Today’s guest lecture by Ashlyn Sparrow led me to think more about immersion and re-playability in alternate reality games. As a genre, ARGs are unique because the “magic circle” they create has a very thin membrane. It is extremely easy to pass between the ARG and real worlds, and I think what separates the two is an immersion into the world of an ARG. By immersion, I mean a psychological immersion that allows people to become players; I mean a mindset that allows individuals to behave under a system that differs from the system of everyday societal life. Ashlyn Sparrow spoke of this immersion as the “1% doubt” in players’ minds that the scenario being presented by an ARG might actually be real, and the Eric Zimmerman reading for today’s class greatly speaks to the interaction between systems and play that occurs in an ARG. Immersion is essential not only because it creates for players a space in which conventional systems of everyday action can be challenged and played with, but also because it keeps players thinking about an ARG within the confines of the ARG’s world.
Though this might sound like a myopic quality, I think it is actually a very freeing one. By being immersed within the confines of an ARG’s system and rules of play, a player refrains from meta-gaming in the sense of wondering how the game was made, asking why their old classroom got transformed into a cove of relics, and pondering as to the educational purpose of the game. Meta-gaming in ARGs is detrimental because it compromises the procedural rhetoric (described by Ian Bogost) that makes them so compelling. Meta-gaming creates a disconnect between process in ARGs and the system in which they are played, rendering the former unhelpful as a pedagogical tool. However, if immersion is so foundational to ARGs, then it is concerning how fragile it becomes after playing multiple ARGs.
The genre of alternate reality games might well face a significant challenge in creating continued immersion for players who have previously played ARGs. Like the big genre twist in Doki Doki Literature Club (Team Salvato, 2017), the embedment of educational aims in ARGs relinquishes all its suspense value after it is revealed to a player that the whole thing was “just a game.” I don’t say this to criticize the effectiveness of ARGs as standalone games, but rather to voice concern that the immersion crucial to ARGs is likely very hard to reinstate in ARG veterans. The 1% doubt principle becomes a 0.1% doubt the second time around, because the player already knows—consciously or subconsciously—that this is a game designed to teach in some form. Is extended pedagogy through ARGs possible for a set group of players?
Personally, I don’t think this is a dead end. In fact, the unique way ARGs enhance and present the concept of consent (in the way Mattie Brice writes in “Play and Be Real About It”), especially for veteran players, offers a mode of player-game and player-designer interaction that can have far reaching implications for both educational and non-educational ARGs. Not to mention that continued play of ARGs challenges the systems described by Zimmerman in a completely novel way.