where you will be inducted into the game, signed up for the
website, asked to swear an Oath of creative fearlessness to the "Reality Committee", and
given a packet of 10 assorted game cards. These cards can be combined with each other
or with other players' cards to create a "Deal" -- a unique creative prompt (there are over
50 million potential combinations) that can be used to seed the production of some kind
of actual media artifact such as a short film or a game or a "happening" or a website. By
actually producing these media artifacts and submitting them to the game's website
(working alone or in self-assembled teams), players earn points on a range of weekly
leaderboards. Crossing certain point thresholds unlocks time-sensitive trailheads leading
210
to special experiences and encounters, usually involving meeting interesting alumni and
industry professionals in offbeat or exclusive locations. All the projects created through
the play of the game are shared with the world via the game's website, which also serves
as a hub for player-to-player communications, player-driven rating and ranking of
projects, and interactions with game runners. The whole experience is framed in a simple
narrative conceit concerning the mysterious "Reality Committee" -- which is in fact a real
committee of faculty and alumni, and is genuinely mysterious.
To put it in game designer-speak, this is a pervasive collaborative production game driven
by a card-based procedural creative prompting system. Its purpose is to increase peer
discovery, deepen students' understanding of and experience with transmedia, and open
new channels for experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Give us one example of a recent collaborative project that came out of the use of the
cards to illustrate the game's functionality.
The players have come up with so many amazing projects that it's hard for me to single
one out. The best way to get a sense of what can come out of this is to go browse the
website at http://reality.usc.edu.
A fun representative project would be the excellent comedy short, "Incopetent" (http://
reality.usc.edu/deals/incopetent/) by production and critical studies students Harry
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Hunter, Aaron Izek, Zach Siegel, Jason Smith and Mitchell Winkie (AKA "Pentapog").
This Deal consists of 14 Property cards and one orange People card built around a
"Comedy Sketch" Maker Card. The Property cards used in the Deal include prompts such
as "About Justice," "Someone Named Laszlo Kovacs," and "Involving a Locked Box" (to
see the full combination of cards, visit the project's web page). The resulting video is a
hilarious send-up of a police procedural:
Every Deal in the game generates at least this amount of content. It's amazing to wake up
each morning and see what the players have come up with. I am constantly humbled by
their talent.
Who did you pull into the room when you knew this would be a project you wanted to
work on? Why?
The list of people who worked on this project is long, so I'll focus on the core design
team only. The first thing I did after getting the green light was to conscript a co-designer.
I don't like working alone on complex dynamic systems like games, especially in the
early concept stages. A good design partner gives you quality assurance, a sounding
board, and a multiplier for the rate at which new ideas can be injected into your
development process. The partner I chose was Simon Wiscombe, a brilliant interaction
designer in the MFA program in Interactive Media here at SCA (he's also an aeronautical
engineer and an actor, so if you need a game, plane, or performance, give him a call).
212
This project wouldn't have taken the shape it did without Simon. Not only did he bring
some heavyweight conceptual chops to the table, but he also has the range of transmedia
skills that are necessary to do the rapid prototyping of cards, website wireframes, and
other materials that a project like this requires. Multiple-threat designer/makers like
Simon are pretty rare, so if you ever find one, hang on to them!
Not all projects can have a Yoda, but ours did. And by Yoda, I mean Tracy Fullerton.
Tracy has been a crucial advisor to me throughout my time at USC, and her passion for/
belief in this project has been unbelievable (if you're not familiar with Tracy's work,
familiarize yourself now -- she's one of the sharpest game design minds in the world).
Tracy (who is also part of the faculty committee that commissioned this project) served
as a mentor and guide for the game. I can't even begin to list the number of pitfalls and
mistakes she saved us from. Intense high-speed design processes can be exhausting. Tired
designers can make lazy decisions or chicken out on bold moves. An advisor like Tracy
can save you from those fates.
Can you give me an example of a few pitfalls?
As we got closer to launch, I had this irrational fear that no one was going to play. And
since we had the cooperation and involvement of the SCA Faculty, it was entirely
possible that I could have given in to this fear and made the game an official curriculum
element. As I discuss elsewhere in these answers, I knew that doing that would really
213
undermine a lot -- or even all -- of the real power of this experience. But still -- I was
scared to death that our plan would backfire and the students just wouldn't engage. I was
afraid that my whole dissertation would fall apart. There was a temptation, however brief,
to rope in a guaranteed player population through some degree of mandatory play.
Talking to Tracy during this time bucked up my spirits and kept me from chickening out
on my original impulses. A good number of the other faculty involved in this project
wanted me to make this mandatory. At the end of the day, this is a pretty radical approach
to post-secondary education. There was pressure from within and without. Tracy helped
me to keep the faith.
Finally, it's impossible to imagine this project happening without Holly Willis, the
director of USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy. In her capacity as chair of the Future
Committee, Holly invited me to develop a game for the students at SCA. Her leadership
truly got the ball rolling on this. Tara McPherson, the awesome chair of my dissertation
committee and the instructor of the freshman intake class that is loosely associated with
this game, has also played a crucial role in helping me to think through the many
interesting questions around this kind of initiative. There are so many other people that
needed to come together to make this happen. You can see a list of most of them on the
game's credits page here: http://reality.usc.edu/credits/.
How did you choose on a deck of cards?
214
Our initial design didn't have cards at all. It was much more like something like SFZero --
a collaborative production game played through a web portal, full stop. This is one of
those instances where the daunting task of executing this project -- we only had a few
months to get everything designed, tested, and implemented -- made me just want to run
with the initial idea and leave it at that. Thankfully, Tracy pushed me to work harder. She
reminded me that we weren't making a game meant to be played by people distributed
across a wide area like a city or the whole world. Our players would be coming into the
same building pretty much every day. Most of them live on campus in the same dorms.
We would be crazy not to make use of that. Physical artifacts would provide a social
lubricant and mnemonic that would speed up the spread of the game while also producing
all sorts of ancillary moments of discussion and interaction. And since the whole mandate
of the game was to increase peer discovery and collaboration, the more we could get
people interacting in real space, the better.
For years I'd been wanting to do a game based on an interlocking card system. I had these
abstract prototypes lying around on my desk -- basically just index cards with "in" and
"out" arrows on them. I started to think about how these cards could be used to drive a
collaborative production game. I realized that this could be how our game could generate
the creative prompts that players would respond to. Rather than curating the prompts
ourselves, we could generate them procedurally through card play. It was kind of like
transmedia Tarot -- by combining the cards based on an interlocking connectivity schema,
players could make a kind of physical "random log line generator" for media projects.
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Further, since the cards could be shared and traded, this meant that players could gain
more control and granularity over their prompts by engaging in social activity. The idea
had an elegance to it that we ran with immediately.
How did you come up with those individual cards?
This was a long and tedious process. Based on the capabilities of our printer and the
limitations of our budget, we settled on a 300-card master deck. The tricky part was
breaking down that deck into the right ratios of the different kinds of cards. We knew we
needed to keep certain kinds of cards scarce in order to drive the players into trading and
collaborating.
What kinds of cards?
There are four basic card types in the game: green Maker cards, which determine the kind
of media artifact that a project is going to become; pink Property cards, which describe
ideas, places, props, or other elements that need to be included in the project; blue Special
cards, which provide various kinds of power-ups, bonuses, and extra-difficult prompt
elements; and orange People cards, each of which contains the name of one of the players
in the game.
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In general terms, we knew the most plentiful type of card needed to be the pink Property
cards. Any given Deal can only have one Maker card, but can have anywhere from 1 to
more than 30 property cards. Special cards were conceived as being just that -- special --
so they needed to be the rarest of all. And there needed to be enough orange cards printed
in total such that each player could have their own (which would be given to another
player at random, encouraging another vector of peer discovery).
Other cards would have to be plentiful enough to guarantee that players could
conceivably start playing right away as soon as they found the secret Game Office and
received their starter pack of 10 (semi-)randomly selected cards. Figuring out the exact
ratios took a lot of number-crunching and pie charts.
How did you approach that process?
One factor in all this was that we wanted our players to all be able to start the game with
fairly different cards, such that they would be able to discover, trade, and share new cards
by talking to other players. If everyone had the same 10 cards in their starter pack,
players wouldn't be curious about what other players had in their packs. So we looked at
the approximate size of what we expected would be our start-up player base -- we
designed for around 200 players -- and then did the math from there.
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A second factor was the range of media artifacts that we wanted players to be able to
create. Obviously, since this is a cinema school, we would need Maker cards for things
like "5 minute short" and "Long Take" and "Suspense Sequence" and "Documentary
Short" and so on. But this is a transmedia game, and today's SCA student does more than
just think about and make movies. So we needed cards for games -- the Interactive Media
Division is a hugely important part of the SCA -- like "Serious Game" and "Board Game"
and "Live Action Video Game." We needed writing cards, like "Series Bible" and
"Scene", and critical studies cards, like "Salon" and "Screen a Film," and animation
cards, like "Flip Book" and "Animated Short", and on, and on, and on. We brainstormed
an initial list of around 90 that our pie charts said we needed to cut down to 54. We feel
like our final collection of Maker cards accurately reflects the spectrum of media making
and theory that goes on in the undergraduate program at SCA.
In terms of the content of the Property cards, this was largely based on the connectivity
mechanic. The more connections a given card has, the more powerful it is in the system.
A card that can only link to one other card in a Deal constitutes a kind of "dead end",
whereas a card with two or more connections enables the Deal to grow, increasing its
point value and creative specificity. Since hyper-connected cards would be so powerful,
we thought it made sense to make them the most conceptually-rich ideas -- big-picture
stuff like "Memory" or "Obsession". Our general rule was that the fewer connections a
card has, the more specific it should be: and so the cards with the least connectivity ended
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up being very concrete things like "A horse" or "The beach" or "The Statue of Douglas
Fairbanks."
Finally, we designed the backs of each card to contain a piece of media-making history or
theory or technique. This was part of the tiered design approach to the game: even if you
didn't engage in the actual card mechanic, you could still collect bits and pieces of media
history. In this regard, each card was a part of a set such as "War Films" or "Game
Consoles." Coming up with all this trivia was fun, but it took forever to make a list that
covered all the different kinds of media making and analysis that goes on at SCA -- not to
mention to gather all the images, write all the text, and lay everything out in InDesign for
the full set of 300.
You mentioned not promoting the game at all and keeping it secretive, how did you get
play testers to see what aspects of it worked?
As it happens we did very little play testing. The only thing we were really able to
thoroughly test in advance was the card game mechanic. To conduct those tests, we got
together a few members of PEG -- LA's pervasive gaming meet up group -- and gave
them some prototypes of the cards. They grokked it immediately and we knew we had
something that in its broad outline was going to work. But we really didn't have the time
to test everything else. We were manufacturing the cards, making the website, and setting
up the Game Office right up until the minute we launched. In the end, we told ourselves,
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"this is the play test. The whole game is a test." And that turned out to be a pretty
liberating attitude.
How did you get to know your target audience? Was there a process you used? When
did you know you knew enough to begin making the game?
There's a temptation in designing games for institutional interventions that says you
should make your game maximally scalable such that other institutions can easily port it
into their programs. The general idea with that is that doing things that way is going to
save you time and money, because scalable universal systems can be turned around and
monetized more easily than bespoke systems. We felt like there was something really
important missing in that argument. In my experience, designing for scale from the start
depersonalizes and flattens games. Our mandate was to make something that would
intrigue, galvanize, and mobilize our players, and we felt that the best way to do this was
to create a genuinely tailor-made experience, something that couldn't happen anywhere
else and that was precisely tuned to this particular player population. That was our
priority. We left aside scale and designed everything around these students and this place.
Ironically (and perhaps instructively for others looking into doing something like this),
the outcome of that process was a number of things that turned out to be quite scalable
and generalizable: the card mechanic and the way it links to a web-based collaborative
production game, for example. But we got there by asking very specific questions about
our players and their context.
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Any examples of specific questions?
Here are just a few:
What are our players doing before they come here? What sorts of media are they
interested in? How do they communicate with each other? What kinds of social behavior
do the existing digital and physical infrastructures of the SCA promote? What gets hidden
or suppressed? How do students traditionally get to know students outside their division
or cohort? What has been tried to break down the silos between divisions, and why hasn't
that worked?
In terms of process, there were basically three stages. In the first stage, we held several
meetings where faculty from each division of the school shared their thoughts on the
students. Since many of these faculty have been teaching here for a long time, this gave
us a good sense of the bigger trends. We also set up a wiki and some discussion boards
around this time, so that faculty and other collaborators could share ideas as they came
up. Next, we did a whole thwack of historical research, digging into the archives and
talking with alumni to get a sense of what students here were like in the past. This was
basically a process of scoping out the USC image/zeitgeist, and since that's a big part of
why students end up choosing to go here, we ended up using this material -- particularly
the rebellious, wild stuff from the 1960s and 1970s, when the school was an unruly den
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of creative energy -- extensively in developing the tone and design aesthetic of the game.
Finally, we did some very direct observation of the students by creating sock puppet
accounts and lurking/lightly participating on student- and school-run Facebook pages and
discussion forums. This last piece confirmed the original instinct to make a collaborative
production game, since we observed students both sharing creative works and informally
issuing media-making challenges to one another -- exactly the behaviors that are at the
center of our game design.
What other initial processes did you use to ensure its success? Were any of them
particularly applicable for other educational ARG designers that you'd like to share?
I never thought of this as an educational game. I think that's the best advice I can give. If
educators want to truly leverage the power of games, they need to make good games. If
it's not a good game, students won't play unless you force them to -- and if you force
them to play, it's not really a game anymore: it's just a simulacrum of a game, a "trojan
horse for learning" that students will see right through. A lot of educators have trouble
getting their heads around that. The fact is, much of the transformative power of games
comes from the fact that players invite them into their lives. This motivation and agency
("I am curious; I want to mess around with this; I want to see how this works") makes
play personal and meaningful. And once an activity becomes personal and meaningful,
players will learn and discover and collaborate and problem-solve in all sorts of amazing
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and self-directed ways. Put differently, ARGs are "pull" experiences. If you find yourself
"pushing" at any point, you're doing it wrong.
Real play is a pull experience. It's about action, not consumption. If you have a serious
aim in mind with your game, the optimal outcome is that you authenticate that aim
through action, not exposition. Now, of course, I *am* being extreme in saying that
you're "doing it wrong" any time you find yourself pushing in a game. But to me, that's
the ideal to aim at. If you have a thesis to prove and you want to prove it with a game,
prove it with a game. Don't set up a game that frames some moment where you prove the
idea with prose.
Of course, I'm being intentionally provocative here. At the end of the day, it's always
about what works. But here's an analogy that may or may not clear things up: Imagine
you're making a movie about some serious subject. And you get to a point where you
realize that through cinematic storytelling alone you haven't been able to prove your
thesis. Do you include a five-minute stretch of text printed on the screen in order to clear
things up? Probably not; instead, you go back to the drawing board and figure out a way
to use the affordances of the cinema -- as opposed to the prose essay, say -- to get your
idea across. Similarly, if you are making a game about some serious subject and you get
to a point where you realize that the play of your game alone hasn't got the point across,
don't just give up and send your players a link to some video they need to watch to really
understand what you're saying. Or if you're doing it at a school, don't use your power as
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an educator to force your players to do something that they wouldn't do if they were
"really" playing a game. Solve the problem with good game design instead.
What's the process through which you now determine what components of the game are
working best?
We've been doing a lot of on-the-fly assessment, and are also compiling statistics and
interviews for review once the game is over. We know from raw numbers that the core
parts of the game are working.
The website through which the game is played tracks a lot of stuff on the back end: who's
collaborating with who, how much and in what way each player is engaging, the kinds of
cards and Deals that players are creating, and so on. There's been a wide adoption of the
game among students, and those who are involved generally participate a lot, both on the
website (through comments, photoblog posts, and status updates) and in the creation of
Deals. We've been seeing a lot of inter-divisional collaboration, and the effect on the
general spirit of the students is something that faculty and students say is really positive.
In addition to the formal data tracking, we're also watching how players play the game
and search for exploits. There have been a lot of interesting surprises. For example,
players have tended to form into very large working groups so as to have as many cards
as possible at their disposal for the creation of Deals. We didn't expect this -- we thought
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teams would be very ad hoc and in the 3-6 player range. As it happens, team size has
been closer to 15 or 20, and in many cases teams have stuck together since shortly after
the game launched. Some groups even keep "card banks" which all their players can use
as a kind of credit union for making Deals. This isn't technically an exploit, but it gives us
ideas about what to expect next year. It's also been encouraging to see the whole thing
move from a very dog-eat-dog capitalist arrangement at the beginning (in the early
weeks, some teams even drew up "exclusivity contracts" to prevent their members from
working with other players) to something a lot more collective-minded by the mid- and
late-game.
One of the most exciting design aspects to me was that this ARG was easily replayable,
not heavily narrative driven and the core mechanic met the exact needs of your target
population, media creators. Can you tell me when you first realized this product/
audience fit?
In a lot of ways, this project was a way for me to demonstrate some of the things I was
thinking about when I wrote a paper called "ARG 2.0" in 2010. Many people who come
to the world of ARGs come from a storytelling background (myself included), and as
such they bring with them a lot of tendencies that maybe aren't so appropriate for the
kinds of interactions and experiences that are possible in pervasive gaming in specific
and transmedia in general. The mantra, "it's all about the story" is one example of this
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mentality. I actually think this is a very counter-productive idea, even though there is now
a super-cool conference that's dedicated to its propagation.
Here's my view on this in a nutshell: story-heavy ARGs are difficult for even the most
well-financed operations to maintain (primarily because of the ballooning content
requirements of nonlinear storytelling -- as anyone who has worked on a story-driven
game of any sort or read a choose-your-own-adventure would surely understand), and
even when they do pull it off, from a player perspective you run into a lot of problems
with people losing the thread of the narrative, new players not being able to figure things
out/catch up with the story, non-hardcore players not being admitted into the inner circles
of players who are at the cutting edge of story material releases, declining engagement,
the abandonment of player groups after the experience has concluded, and so on.
One solution is to design your ARG experiences so that they function procedurally -- that
is, create an actual game that drives participation and play among your audience such that
the play itself generates the experience. In our case, we had a lot of eager young media-
makers to work with, and so we were able to leverage their creative and performative
motivations in order to generate the overall experience. This strategy was a particularly
good fit for SCA because we wanted to place the emphasis on the players' creativity, not
ours. Our job was to frame their engagement with the right narrative/design cues in order
to bring out the real story -- the unique story of our players themselves, told in their own
images, words, and works.
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Will there be any attempts to monetize this game process and turn it into a product/
platform?
We're looking into ways to do that. A lot of people who aren't students at USC are
clamoring to play, so we feel like there's probably a market. But before we do anything in
that regard, we want to iterate some more on the USC-only design, and experiment with
some other elements we didn't have time to implement for this "season" of the game.
We'll be back next year, so stay tuned!
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Appendix C: Interview with Henry Jenkins
The three of you have been co-conspirators in the development of an alternate reality
game which has captured the passions and interests of the incoming students at the USC
School of Cinematic Arts this fall. Can you give us some background on the project?
What got it started?
Tracy Fullerton: The project actually came out of a committee established by the dean
of the School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) in 2009 after a full faculty retreat. The charge for
that committee was to envision the future of the SCA, and one of the key initiatives was
to establish a "gateway experience" for incoming students that introduced them to the
changing media landscape, the history and future of the school, the possibilities that can
emerge from the SCA network of current and past students, and the importance of
bridging the divisions of the school while they are here, both socially and academically.
The gateway course was envisioned as introducing a new kind of social networking for
SCA students, both on and offline, that would become critical to their involvement in
courses and with each other. As the class developed, it became clear that a game layer
would be a perfect way to achieve all of the goals set out by the committee without
falling victim to the general survey or lecture class tradition we wanted to move beyond.
So, while the curriculum for the gateway class and the game aren't "officially" linked,
they are intertwined in vision and purpose and serve to bring students from all divisions
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together in multiple ways that will purposefully drive the social dynamics and the cross-
media collaboration.
From its inception, the gateway class was envisioned as having a companion social
network, which linked to a digital library of information about media history and theory
and SCA's past and future. The design of the card game, with its "high touch" in-person
mechanics, is just the beginning of implementing that vision. On each card, history and
theory are linked to practice with a piece of knowledge on one side and a prompt to
creative practice on the other. This bridge between theory and practice, like the ones we
hope to forge between divisions here, is a critical statement at the heart of the game.
Jeff Watson: As an iMAP PhD student, finding ways to bring together theory and
practice is central to my doctoral research. Over the past couple of years, I had been
looking for a dissertation project that would enable me to put into practice my research
into transmedia interaction design and alternate reality games. I wanted this project to be
something that played out in the real world and had a tangible and measurable impact. I
didn't want it to be a demo or a proof of concept. I wanted to play with real stakes, real
players, and real outcomes. I wanted the project to be able to fail if it wasn't designed
properly. So when Holly Willis, the chair of the Future Committee, came to me with the
mandates that Tracy just outlined and asked if I would be able to come up with a pitch for
an ARG that could be played by all the incoming students of the SCA, I jumped at the
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chance. This was a real design challenge that touched on all the corners of my research,
from participatory culture to social and mobile media to interventionist art practice.
What were the core learning goals for the design and deployment of this game?
Tracy Fullerton: The core learning goals for the game are all around fostering the kind
of complex skills that are sometimes called 21st century skills. Of course, these skills,
such as team-building, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and
innovation, are not unique to the 21st century and they have been at the heart of the
curriculum here at SCA for a very long time. The difference here is activating students
right from the start of their SCA experience with the knowledge that these skills are
critical building blocks to their success as media makers, and also that the development
and improvement of these skills is something they need to take responsibility for
themselves from day one.
The game wraps these learning goals into a kind of induction into the SCA culture of
networking and support which is something students certainly leave USC with, but we
wanted to use the game to start surfacing these ideas for them earlier in their
development.
Jeff Watson: When we first met to brainstorm what we wanted students to be able to
discover through this game, we filled up a 16 foot whiteboard and still felt like we hadn't
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scratched the surface. On top of the kinds of building block skills Tracy just mentioned,
faculty members from each division of the SCA had very granular lists of the kinds of
things that they felt Cinematic Arts students should be aware of as they commence their
tenure as undergraduates. Writing professors wanted the game to encourage the
exploration of character and story; production faculty wanted to make sure all students
acquired basic knowledge about cameras, editing, and safety; critical studies pushed for
more opportunities for analysis, historical contextualization, and reflection; animation
wanted to make sure their students would have more ways to connect with students from
other divisions; and interactive media pushed for a deeper integration of notions of
iterative design and systems thinking. At the end of the meeting, I took a picture of the
whiteboard with my iPhone. It was a crazy tangled bird's nest of inspiration.
To make sense of it all, we took the mass of ideas generated during that whiteboard
session and started looking for connective tissue. We noticed that all the learning goals
we had brainstormed fell into one of three broad categories, which we ended up calling
Literacy, Craft, and Social. Literacy goals were those that pertained to knowledge of all
kinds: from highly local lore about the school and its resources, to basic understandings
about the history and theory of media-making. Craft goals were those that had anything
to do with the act of making -- from writing prose to shooting video to designing board
games. Finally, Social goals were all those that related to the discovery of and connection
with peers, alumni, faculty, and the broader community. Since the "content" of each of
these categories of learning was agnostic with respect to the various divisions of the
SCA, the first challenge of breaking down divisional/disciplinary boundaries had been
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met. The question became how to make a game that would motivate players to traverse
the networks of Literacy, Craft, and Social goals that we had identified for inclusion. This
became the starting point for our prototyping.
Can you describe some of the basic mechanics of the game?
Simon Wiscombe: The game is, at its core, a project creation game. When players elect
to join, they're given a pack of cards containing green "maker" cards (e.g. "30 second
short," "Board Game," etc.), pink "property" cards (e.g. "About love", "In the SCA
Courtyard", etc.), and one orange "people" card (which contains the name of one first
year undergrad in the USC film school). These cards can be combined together or with
other players' cards to make a "Deal," the simplest of which is composed of one maker
card and one property card -- although an almost unlimited number of property cards can
be attached so long as there are enough connectors. After laying out a Deal, players go
out and actually create it (i.e. "A 30 second short about love in the SCA courtyard"). They
then submit it to the site, and justify it in the game office -- at which point it's uploaded,
they get points for the Deal, and everyone in the game can see it.
Jeff Watson: This whole process is outlined with pictures and video on the game
website. Since it's such a highly visual interactive experience, readers who want to get a
good sense of how it feels to play should head over there and check out the intro
materials.
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Simon Wiscombe: Yes, visit the website -- it explains everything and also showcases the
amazing work the players have created so far.
What relationship does this game have with other alternate reality games which have
been used for entertainment or training purposes in the past?
Jeff Watson: The "meat" of this game is structured creative improvisation. As Simon has
described, the core interaction here involves players trading, sharing, and combining
collectible playing cards in order to generate creative prompts known as "Deals".
Responding to these prompts by submitting completed artifacts results in advancement on
the game's various leaderboards, unlocking special game content. This special content
constitutes what might be called the "sauce" on the meat of the game.
This "sauce" is the closest we get to "traditional" alternate reality game content. For
example, toward the end of the second week of gameplay, we sent clues to several
players who were leading in key Deal-making categories. The clues provided the players
with a time and a location and nothing else. Bravely enough, the students showed up.
Once there, they were greeted by a formally-attired Oud player. Accompanied by the
Oudist, the players were transported without explanation to the Museum of Jurassic
Technology. Once in the museum, the players encountered two alums of the SCA, Jenova
Chen and Kellee Santiago (designers of critically-acclaimed games such as Flow, Flower,
and Journey), who were wandering around in the darkness wearing sequined masquerade
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masks. Upon discovering them, the players were presented with a special game power
which enabled them to score additional points on subsequent Deals, and were then treated
to 90 minutes of informal discussion about game design, art, and media making.
In short, our approach uses a rule-based play system (the card game) to drive the bulk of
the experience, and employs more traditional ARG techniques around the edges, as
rewards and tonal elements. This approach is in many ways a practical implementation of
the ideas and critiques I presented last year on your blog in my essay, "ARG 2.0". In most
"traditional" ARGs, our "sauce" is the full meal. The player experience in such games
unfolds around a kind of scavenger hunt activity wherein game runners moderate and
manage player communities as they plow through a sequence of puzzles, curated action
prompts, and side-quests.
While this logistically-complex structure is appropriate for certain team-building and
talent sourcing applications, we wanted to make something that would have the capacity
to perpetuate itself without relying on the constant generation of puzzle and narrative
content by game runners. More importantly, we wanted our game to emphasize an active
engagement with media-making: while scavenger hunts might help to build social bonds
and search/analysis skills, we felt that they are inherently about solving puzzles or
responding to prompts created by someone else -- and as such are a kind of consumption-
oriented form of play. We wanted to make this game about the players' creativity, not
ours.
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A key concern of the Cinema School recently has been to encourage greater integration
across the different tracks (production, screenwriting, animation, critical studies,
interactive). How has this game helped to support this goal?
Tracy Fullerton: This was part of the mandate given to the committee that initiated the
project. The school is making an integrated effort, of which this game is only one part, to
bridge divisional barriers and encourage thinking, working and team-building across the
school. One way the game does this is simply by eliminating divisional identifiers on the
site. We give students an area to talk about their skills so they can find each other to work
with, but we don't identify them as coming from any particular part of the school. Also,
more directly, we have cards in the deck that reward them for working interdivisionally,
and even across other universities.
In the first few weeks of play, we had a writing student who had never done any
programming pick up GameMaker on the advice of other students, teach himself some
simple coding, and make a simple video game. We have a group that has created a
transmedia ARG, and interactive students who have tried their hand at creating an
animation flip book. The game rewards groups equally for either trying something new or
adding a person with know how to the team, so it is up to players how to approach and
solve a problem.
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One thing that stands out to me about this project is that it isn't mandatory. Students don't
get graded on their work, and they don't have to participate if they don't want to. How
has this worked in practice, and what was the thinking behind making engagement
optional?
Tracy Fullerton: Yes, this is a voluntary experience. We were very clear about this from
the outset of the design. In fact, when we first showed the game concept to some of the
staff, the reaction was "great, we can use this to make students do things we want them to
do, like fill out these forms or go to this office, etc." But we very nicely pushed back on
those ideas because we wanted the game to have an energy that could only come out of
students' passion for making media together. It was important that it not feel in any way
like an assignment or an extension of the orientation process. We felt that the tone and the
sensibility had to recognize personal expression as being intrinsically motivated.
Incoming SCA students have already self-selected as creative individuals, so for that kind
of student, the idea of taking away that intrinsic motivation could actually be potentially
harmful to their development as creative professionals.
Jeff Watson: We actually went to some pretty extreme lengths to keep the game a secret
around the time that we were launching it. This was a bit nerve-wracking at first, because
only a handful of students even noticed that the game existed at all. But in the end, this
strategy paid off. It made the game a "pull" experience, drawing students in of their own
accord. Players gradually began to appear at the Game Office, and they did so because
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they were curious and they wanted to be involved. As more and more students came in,
the game acquired more and more evangelists, since each new player was personally
invested. This approach is well-trod territory for marketers and ARG designers, but is
something new in education, and we're excited to be breaking that ground.
How do you deal with students who aren't willing or able to get involved in creative
production? Are there ways to engage that don't require large investments of time or
social capital?
Simon Wiscombe: We figured that the level of engagement would vary from person to
person, so this came up during our design sessions constantly, and we created four tiers of
engagement. The top tier is for those who engage in all the ARG elements along with
making creative projects--these are our "hardcore" players who seem to be able to solve
all of our puzzles in a fifth the time we estimated they would. The second tier is for those
who engage in the projects and enjoy creating, but aren't necessarily interested in
scouring SCA or the website for the hidden ARG clues. To tackle the last two tiers, i.e.
those who wouldn't engage as much as the others but still wanted to feel a part of the
community, we drew from some inspiration we took from old photographs of the SCA in
the 1960s and 70s. Jeff was particularly interested in one photograph of a space known as
"the Bullpen."
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Jeff Watson: The Bullpen was the central workspace of the Stables, the building which
used to house the cinema school back in the day. It was a wild, unruly place, covered in
graffiti, littered with junk, and full of creative energy. We felt like that kind of space was
missing from the SCA of today, and so we decided to re-create it -- virtually, as a kind of
social networking system on the game's website.
Simon Wiscombe: In the Bullpen, players are can comment on both deals and cards,
participate in impromptu discussions, and upload pictures. Some of this is publicly visible
through the site's "Photoblog" feature, but much of this discussion is kept in a walled
garden, both to create a safe space for venting, and to extend the "exclusive" and
"mysterious" narrative that envelops the game. Finally, there's a whole slew of other
forms of engagement, much of which we can't track (but we know is going on), such as
collecting sets of cards, lurking on the website, participating in deals without registering
for the game, and so on.
Essentially we wanted to foster an awesome interconnected community of already
amazingly talented people, and it seems to be working for players at a variety of
engagement levels.
What roles do faculty and staff play in this process? How might the kinds of playful
interaction the game is encouraging shift the relations between students and faculty?
How have faculty integrated aspects of the game into their own curriculum?
238
Tracy Fullerton: When we designed the cards for the game, we purposefully included
some prominent faculty, past and present, in the deck -- as you know, since you've given
your own card out to students as part of our "Hey, Henry convergence" meet-up. It's a
nice opportunity for us to involve faculty from all over the school in the game. We've
found that the faculty have a tremendous curiosity and interest in what's going on in the
game. Some are participating on the site, commenting on deals or cards, joining in the
general discussion. Some are coming to the class to hear speakers, and some have helped
with deals. It's an interesting opportunity because in this situation there are no predefined
power structures. The game is presented by the mysterious "Reality Committee" which
may or may not be comprised of faculty, it is very unclear. So the faculty are free to
participate at any level they feel comfortable.
What aspects of this game could be ported to other educational contexts, and how does a
game like this scale?
Simon Wiscombe: This type of game can be modified, with very simple tweaks, for any
creative endeavor. We've had discussions about how we could specify it to any of the film
school's departments (interactive media, film, animation), or how we could port it to art,
music, dance, or theater schools. At its core, it's a game that relies on fostering and
promoting the creativity of its participants through prompts that eventually lead to
projects. What form those projects take could be anything. And in regards to scale, while
239
this game was designed specifically with 130 or so players in mind, it could easy be for
smaller or larger groups, although one would likely have to rethink its purpose. For
smaller groups, I've found it's great as a brainstorming or creative sprint tool, and larger
groups might embrace the idea of maximizing collaborators. This game is fairly simple in
its construct, so I'm sure there are methods of applicability we haven't even dreamed of
yet.
I have to ask: Early on in the game, you asked me to meet some students at a "secret
location" on campus and give them some "Shared Universe" game cards -- which also
happened to have my picture on one side. What did they end up using those cards for?
Jeff Watson: Well, so far, your card has been used in 5 different Deals. Each of these
Deals spins the notion of "Shared Universe" In a different way. For example, in the
Justification for the stunningly-photographed music video,"Space Bound," , the players
explain that the characters and story elements in their music video cross over with
characters and story elements from a "Character Artifacts" project they previously created
in the game. Other projects, such as the 10-part transmedia extravaganza, "Chronoteck",
use the "Shared Universe" card to link together multiple projects across many platforms,
connecting artifacts such as the fake Facebook group,"Stop Chronoteck!" to other story-
rich artifacts such as the fake promotional video for the"Chronoteck Tach C," a new
brand of cell phone that "receives messages from the future." It's a daily thrill for us to
see amazing transmedia projects like these emerge out of our game.
240
Abstract (if available)
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Watson, Jeff
(author)
Core Title
Reality ends here: environmental game design and participatory spectacle
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)
Publication Date
08/03/2012
Defense Date
06/25/2012
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
alternate reality games,environmental game design,experiential learning,game design,OAI-PMH Harvest,pervasive games,Play,usc school of cinematic arts
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
McPherson, Tara (
committee chair
), Anderson, Steven F. (
committee member
), Fisher, Scott S. (
committee member
), Fullerton, Tracy (
committee member
)
Creator Email
remotedevice@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-87218
Unique identifier
UC11289868
Identifier
usctheses-c3-87218 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-WatsonJeff-1131.pdf
Dmrecord
87218
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Watson, Jeff
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
alternate reality games
environmental game design
experiential learning
game design
pervasive games
usc school of cinematic arts