Brooke Talks About Designing Alternate Reality Games

Brooke of Giant Mice talks about designing Alternate Reality Games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/arg-giantmice-interview-final.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m at the ARG Fest in Portland, Oregon, and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Brooke: Hi, I’m Brooke Thompson of giantmice.com, and I create alternate reality games and other sorts of things.

Interviewer: What types of games or what types of ARGs have you worked on?

Brooke: I work mostly in independent games on my own, but then I contract out. So, I’ve done a lot of promotional games for video game companies and for General Motors and the like. And then, I’ve done extended realities for television shows like Xenophile’s ReGenesis.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the design challenges that ARG designers have to face?

Brooke: It depends a lot on the game that you are creating, but a lot of it is about creating community. How do you encourage community play and collaborative play, which is what I think differentiates alternate reality games from pretty much every other genre of games?

Interviewer: Can you talk about collaborative play? Are you talking about collaborative puzzle solving, or is it something else where people are building stuff?

Brooke: Partially collaborative puzzle solving but I think a lot of it is just getting people to come together and create an experience on their own, whether that’s doing it on an Internet forum or whether it’s doing it, like going to a park as a Flash mom. That takes collaboration. It might just be collaborating to all show up at 5 P.M. but once you’re there you need to recognize everyone and get together and do whatever it is you are doing.

Interviewer: How is an ARG different than a MMO where people have to just go online and cooperate or meet people?

Brooke: It’s different from a MMO where like World of Warcraft has the fighting element or it has the video element, and alternate reality games can do games like that. But they can also then fall out of that platform. ARGs are platformists whereas most MMOs are either online or they’re… Well, they are pretty much all online.

Interviewer: As you developed ARGs, have you come to any realizations or design, I guess, changes or design understandings that you feel make you a better ARG designer? What are the surprises that you faced?

Brooke: I don’t think I’ve really come to anything. The one thing is that everything is constantly changing. When I started out, I really wanted everything to be online, and I really had idealistic goals for everything. It had to fit. It had to support a certain ideal and all of these different things, and I have come to realize now that I really like playing in the streets more than I like playing online. So, it’s all changed.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the street gaming and ARGs. Is street gaming like a sub genre of ARGs, or is it where ARGs are going?

Brooke: I think that because ARGs are platformless, you can play them anywhere. So, street gaming is actually more, something that supports an alternate reality game. There could be an alternate reality game that is solely played on the streets, but with mobile technologies, iPhones and on the Android, there are so many options to get people outside because you get to take your computer anywhere. You can find that secret clue, and you can let everyone know. It’s just really nice to explore how you can do that and what sorts of things you can do on the street. Of course, that’s really not what my games are, but that’s the ideal of it.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the street games that you are working on, or the types of street games you like to make?

Brooke: My big thing right now is taking board games and translating them into a way that you can play them without the board, like I did Clue where you have to figure out who killed who with what and where. I assign stores and weapons with people that were playing the game. You had to hunt out and figure out, and then you would make your guesses through text messages to each other. And finally, somebody would have it right, or I did Hungry Hungry Hippos where I had people all dressed in white running around acting like the balls while others had to circle them with ropes, like the hippos eat.

It’s sort of a way to translate. It’s a way to explore what makes a game tick and what makes a board game work, only you’re doing it on the street.

Interviewer: How long do these ARGs take then to play completely, or are they just single few hour sessions or how…?

Brooke: Most alternate reality games take about three months. I think that’s about the ideal length. Much longer than that is such a long, hard commitment for players that are really into it to make that you don’t want to run it too long, but you need to be able to develop the story and a way of taking people out. Like if you have geocaching or anything like that, you need to give them time to discover that information, to plan to go get that information, and then to report back that information. So, it takes about three months to play everything out.

Interviewer: Do you feel that ARGs are going to go mainstream any time soon, or do you think it’s going to be a niche thing? Where do you see it going?

Brooke: I don’t think that alternate reality games are going to ever go mainstream which makes me the devil of the designer world because everyone wants to make money. In order to make money, they think they do need to go mainstream. And I think that we need to instead recognize that we are a niche and support that. Niches can be quite profitable, so it’s a matter of not necessarily finding a million people to play. It’s a matter of finding the passionate people to play.

Interviewer: Any last words then for anyone who wants to get into ARG design?

Brooke: If you want to get into ARG design, I think the biggest thing to do is to, wow… That’s a really hard question. I would start off by playing a game because that gives you an idea of what sorts of things can be done and how you can improve on it.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.